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If you dive into Visual Studio development, you'll be tempted to buy some extra goodies! Here are some non-sorted recommendations:
Tool |
Description |
Visual Assist |
Visual Assist from Whole Tomato is an extra "intellisense" tool, making the editor much more "smart". As soon as you type, Visual Assist aid the already existing Intellisense logic and propose the full sentence. When you get the feel of this tool, it renders inalienable! It also has nice template logic, making it a blast to insert method-headers etc. |
CPRETTY |
Hey, that's a really old tool from the MS-DOS days! What does it do ? I reformats the source code (or "pretty-print" as it's often called on the Internet). I has better support for C than for C++, but with some experience I still find this tool very valuable. Contact me if you are interested. |
BoundsChecker |
BoundsChecker from CompuWare is an indispensable tool to search and hunt down memory leaks. Some leaks can be extremely hard to find, but BoundsChecker make their existence harder :-) |
WinSpector |
WinSpector is a tool similar to Spy+ shipped with Visual Studio. But it's free and far better! Use it to track all kinds of windows and classes of your running processes |
CleanEx |
CleanEx from Elphin keeps your directories free of Visual Studio intermediate files. You will be amazed over the amount of data Visual Studio produce. If you are making a backup, you don't really need the intermediate files, so they just take up too much space. Don't run this on the Visual Studio directories themselves - Believe me - it's not worth it :-) |
Most tools from SysInternals |
SysInternals ships many free tools, such as Registry Monitor, File Monitor and Handle Monitor. Finally get a grip on what files etc. that get worked on by applications! |
The CodeProject Site |
The CodeProject is not necessary the site I go to every day for Notes problems! But as a Windows programmer, I hang out here almost every day. A highly recommended site with many top-quality articles. |
CodeGuru |
The same concept as CodeProject, but this was the original! CodeProject and others spinned off this fabulous site, albeit it's old and chunky interface. CodeGuru is still here! |
WMware Workstation |
WMware Workstation will let you have multiple concurrent emulated operating systems sessions at the same time. You can for example have one Windows 2000, and one Windows 98 session at the same time. Switch between the operation systems, just as you switch between other Windows-applications. |
There are a whole bunch of editors available, such as UltraEdit or SlickEdit, but I have never gotten into them, so I can hardly recommend them. Remember the old saying "An programmer don't trust other editors than the one he made himself" :-) Well, I happen to like the default editor!