Recommended software development tools

By George Mihaescu

Summary: this article lists the tools that I use almost on a daily basis and I found to be the best at what they do. Updated periodically (at least once a year).

Primary tools

Those I basic tools that I really couldn’t do without.

• Visual Studio 2005 (Microsoft) – an obvious one. 2005 is far better than any previous version, and I'm a big fan. However some areas really suck, such as the content-sensitive help and integration with the MSDN library (which, as always, blows horribly). The Intellisense, although substantially improved, still disappoints (it's years behind the equivalent in Java IDEs such as IntelliJ that I was using in 2002). The refactoring abilities are also very lame compared to Java IDEs; those of you who feel the same may want to consider Resharper (from Jet Brains, incidentally also the makers of IntelliJ, my favorite Java IDE) as an add-on to replace Intellisense and give you better re-factoring, plus many more. I'm not a big fan of Resharper, but it's highly rated by some of the developers I work with.

• TextPad (Helios Software Solutions) ($30) – my favorite "quicky" text editor. Loads very fast, has a nice plug-in design for syntax highlighting (you can download tons of such plugins from the product web site, for pretty much any language you can think of) and scales very well for large files. Lots of other nice features; highly recommended.

• Beyond Compare (Scooter Software) ($30) – the best diff tool I have ever used. Language-aware (has rules for various languages, that can be adjusted), has an excellent plug-in design that allows you to install "comparers" for various formats (even gif images if you want) and extremely fast. Lots of other features; highly recommended.

• Dependency Walker – free (now comes with Visual Studio). An excellent tool to see the dependencies among binaries (exes and dlls). Allows tracking a lot of loading / deployment / COM registration problems.

• Process Explorer – free. Made by Sysinternals (now part of Microsoft), which also makes a number of other tools that may come in handy – check them out. Process Explorer provides a wealth of information about each of the processes that run on your machine, from memory foot print (private bytes, working set, etc, etc) to CPU and memory usage graph, to kernel objects being used, etc, etc. Also very useful as a learning tool. Highly recommended.

• Perforce (Perforce Software) ($800 per user) – my favorite source control system. Although pricey, it is well worth the money. Client-server, with GUI client or command-line interface, it is fast and very robust – my only complaint would be that some parts of the UI are overly complex and will overwhelm new users (such as when resolving conflicts; branching may also appear tricky at first).

Secondary tools

Those are tools that I don’t use that frequently; they are also very good at what they do, but I could do without them if pressed (really hard) simply because I use them infrequently – so in an emergency I could get same freebee replacement to do the job.

• XMLSpy (Altova) (starting at $500) – a very good editor for modeling, editing, transforming & debugging XML technologies. Excellent editing of XSD and XML, XML generation based on XSD, XML validation, etc. Scales very well for large XML files. Lots of other nice features – however the code generation from XSD (DOM) in any of the supported languages (C#, C++, Java) is pretty lame and we gave up on using it. We have used its SPL (a templating language) to generate SAX-based parsing classes with better results (but it was a painful exercise, as SPL is very limited and basically, sucks). The companion XLST program from Altova (MapForce) offers a very nice and promising GUI to visually create XSL transforms, however the generated XSLT is as inefficient and dumb as it gets (e.g. all elements are copied through iterations, so you end up with hundreds of lines of XSLT when the same thing can be done by hand in 20 lines) – so use it only if you have no clue how to write XSLT by hand. But I do recommend XMLSpy for XSD and XML related work.

• PL/SQL Developer (Allround Automations) ($180) – an excellent development tool if you need to do any serious Oracle work (stored procedures, triggers, etc). Highly recommended.

• Photoshop (Adobe) ($650) – my favorite for adjusting / converting / preparing images for the web. Pricey, but highly recommended if you need to do a lot of image manipulation.