This page contains a list of some of the applications I use for various tasks. This list is mainly comprised of developer tools and other free applications.

This is an old list, and this page hasn’t been updated in a few years. Beware. Just keeping it here so any links to it don’t break / 404. Thanks!

Developer Tools

.NET Framework and Microsoft Development Tools

MS Visual Studio 2010 Express - Free .NET Framework development IDE

MS SQL Server 2008 R2 Express - Free SQL Server database server/engine

MS SQL Server 2008 Management Studio Express - a free, integrated environment for accessing, configuring, managing, administering, and developing all components of SQL Server, as well as combining a broad group of graphical tools and rich script editors that provide access to SQL Server to developers and administrators of all skill levels.

XAMLPad - is a basic visual editor for Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML).

LINQPad - Lets you query various data sources (SQL Server, SQL Azure, OData and more) using LINQ.

.NET Reflector - Explore and analyze compiled .NET assemblies, viewing them in C#, Visual Basic and IL.

Visual Studio Plugins

Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2010 - (This is a must have tool for all devs, and alot of these features should be baked into VS’2010) - A set of extensions to Visual Studio Professional (and above) which improves developer productivity. In this third major release of the Power Tools we have made significant improvements to the Solution Navigator and the Tab Well to address our top customer requests.

Reference Assistant for Visual Studio 2010 - Helps remove unused assembly references from C#, VB.NET or VC++/CLI projects.

NuGet Package Manager - A collection of tools to automate the process of downloading, installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing packages from a VS project.

Web Essentials - Adds manu useful features to Visual Studio for web developers.

Web Standards Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 SP1 - Adds CSS3 support and updates the HTML5 intellisense and validation including new JavaScript API’s

Designer / Graphics Tools

Paint.NET - is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

Utilities

FileZilla - the free FTP solution.

Audio / Video

Handbrake - an open source, multiplatform, mutlithreaded video transcoder.

Web Browsers

Firefox - The Firefox Web Browser is the faster, more secure, and fully customizable way to surf the web.

Chrome - Web browser from Google, based on WebKit.