Colin Thomsen's Microsoft Blog

Tools of the Trade

I've been thinking about what some of the most important tools are for me while coding. Here's a few:

• Good IDE - syntax highlighting, integrated builds, source control integration, search facility, debugger and profiler built-in. I use VSTS.
  
• Source control/bug tracking system. I use TFS (typically a dogfood version of TFS).
  
• Windows Task Manager.
  
  I use task manager to:
  - View CPU usage
  - Kill processes
  - Start a new explorer.exe if I ever kill explorer.exe. Do this from the Applications tab.
• Process Explorer.
   
  I use Process Explorer like task manager, but it can also:
  - Find what process has a handle (e.g. a file) open. This can be handy if you want to delete a file but a process has it locked.
  - Find out what DLLs a process has loaded
  - List the environment variables for a running process
• Process Monitor
  
  I use Process Monitor to record file, registry and process activity. This is very useful when debugging issues in complex programs like VSTS which have a lot of registry interactions.
• DebugView
  
  Display debugging output from programs without having to attach a debugger. This is very useful if you want to run your program outside a debugger and still want to see all those debug prints.
• Media Player. I like to listen to music while I code.
  
• Outlook. It is somewhat sad that I spend a fair percentage of my day reading emails, scheduling or checking up on meetings and writing notes in an Outlook journal, but I do and so I have Outlook open all the time.
• Internet Explorer. I need to use MSDN a lot and do web searches. I also read RSS feeds of relevant blogs with IE.
• Regedit.
• Remote Desktop. I work on different machines pretty regularly and Remote Desktop makes switching between machines easy.