(Updated) Tim Heuer and the tools we love…

Updated! Tim pointed out that he did have Live Writer on his list. Sorry, I listed it in the wrong place. Egg, meet face.

In a recent post Tim Heuer discussed the tools he is re-loading after a fresh install on his laptop. While looking over the list I found some new gems and old favorites. As I have recently done a re-load it seemed worthwhile to piggy-back off his post and compile a similar list.

For the moment, I am concentrating on tools, utilities and applications that I use all the time while working with clients or projects. I will do a similar list for toolkits, components and libraries soon, for now, I will just scream Telerik :)

Stuff we use that is also on Tim’s list…

• Office 2010
• Visual Studio 2010 – we moved entirely off VS2008 a month or so ago
• Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer – simply the best way to get most of the good stuff you need for development, don’t walk, run to grab it.
• Camtasia and SnagIt – as Tim says, “because they rock”. Screen capture and screen recording.
• Balsamiq – I have been a fan of this for a while. Balsamiq allows yout o easily sketch interfaces. This has largely been supply supplanted by SketchFlow in Expression Blend, but still useful.
• Microsoft Sharedview – one of the easiest screen sharing tools around.
• 7Zip – an awesome file archive manager
• Fiddler 2 –when you really need to see what is going on
• TortoiseSVN – we use this for connecting to client repositories, we use TFS internally.
• Windows Live Writer – an awesome desktop blog editor, really fantastic

Stuff we use that is not on Tim’s list…

• GoPlan – we use this constantly for project management and tracking. The company is awesome and the price is not bad. It beats Basecamp like a rented mule.
• Expression Studio – that’s Blend, Web, SketchFlow, Design and Encoder
• Tweetdeck – currently our weapon of choice for Twitter on the desktop. Tim uses Twirl. We keep considering a change to Seesmic, but it isn’t quite there yet.
• Notepad++ – a awesome multi-tab notepad replacement that I love. Tim uses Notepad2 (actually a variant) so I am curious as to the differences between them. Feel free to let me in on your thoughts in the comments.
• InfraRecorder – a ISO burner / disk image tool. Tim is using ImgBurn instead. Again, I wonder why that choice and welcome your comments.
• FileZilla – a great free FTP client.
• Firebug – I consider this tool absolutely essential when working with CSS.
• Windows Grep – a essential utility to handle mass searching and / or replacement.
• WinMerge – a super fast, super useful file differences and merge tool. Note that you can set it up as the tool for resolving Team System conflicts, which rocks.
• Affixia – allows you to use Gmail as the target for “send to email” menu options. Completely useful.
• paint.net – a fantastic free image editor. yes, we use Photoshop and friends but this one is what we reach for when we have minor development images to create.
• Windows Live Messenger – essential IM and messaging tool, allows us to stay in constant contact

Stuff we will look at in the future (thanks Tim!)

• Ninite – a multi installer. It looks like a good way to mass install the apps we like, though we always have security concerns with things like this.
• Axialis Icon Workshop – looks interesting, not sure I have a use for it at the moment though.
• Silverlight Spy – this looks pretty cool for seeing what SL is doing.
• TabsStudio for Visual Studio – again, this looks really useful!
• XAML Intellisense by Karl Shifflett – whoa! A fantastic find!