tobinharris.com

There's actually a trend forming here, in that pretty much all the stuff I'm interested in is Open Source and FREE!!

.NET, IDE's & Tools

• SqlBuddy (FREE)
  SqlBuddy is an OpenSource SQL Server/MSDE IDE I have been working on!
• SharpDevelop IDE (FREE)
  This is an amazing FREE IDE for working with .NET. Includes form builder, syntax highlighted editor, library/code reflector, and much more.
• NUnit (FREE)
  A unit-testing tool for .NET
• NDoc (FREE)
  An automated documentation too for .NET
• NAnt (FREE)
  An automated build tool for .NET. Similar to Ant - it allows extremely complex configuration of software builds through XML configuration files. Can make use of NUnit and NDoc for automatic test running/logging and documentation generation. Update! Some of these tools are now being charged for, but still lots of free stuff.
• Fiddler (FREE)
  Haven't tried it yet but this looks like a great debugging proxy for HTTP traffic. Written in c#.
• API Guide
  Wow, this looks like a fantastic guide to the windows API. This downloadable app has over 900 API calls listed, and .NET and Visual Basic 6.0 examples. Fantastic work!

.NET Components

• DotNetMagic GUI Library (FREE!)
  Excellent graphics library for .NET with tabbed windows, menus, docking etc. Open source version (1.7.4 )available here, and commercial version available also at www.dotnetmagic.com
• FTP Component from Rebex (Commercial)
  This is a great, well priced FTP component for use in .NET applications.
• Zip Component from ICSharp Team(FREE)
  This is a great tool from the ICSharp team (authors of SharpDevelop).
• GUI Widgets, Toolbars and Components (FREE!)
  Nice, simple set of toolbars and other useful components. Some good articles here. I've tried using the toolbars in the SqlBuddyX project (X for cross platform), and so far so good!
• New! Ace XP Style GUI Widgets( FREE )
  These look really great, and the guy won Code Hero on Winforms.net!
• Netron Graphing Component (FREE)
  I need to look into this more, but this looks like a nice graphing component for c#.
  

Misc Utilities

• New! Visual Basic 6 Profiler (FREE)
  Haven't tried this one yet - but looks like a possible runner for profiling VB6 code performance.
• New! Loads and Loads of ace monitoring tools
  Wow! What a fantastic resource of free monitoring applications and tools. There really are too many to list! One tool allows yout to see what applications are accessing what files. Another allows you to see what debug information an applications is spitting out. Another allows you to see any registry IO in real time.
• QClock Inetnational Desktop Clock (FREE)
  This is a pretty funky international clock for your desktop. It has click to show/hide in the system tray, and you can set up whichever cities/places to show time for. Also looks NICE!!! I use this for working out where what time it is for my various clients - great if you don't want to miss a deadline!
• Ransack File Search (FREE)
  This is a cool and popular tool for searching the windows filesystem. There are known issues with Windows search, especially when searching in files, but this tool seems to work great - and it's FAST!
• K9 Spam Filter (FREE)
  Wow, this tool has solved by 100+ spams/day problem within 4 hours of downloading. I would recommend this to anyone who receives spam in thier inbox. I had a slight problem with setup, but it only took 10 mins to work around. Honestly, install this thing now!
• Inno Setup (FREE)
  This is a great, professional quick n' easy installer. I use it to deploy patches for applications. The help is fully comprehensive for it's simple yet powerful scripting language (although the Wizard interface means you don't really need to roll your sleeves up unless you want to do complex stuff).
• Regex Coach
  This is an excellent regular expressions workingbench which allows you to step through the regex looking for problems!
• Visual XPath
  Looks like a nice tool for generating XPath query results.
• TextPad (FREE)
  This is a pretty darn useful Windows text editor. It's free (occasional nag screen), but worth paying for too!
• MailWasher - Anti-Spam tool (FREE)
  A great tool for clearing out spam on my email account.