How would you spend $150 on developer tools?

Question

If you had $150 to spend on one or more developer tools or utilities, what would they be? Please list in shopping list form:

• $25 SuperMerge (link)
• $49 MegaGridPro (link)

Note: I'm looking for products which are for sale here, so please don't list free software. And, no, donating to an open source project doesn't make it non-free, at least for this question.

If your tools are specific for a certain type of development (e.g. web development on LAMP, .NET WPF, embedded databases for Amiga, etc.) then include it in your answer. Some tools, like merge, apply to pretty much everyone, though.

Answer 1

Either a second (or third) display, or a nice keyboard.

Answer 2

$50 Beyond Compare

Answer 3

Its a bit vague - developer tools for what language? are you a DBA? A Web developer? .Net? Java?

Answer 4

I'm a PHP developer on a Mac, so I use these:

• Transmit - $30. FTP client.
• TextMate - $59. All-around good text editor with hundreds of plug-in bundles available for things like PHP development, blogging, and editing markdown, among plenty of other things.
• OmniFocus - $80. Pricey for a to-do list app, to be sure, but it's great for keeping track of the lists of bugs and changes that inevitably wind up cluttering note pads and white boards.

A little over $150, I know, but still worth it.

Answer 5

$99 Refactor Pro (Visual Studio add-in)

$32 MS Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000

Answer 6

undeniably, absolutely, and categorically

• €114 a personal license for Resharper, the c# edition

I really couldn't live without it

Answer 7

$149 - Resharper 5 C# Personal Edition http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/buy/index.jsp

Answer 8

Conflunce is a great addition to a team/company. I use it to * track projects * report status of dev * report on R&D effort and what we learn * build FAQ * document Database

if you have 8 developers, it is about the price you you have per developer.

Answer 9

Assuming you are a C# or VB.NET developer, my choice would be ReSharper. Makes refactoring a breeze, keeps your codebase nice and clean, enforces good coding standards, and makes unit testing fun. Definitely the most bang for your buck in the developer tool world.

Answer 10

(obligatory) 40 12-packs of mountain dew http://www.peapod.com

Answer 11

I second Omnifocus on the Mac, or any of the "Getting Things Done" packages on Windows (what's a good one?)

It really does work nicely to assist in getting your project done smoothly.

Answer 12

My two most indispensable tools:

• $0 - Eclipse
• $33 - TextPad

Answer 13

• $35 - E-Texteditor
  • this may not be neccessary if all you're coding is C# or Java and then you can use VS or Eclipse, but for rails or PHP it kicks ass
• $50 - Beyond Compare
  • Beyond compare is the business. Even the old version 2 beats the pants off every other diff/merge app, and v3 is even better

Spend the rest on coffee

Answer 14

I have been using aggiorno and JQuery a lot lately, specially now that I am doing some freelance work on a ASP.NET MVC-based website, and had been doing a lot of XHTML code manually.

Aggiorno is a little add-in for Visual Studio that kind of refactors XHTML into compliance markup and automates some really time-consuming tasks like extracting the inline CSS and adding alt text to images in bulk, among other stuff.

And JQuery, well everyone knows JQuery.

The web app that I am working on right now has over 50 unique pages and some templates, combining the public and admin site, and between this two tools I have saved lots of hours from making things manually.

Cheers!

*Disclaimer: I work for the company that makes aggiorno, but please don't treat this as an ad... It really has boost my productivity in my freelance world, even as it hasn't been finally released yet.

Answer 15

+1 for Beyond Compare...

but Orion-Edwards, they did just update it (actually, it's in beta, now).

Since I've already spent my money on Resharper, Beyond Compare, and VisualSVN (which would be the first three on my list), I guess I'd spend my next $150 on NDepends.

Answer 16

• $150 WD Raptor 74GB 10K rpm
• $150 Corsair 32GB SSD

Hardware counts as a developer tool, right? :-D

...or for $10 more:

• $160 (After Rebate) WD VelociRaptor 150GB 10K rpm

I have 2 of the WD Raptor 10K rpm drives in a RAID 0 here at work and my machine compiles very fast.

Answer 17

• Visual Assist X ($99)
• UltraMon ($40)

Another nice tool that I like: Total Commander ($38)

Answer 18

• SnagIt 9, $50, link text
• RegexBuddy, $40, link text
• VisualSVN, $50, link text
• ReSharper, $199, link text

Answer 19

As a user of Free Software... paying for Software seems so 80s... or 90s.... Even on windows I can get perfect (well for my needs) software at zero-usd, and sometime they even are Free (GPL etc) software.

When I run linux - I still have not find any good product that is worth paying for. All open source/FOSS software on linux kick ass (maybe Opera is "good", but still it cannot compete with Firefox+Firebux).

On windows... I would say Total Commander. Yes, never seen such a fine product, I often use it under wine. Now a days, I use Dolphin which works quite fine for me.

So, unless it's HW, and for 150USD you cannot buy much HW, I would spend it on beer. Does it count as a developer tool? :)

Answer 20

1. Visual Assist

2. 2nd Monitor

Answer 21

I can't imagine nobody's mentioned CodeRush and Refactor! yet. I really coudn't live without them!

It's a bit more than $150, but definately worth the extra buck!

Answer 22

Gallons of redbull

Answer 23

BareTail pro - link

BareGrep pro - link

Only $35 each and really useful when searching through log files, text files etc.

Answer 24

I would probably spend a few bucks on a tool to monitor development while storing and protecting my code in a safe way:

• $25 or $50 (depending on the project size) GitHub