Tools & Utilities

Check out some of the tools and utilities recommended by members of the SoftwareMonkeys.net community. This list will grow as more members submit suggestions so be sure to check back from time to time.

.NET

Reflector Reflector is a class browser, explorer, analyzer and documentation viewer for .NET. It allows you to easily view, navigate, search, decompile and analyze .NET assemblies in C#, Visual Basic and IL. Interacting with compiled assemblies can be difficult if you have little or no documentation. Reflector is an invaluable tool for allowing you to look inside an assembly and find out how it works, potentially saving hours of trial and error and debugging. (Additional utilities also listed on page linked above.)

Anti-Virus

AVG Free Award winning, efficient, and light-weight anti-virus software available for free download. Advanced commercial versions are also available.

CD/DVD

CDBurnerXP With CDBurnerXP you can burn CD-R, CD-RW DVD+R/RW DVD-R/RW discs (including to/from ISO files). The application is available for download free of charge.

Database

db4o - Database for Objects Possibly the most innovative and well designed data storage solution ever created for object oriented .NET and Java applications. After a bit of a learning curve from traditional storage solutions the db4o system makes saving, updating, deleting, and retrieving objects to and from your data store, one of the simplest aspects of your application, allowing you to focus on the rest of the project.

Testing

NUnit - .NET Unit Testing Framework This entirely C# based port of xUnit is arguably the best and most well known unit-testing framework for all .NET languages. Unit testing helps to ensure that most of components and functions in your application run exactly how they're supposed to, even after adding/editing features, refactoring code, etc. The time taken to create unit tests for your project is minimal compared to the time you'll save from hunting down hard-to-find bugs during development and maintenance.

Zip/Compression

7-Zip A light-weight and powerful open source compression utility. It supports the following extensions 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS.

Recommend a useful tool or utility

If you would like to recommend a tool or utility (either one you use or one you've created) to the community please send an email to tools@softwaremonkeys.net with the name, URL, and brief description of its benefits.