How did I ever live without it?

Here are some random software things I use that really change how I work.

  • OneNote: Word is not a good way to track general random information such as todo-lists, meeting notes, random thoughts, or anything that you would naturally write in a scratch-pad. OneNote is great for this. And you can scribble tihngs to. I lament the years I spent tracking my "todo" lists in Word instead of OneNote.
  • FrontPage. This is my HTML editor of choice by a landslide and all of my blogging is done in FrontPage. I believe word is not an HTML editor any more than it is a C++ editor. And while VS is nice for editing code-oriented HTML; it's missing simple features for paragraph-oriented HTML, like a spell-checker.
  • Edit-and-Continue in C#. This is just so cool! Sometimes I want to work on Mdbg just so I have an excuse to use C# EnC.
  • symbol servers: When you're looking at crash dumps from a wide range of random different builds, it's horribly painful to manually find the right set of symbols - especially if you have several different DLLs to go find.
  • Lookout: sometimes I just need to be able to do a real search my outlook mail box.
  • Wikipedia: I find search engines often provide a lot of noise when I'm just looking for a quick overview of something.