Packing light
I recently got a new laptop and I made it an opportunity to be very conscious about which tools I would install rather than reimaging my laptop with the same configuration as I had before. This post gives you the what and whys of my new setup. This list is not an attempt to compete with Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Tool List.
My first choice was to downgrade from Visual Studio Team Suite to the Professional Edition because I never use the additional features of the team edition. I use NUnit rather than the Visual Studio test features, for code coverage analysis I use NCover in combination with NCover Explorer and I use TestDriven.NET to bring it all together and give me an integrated development experience. ReSharper is still a must - and I use this extensively. Throughout the years I have written tons of ReSharper templates to make C# development more "wrist friendly". Speaking of "wrist friendliness"; I use SharpDevelop to write Boo code. I use Boo to write things like tests and automation scripts.
I have been using IntelliJ for Java development earlier, but this time around I've chosen to give Eclipse a try. Eclipse has improved drastically from the last time I used it, and it has also gotten a vast amount of plug-ins. I use Spring a lot with Java, and the Spring IDE extensions are sweet. One thing I miss is IntelliJ's keyboard shortcuts because they map nicely to ReSharper's keymappings.
Here is the entire list of my must have tools and frameworks:
- .NET development tools:
- Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition. Packs all the features I need, and leaves a smaller footprint than its bigger brothers.
- ReSharper. No need to tell you why you need this. It is a must!
- Reflector. This is also a must. Be sure to get all of the plug-ins as well.
- NUnit. The original an still my first choice when it comes to unit testing.
- MBUnit. A strong contender to NUnit's hegemony. I will be trying to use this more in the future.
- NCover. NCover is a little cryptic by it self, but combined with next tools it is superb!
- NCover Explorer. This tool gives you a much better overview than Team System's coverage explorer and it packs a whole bunch of useful features like coverage filtering and reporting.
- TestDriven.NET. This essential plug-in brings all of the above (expect ReSharper) together for a brilliant integrated development experience.
- Sharp Developer. Because C# and Visual Basic aren't the only .NET languages.
- NAnt. Sometimes Ctrl+Shift+B is not enough.
- .NET frameworks:
- Castle Project. In addition to having the best IoC container I've ever used, it also sports cool frameworks like Active Record, Monorail and more.
- NHibernate. My first choice for object persistence.
- Spring.NET. I don't use this as frequently as I used to, but its there.
- iBatis.NET. For those rare occasions where NHibernate is not an option.
- Rhino Mocks. Keepin' it fake!
- Rhino Commons. Oren's add-ons to Castle Windsor, Active Record and NHibernate make my favorites frameworks even better.
- Java development:
- Eclipse. This tools is still being evaluated, I might switch back to IntelliJ.
- Spring IDE. One of the reasons I'm giving Eclipse a chance.
[Update: I switched back to IntelliJ :) ]
- Maven. Making Java dependencies so much easier to handle.
- Ant. Same reason as NAnt.
- JUnit. With annotations JUnit is almost the same as NUnit.
- Java frameworks:
- Spring. At least until someone creates Jastle, Castle for J or something similar. :)
- Hibernate. Do you see a pattern here?
- XFire. Of all the Java Web Service frameworks I've tried this is my favorite so far.
- Platform independent:
That's about it, I've probably forgotten a framework or two - but this might be a hint that I should get rid of it. I've chosen to pack light this time and I like it better than my previous "heavy" setup. Things much are smother and faster.
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