One of the things that makes developers passionate is our tools! We would, if left to our own devices, spend the rest of our lives making tools to make our job easier. Luckily some people actually get paid to perform this wonderful activity.

This post is the introductory post in what will be a very intermittent series about tools I use to do my job, what I like and dislike about them, and how they help me do the work that actually generates my income.

There are a number of other blogger's that publish various lists of tools that they use. The best example, IMHO, of this is Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows.

Scott publishes a yearly version of this list, and periodically updates individual entries scattered through the year as well. It's a fantastically valuable starting point for anyone developing in the Windows environment to begin looking for recommendations for tools.

I am going to try and go more in depth on a specific tool, or set of related tools and provide some background on what I needed to accomplish, what my selection criteria were and how my experience has been.

Commercial or Open/Shared Source and everything in between are on my system and in my arsenal. I am, like most of us, sensitive to cost to some degree. I am happy to pay a fair price for a great tool. But I do have a budget (who does not) and so I tend to look for value pretty carefully.

My primary criteria tend to be results oriented, meaning I want tools that tend to do something very very well and that do not require a steep learning curve to use them effectively.

So, with all the above in mind, my next post will be on ORM tools and persistence layers, stay tuned!

Cheers,

Robert Porter