Scott Hanselman is my hero

Scott Hanselman is, hands down, simply my hero today. A couple of years ago he posted a pretty massive list of useful tools, utilities, and must have stuff a any self-respecting geek should have on his hard drive. Now he's updated the list and it's massive (and broken down into catagories to boot). I find that I use about 1/2 of the tools listed and now I'm off to investigate the other half. If there's one blog entry you need to bookmark, clip, or copy and paste into OneNote (if that's your thing) this is it. Check out his 2005 updated list here. Everyone else is.

Here's my personal top 10 from his list (plus some that are not there) that I faithfully use every day:

  • ReSharper - Basically live and die by this. I can do all the refactorings by hand, but it's just so sweet to rename a class and have 30 files update automatically.
  • WinMerge - Fantastic util and very handy for trying to diff SharePoint xml files between environments. Open source to boot.
  • NAnt - Build, build, build (and do a whole lot more)
  • TestDriven.Net - Test, test, test (and then refactor and test some more)
  • OneNote - I clip tons of stuff everyday. It's from my old days as a graphic artist where I would clip pictures and put them in what's called a "graveyard". OneNote lets me do this, search it, organize and much more. I also keep a OneNote section on blog ideas and whatnot. Very handy!
  • Notepad++ - Scott pushes Notepad2, but I prefer this Notepad replacement. YMMV.
  • Midnight Commander - Scott doesn't have this listed so call me a command line guy, but I prefer this util over Explorer anyday. Reminds me of the odl XTree tool (which I used all the time as well)
  • CopySourceAsHtml - Great for blog postings!
  • Reflector - I'm poking inside Microsofts assemblies everyday trying to see what makes things tick.
  • Web Services Studio 2.0 - This is an invaluable tool when trying to debug Web Services from SharePoint. Get it now!

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