What software products do you use at work that cost money and are totally worth it? Anything from dirt cheap (regex buddy) to expensive (Rational Purify). I'm at windows shop. My manager asked me what tools we might need next year.
Anything from development related tools, to productivity tools, to software that just makes you happy. We already have MSDN.
One of my favorites is Beyond Compare It is a very fast and feature rich file and folder comparison tool, including 3-way merge and compare.
I can't imagine developing on the windows platform without it.
For the upper end of the scale, I'd love to be in a position to use Coverity.
Microsoft Visual Studio - integrated development environment
I use an addin for Visual Studio called Visual Assist X (wholetomato.com). It does a much better job at auto-completion than the default Intellisense. It also does refactoring and extra syntax highlighting.
A profiler appropriate for the language you use, such as Ants Profiler Pro: http://www.componentsource.com/products/red-gate-ants-profiler-pro/index-gbp.html
CALM, fine-grained application monitoring and unhandled-exception trapping for .NET
SQL compare from Red Gate for comparing and synchronizing DB Schemas
To prevent colleagues who listen to music leaving their headphones blaring when they wander away from their computer.
{SmartAssembly} for assembly protection/obfuscation. SourceGear's Vault for source control.
010 Editor - a binary file viewer and editor. It supports very flexible configuration (almost programming) of structured binary file formats.
Faststone Capture - very nice and easy to use screen shot software
Xplorer2 - replacement for Windows Explorer. I guess everyone has their own favorite "Norton Commander clone". Mine is Xplorer2.
In a situation like yours, i.e. finding out what tools should be budgeted for next year, the best approach is:
Examine how your shop is developing software
Identify the "pain points" in the way your shop develops software (for example: "Source code control is a pain," "Deployment to production is a pain," etc)
Focus on the tools that will be useful and then prepare a list. Don't waste your time an money on anything that is not a pain point.
With the list in your hand, you can repeat your question in a more useful fashion, for example: "What deployment tool is worth buying for a Windows shop?"
Good luck!
Compare & Merge, a visual text diff util. Very simple to use, just two editors with color coded diffs. Change any line and the diffs get updated in real time. I like the clean user interface, it is our default diff tool for TortoiseSVN.
It can also compare directories but I rarely need that.
I strongly, strongly suggest using Subversion for source control over anything provided by Microsoft. I know of several very large MS shops using it. Best of all, it's free and with Tortoise (also free) there's great integration for Windows and Visual Studio!
I do a lot of demos for the sales force and I couldn't live without Camtasia. It makes demo creation and editing very easy.
Almost everything else is free, either GPL'ed or created by my employer IBM, so there's a lot of software we get to use without paying.
I really like ReSharper.
For SQL Server work I use RedGate SQL Compare a lot.
For report formatting, Data Dynamics Active Reports.Net is a great tool that integrates completely with Visual Studio, uses C# and VB.net, and is extremely powerful and scaleable.
I like FinalBuilder for build automation a lot as I don't like messing around with the NAnt xml files.
I ended up buying SnagIt to take screenshots. It really helps me communicate, when its hard to explain some UI element in some program's behavior, I just screenshot it and attach.
Vim plugins for both Eclipse and Visual Studio. It's almost like using vim... Most of the time I just use real vim though, which is free.
+1 to Beyond Compare
If you run virtual machines, VMware is well worth its price.
This isn't really a developer tool, but I rip all my DVDs to my Windows Home Server. I use AnyDVD to unlock the copy protection so I can rip the DVDs that I actually paid for.
I can't live without "RegEx Buddy", which is excellent for creating and debugging regular expressions. It will show you, token by token, what the RegEx is testing for, allows you to run test cases from all different sources, has an awesome built-in tutorial/lessons for RX's, and has "grep" like feature to scan through all (or specified) files recursively to either find or find-and-replace strings.
If you're a .NET developer with Resharper and SVN and continuous integration, you will definitely want VisualSVN.
You'll never check in forgetting to add a new class to SVN that winds up breaking the build. Also you can move files around in VStudio and it takes care of the moves in SVN for you. You'll hardly ever go to Windows Explorer to use Tortoise.
Also, for you R# keyboard shortcut masters, imagine doing an update, run tests, check in without moving your hands from the keyboard.
LLBLGen Pro (http://www.llblgen.com/). The best ORM tool out there today. It will make you much more productive in creating data access and business layers. Pretty inexpensive.
Total commander, for sure.
It's a replacement to windows' "file explorer", with integrated viewers, seemless ftp integration, seemless archive integration (e.g. you can just drill down into arj, zip, msi, iso, as if it were yet another directory), tons of useful plugins, much better performance of explorer, better exception handling (e.g. while copying lots of files of which some are dups), tabbed interface, (all your locations are accessible and remembered for next time) integrated command line tool, much more customizable than other file explorers, full and consistent keyboard shortcuts
i can't imagine using Windows without it. i heard there's a linux equivalents (like mc for terminals, and krusader), i used norton commmander on the DOS, then FAR, then Volkov commander)
p.s. i don't agree with "@Kwang Mark Eleven". there are many "blind spots" that aren't getting any attention by people because of lack of awareness to the fact that "things could've been better, if we just used X"
p.s. 2 i am not affiliated with total commander
If you run SQL Server, I highly recommend SQL Data Generator by Red Gate. It's extremely flexible and we use it routinely to generate millions of rows of test data for our application DBs. It helps diagnose performance and data integrity issues early on, and you can have a test database populated with 10 million rows in as little as 5-10 minutes.
Also, I second any recommendation to use Subversion, but that's free.
Edit: I just saw someone mention SnagIt, and I have to say, it's a wonderful program. Nothing like being able to show the users what to do, rather than tell them. It's highly flexible and can even record scrolling web pages. Cheap too, for the benefit gained.
visualsvn vs.net addin to access subversion repository. resharper for refactoring and productivity jira for issue tracking
The one software which I have purchased and use almost everyday is: WordWeb Pro. No it's not a programming related tool, but it helps me a lot. I see a word which I don't know the meaning of, I do a "Ctrl + Rt Click" on the word and I get its meaning. I would classify it as a productivity/personal-curiosity related tool.
You are at a Windows shop you say, so I will recommend a number of .NET tools:
-Threat Modelling -FXCop -StyleCop -Enterprise Library
-Subsonic
-NCover -TDD.NET
A lot of software I used has been mentioned in this thread.
If you want really good looking winforms/webforms, then look into Telerik's products.
Tools I use regularly (not development):
Development:
These are the tools that I currently use regularly and I strongly recommend them to others to consider. By buying tools you gain more (in performance) than you pay in licenses.
I say, Iconoid.
It's FREE, so it really doesn't belong in this list, but I couldn't live without Iconoid.
It's a Windows utility that remembers where all of the desktop's icon are. If they get reshuffled for some reason, like you change the screen resolution, Iconoid will put them all back with one click.
It's a lifesaver (well, timesaver and frustration eliminator).
Randy
NDepend that comes with unique features:
http://www.ndepend.com/Features.aspx:
- Code Query Language (CQL)
- Compare Builds
- 82 code metrics
- Manage Complexity and Dependencies
- Detect Dependency Cycles
- Harness Test Coverage Data
- Enforce Immutability and Purity
- Warnings about the health of your Build Process
- Generate custom report from your Build Process
- Diagrams
- Facilities to cope with real-world environment
SlickRun SlickRun is a free floating command line utility for Windows. SlickRun gives you almost instant access to any program or website. SlickRun allows you to create command aliases (known as MagicWords), so C:\Program Files\Outlook Express\msimn.exe becomes MAIL.
Snagit for screen capture. The output plugins are what set it apart for me.
Fogbugz. It's the nicest issue tracking software I've seen yet.
If you work with > 1 RDBMS, AquaFold's Aqua Data Studio. It does everything SQL Server Management Studio does (and more), and works with Sybase, Oracle, DB2, MySQL and others. I was able to get rid of several single-RDBMS tools (SQL*Plus, Sybase Central, SQL Navigator, SQL Builder) when I got ADS. And it's very affordable with a sane & realistic EULA.
These are the core tools I always make sure I have on top of the MSDN subscription:
Jira for issue tracking
Red Gates SQL compare and SQL data compare for syncing databases.
Finalbuilder is great for putting together complex deployment scripts and automating other complicated tasks.
VMWare for virtualisation, if you need to test on different platforms or run multiple servers.
A decent text editor (although what makes an editor "decent" is somewhat subjective). I like EditPlus 3 (and, previously to that, Allaire Homesite 4.52) for Windows, KATE for *nix, and BBEdit for MacOS.
As someone who writes a lot of HTML, CSS and Javascript, I'm a massive fan of TopStyle 4.
VMware or some other form of virtualisation.
Being able to virtualise your servers will save a lot of time when you need to set up a new server, recover from a disaster etc. It also gives you a lot of control over the hardware specs. You can see how something would run with more/less RAM/CPU etc, or on different OS's. The VMWare GUI is idiot proof as well.
It also allows you to utilise your hardware more, especially for servers with low overhead. We have three physical servers running 20+ virtual servers, and a couple of virtual desktops. Our server racks are looking pretty bare, which is great. Less power & fewer cables is perfect.
This is more of a comment then anything, but have you considered using free tools but contributing to the project at all? This could cost less in the long run while helping the community keep valuable tools going. I know this was the down fall of NDoc and I think one of the reasons NCover went commercial. Free tools cost the developers, and at some point some of these great tools will go away without support.
Some things I use daily are
And lastly the most important one is Pandora because I need something to fill in the void while working.
For mapping remote locations (ftp,ssh,webdav,...) as windows drives I payed for WebDrive.