Tools

I found a couple of cool (and free!) development-related tools last week that I thought were worth sharing. The first one is actually a small suite of tools, SlickEdit Gadgets (for Visual Studio 2005). There are 5 gadgets included: Editor gadgets, Command Spy, File Explorer, Data Object Analyzer, and SLOC Report.

I'm a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts, so the main reason I installed this add-in was for the Command Spy. This little utility watches your actions in the Visual Studio IDE and shows the associated keyboard shortcuts for those actions. If you have to keep grabbing the mouse to get to a command buried in the menu system, this can easily show you the key binding (if there is one) and save you some time in the future.



The SLOC Report (Solution Lines Of Code?) generates a pie chart showing the breakdown of the lines in the selected code file(s), project, or entire solution. Not exactly a productivity breakthrough, but it's cool to see what your project is made of.



I haven't really used the other gadgets much, but you can read more about them on the site.

Paint.NET is an image editing app similar to Paint, PhotoShop, PaintShop, etc., written in the .NET framework. I know, it's not really a development tool, but it's great for some of the quick image-editing tasks I occasionally have to do related to development (website images, UI images and icons, etc). It covers all the functionality of MSPaint, and quite a few of the tools and effects in PhotoShop and PaintShop -- it even supports layers. I don't really get into image editing unless I have to, and even then, it's usually small stuff like cropping and resizing where PhotoShop would be considered overkill. Paint.NET is a great lightweight tool for these situations.