Best Tools for Open source/Home .NET development

Question

Hi,

I'm looking for tools which are free for personal use. As a .NET/C++ developer I've been using #Develop And VS Express editions IDEs for quite some time now. For Unit testing I use NUnit and TestDriven.NET for runner.

Are there any other good tools for an open source developer I should know of?

Answer 1

Do get some kind of revision control like Mercurial, Subversion and the like.
Wikipedia has a nice list: List of Revision Control by category

Answer 2

Reflector has always been one of my favorites.

Answer 3

My personal toolkit is e text editor, although emacs is my next favorite editor, NAnt, MbUnit, and a slew of compilers/interpreters (Nemerle, Boo, C#, F#, IronPython, Python). I highly recommend everything mentioned, although NAnt build files can get nasty.

Edit: As Nascio mentioned, Reflector is also a definite must-have!

Answer 4

You should start thinking about a code repository and you could not go wrong with SVN.You could use TortoiseSVN as a client integrated with Windows Explorer.

Answer 5

This is hard to answer without knowing what platform/languages you are working with.

Eclipse is a very popular, free IDE that works with many programming languages and runs on many platforms.

Answer 6

A great place to start is Osalt.com. You'll find that certain closed/proprietary/commercial software have open source alternatives. For general purpose stuff I use notepad++.

Answer 7

Take a look at Code::Blocks. It's a nice C++ IDE.
As for .Net, see also:
- Snippet Compiler - pretty handy
- NVelocity - I use it for code generation (Java reminiscence)
- Nant - for build systems. MsBuild is "inspired" from Ant.
- Monodevelop, a Gnome IDE - in case you're so adventurous to write code on top of mono on non m$ platforms.

Answer 8

Instead of using VS.NET for testing some pieces of code Snippet Compiler is the best http://tech.wowkhmer.com/post/2008/10/29/Compile-and-Test-NET-Code-Snippet-Without-Saving.aspx