There are already just about a million “Top Ten” style software lists. Regardless, here is the software without which I could not conduct bidness:
1) Visual Studio 2005
Yes, I know…we write mostly PHP at my company, but Visual Studio happens to be the best IDE available. I have a copy of 2008 that I haven’t installed yet, mainly due to the fact that I’d have to re-buy a bunch of plug-ins such as…
2) VS.PHP by Jcx.Software
This little gem allows PHP development on Visual Studio. I mentioned this a million years ago when I’d first started using it and I’m pretty much convinced it’s the best thing since sliced bread for PHP developers and it’s only $99.
3) Visual SVN
Yet another brilliant Visual Studio plugin that integrates open-source brilliance with…Microsoft. It integrates Subversion, the remarkable source code management system, right into Visual Studio. Everything you’ll need is available from either a context menu or via the menu that appears in the, um, menu bar. For those of you already familiar with Tortoise SVN (upon which Visual SVN is built), basically this product shoehorns Tortoise into Visual Studio. It is worth the $49 per license several times over.
4) Visual SVN Server
This is a product by the same company, but it’s remarkable enough that I felt it deserved indivual mention. It makes the creation and management of Subversion repositories, users, and security as simple as navigating the very intuitive user interface.
5) FileZilla FTP Client / FileZilla FTP Server
Free FTP client, free FTP server. Each product is very very easy to use. I used to be a SmartFTP user but after that product started to decline in quality, RootCause steered me in this direction.
6) FoxIt PDF Reader
FoxIt is a free PDF viewer and printer that frees you from the shackles imposed by that horrid piece of bloatware known as Adobe Acrobat. I don’t even know how big the Acrobat is these days, probably around 45MB…just to read PDFs! The 2.44MB FoxIt download frees you from this stupidity.
7) Open Office
The Sun-backed productivity suite has almost completely obviated our need for Microsoft Office. I say “almost” because the only reason I have Excel is that I needed to run a regression analysis a while back and Open Office does not have a good statistics package. That one example aside, I haven’t used office since we opened our doors. This, however, would not be possible without…
Google Applications
Who needs the cruft commonly known as Microsoft Exchange when Google provides excellent (and constantly improving) web based applications? Not my company (and probably not yours, despite what your CTO tells you).
9) TredoSoft MutipleIEs
Any web developer has to contend with the steaming pile that is the world’s most popular browser, Internet Explorer. While IE 7 has fixed some of the stupidity, there’s a lot of the universe that is still on IE6 (and a few on 5.5), and web developers have no choice but to deal with this. This free download from TredoSoft makes this easy and it works much better than other solutions.
10) PuTTY
This SSH/telnet client is indispensable for anyone that deals with Linux servers. And there is even a version for WM6 phones!