If you’ve been following this blog, you probably know I’m big into using the right tools to be more productive. A few weeks back I got a copy of the following book:
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Windows Developer Power Tools: Turbocharge Windows development with more than 170 free and open source tools (Power Tools) by James Avery, Jim Holmes |
This is a great book. It lists a bunch of tools to improve developers’ productivity in many fronts. Many of the tools listed on the book I’ve also blogged about here (and I’ll continue doing so, putting my own spin as to why I like the whatever tool). I was happy to see that a bunch of the tools I use are listed in the book.
This is a big book (1308 pages), but it is not the kind of book you read from cover to cover, or in any specific order. One should pick it up, flip through the pages, see what’s there, and dig into the topics of interest.
I certainly recommend any developer should look into this book. There’s nothing like using the right tool for each kind of job (even though one can put a nail on the wall by using a screwdriver, the best tool for the task is a hammer, right?). Of course, there is a boat load of tools available out there in the wild, and it’s hard to decide which one could be useful for us, and this book does a great job at pointing us out to what’s worth checking out.
Here are some of the tools listed in the book that I already use:
- Test-Driven.NET
- NUnit
- GhostDoc
- CR_Metrics
- NDepend
- .NET Reflector
- SlickRun
- SysInternal tools (Process Explorer, AutoRuns, ZoomIt, FileMon, …)
- MSBuild Community Tasks
That’s just to name a few. I’ll also be going through the book to check out what other tools I should definitely be using.
Claudio Lassala's Blog 