SharePoint Developers–What’s On Your Machine?

I recently got a question from a customer about utilities to include on their development machines.  My view is that you should trust your developers and let them install the tools they need.  However, some devs don’t have managers who trust their developers to do the right thing and they need to request tools in advance.  Which got me thinking… what’s on your machine?  What do you consider essential for developing software?  I challenged myself to go through my machine and recall all of the various utilities, add-ons, programs, scripts, etc that I use regularly and listed them below.  There are a lot, and I am sure I am missing a few!  I am always on the lookout for new tools and utilities that will make development easier, so… what’s on your machine?

SharePoint Server 2010 + pre-requisites (Standalone)

ADO.NET Data Services Update for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (enables WCF Data Services for SharePoint) - https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=79d7f6f8-d6e9-4b8c-8640-17f89452148e&displaylang=en

Office 2010 Professional Plus (32-bit)

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Management Studio Express (or I sometimes have full-blown SQL Server 2008 and tools on the same box) - https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=08e52ac2-1d62-45f6-9a4a-4b76a8564a2b&displaylang=en

Microsoft SQL Server Community Projects & Samples - https://sqlserversamples.codeplex.com/

SharePoint Designer 2010 (32-bit) - https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=d88a1505-849b-4587-b854-a7054ee28d66&displaylang=en

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition - https://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/

Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio - https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=b3deb194-ca86-4fb6-a716-b67c2604a139&displayLang=en

Expression Studio 4 Ultimate - https://www.microsoft.com/expression/

Open XML SDK - https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=c6e744e5-36e9-45f5-8d8c-331df206e0d0&DisplayLang=en

Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4 - https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=6b6c21d2-2006-4afa-9702-529fa782d63b&displaylang=en

Psscor2 Managed-Code Debugging Extension for WinDbg - https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=5c068e9f-ebfe-48a5-8b2f-0ad6ab454ad4&displayLang=en

Visual Studio 2010 SDK - https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=47305cf4-2bea-43c0-91cd-1b853602dcc5&displaylang=en

Visual Studio 2010 Visualization and Modeling SDK - https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=0DEF949D-2933-49C3-AC50-E884E0FF08A7

SharePoint 2010 SDK - https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=f0c9daf3-4c54-45ed-9bde-7b4d83a8f26f&displaylang=en

Visual Studio SharePoint Power Tools - https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/8e602a8c-6714-4549-9e95-f3700344b0d9/

Visio 2010 Premium - https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/visio/

Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (enables IntelliTrace and unit testing for SharePoint) - https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=75568aa6-8107-475d-948a-ef22627e57a5

Pex and Moles - https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/

SharePoint Dispose Checker - https://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/SPDisposeCheck

Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools - https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/8e602a8c-6714-4549-9e95-f3700344b0d9/

CKS: Development Tools Edition - https://cksdev.codeplex.com/

SharePoint Manager 2010 (there is also SPM2007) - https://spm.codeplex.com/

Open Data Protocol Visualizer -https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/f4ac856a-796e-4d78-9a3d-0120d8137722/

ULSViewer (works with MOSS 2007 and SP2010) - https://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/ULSViewer

SPTraceView (works with MOSS 2007 also) - https://sptraceview.codeplex.com/

LogParser (great for parsing IIS logs) - https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=890cd06b-abf8-4c25-91b2-f8d975cf8c07&displaylang=en

Microsoft Expression Studio (a must-have for Silverlight dev as well as web page design) - https://www.microsoft.com/expression/

Fiddler - https://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/version.asp

Reflector - https://reflector.red-gate.com/download.aspx?TreatAsUpdate=1

U2U CAML Query Builder - https://www.u2u.be/res/Tools/CamlQueryBuilder.aspx

AC's WCM Custom Commands for STSADM.exe - https://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/MossStsadmWcmCommands.aspx

SharePoint 2010 PowerShell CmdLets and STSADM Commands - https://blog.falchionconsulting.com/index.php/category/stsadm-commands/

DynaTrace AJAX Edition - https://ajax.dynatrace.com/ajax/en/

Microsoft Network Monitor (NetMon) - https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=983b941d-06cb-4658-b7f6-3088333d062f&displaylang=en

Visual Round Trip Analyzer - https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=119F3477-DCED-41E3-A0E7-D8B5CAE893A3&displaylang=en

SysInternals Suite - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb842062.aspx

Idera PowerShell Plus - www.idera.com/downloads

Remote Desktop Connection Manager - https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=4603c621-6de7-4ccb-9f51-d53dc7e48047&displaylang=en