San Diego User Group (8/22/06) - Toolbox Meeting
On Tuesday I was one of several presenters at the San Diego .NET User Group's second annual Toolbox meeting. The presentations were supposed to be "rapid-fire (15 – 20 minutes), brief presentations", but I kind of took it to the extreme. I presented eleven of my favorite tools in under 18 minutes.
I was shooting for something like Scott Hanselman's presentation for GrokTalks - Ten Utilities in 10 Minutes (WMV download), but even at 100 seconds per utility I felt like I was rushing like crazy.
Here are my notes. I'd like to do a more in depth post on this some time with screenshots and descriptions and stuff, but until then here are the notes I promised:
//San Diego .NET User Group - Tools
//Why bother with tools?
{
-Outsource busywork (it really adds up)
-Minimize repetition - minimize stupid mistakes
-Keep your focus on what's important
-Windows and Visual Studio are NOT optimized for you...
}
//My Short List
{ClipPath - Right-Click copy file path to clipboard
http://personal.vsnl.com/sureshms/utilities.html
Copy Path - A little better than ClipPath, but same idea
http://blogs.vertigosoftware.com/ralph/archive/2006/09/28/Copy_Path_Shell_Extension.aspx
Cropper - Simple screen capture
http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/articles/Cropper.aspx
Notepad++ - A great Notepad replacement
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
ClipX - Clipboard history
http://bluemars.org/clipx/
Paint.NET - Simple image editor
http://www.getpaint.net/index.html
Colibri - Launcher that learns
http://colibri.leetspeak.org/
TimeSnapper - A black box for your computer
http://timesnapper.com
Reflector - View source for .NET compiled code
http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet
Regulazy
http://tools.osherove.com
WinMerge - A nice diff / merge tool
http://winmerge.sourceforge.net/
TortoiseSVN - Makes Subversion (SVN) easy
http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads
}
//Where to find more...
{
//Scott Hanselman's Developer Productivity Tools Screencasts
http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-291881.html
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2005UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolList.aspx
//My stuff
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway
http://tools.veloc-it.com
}