Tools of the Trade

In addition to the Visual Studio IDE, there are several useful tools that I recommend to be a productive coder.

Red Gate Software's Reflector:  Reflector allows you to disassemble compiled .NET code (EXEs, DLLs, etc) and see the code behind them.  Keep in mind, some items may render using the MSEL syntax and not the normal language syntax you might be used to.  But for the most part, readable code the way the original developer(s) wrote it.

Uses:  My biggest use for this tool is to inspect production DLLs if there is an issue.  I've worked at IT shops in the past where you have one person doing builds and its hard to determine if your changes were pulled from the source code repository and deployed.  By using reflector, I can navigate to the method in my code inside a production DLL and verify if my changes were included.

Reflector can be found for free at http://www.red-gate.com/

Firebug:  For web development, Firebug for Firefox is a great tool to inspect the currently loaded HTML object.

Uses:  Checking the rendered HTML for anything goofy.  (Sometimes .NET outputs non-standard HTML that may not display correctly outside of IE.)  Additionally useful for checking the path of scripts and other resources.

NUnit: If you don't have any type of TDD software, I recommend NUnit.  Type NUnit in Bing or Google you'll find it.

NDoc: Greate tool for document your application.  NDoc can ready the meta data and uses it to give a good starting point for your documentation.

Really, these are the add-ons I use most often.

If you have additional tools you recommend, please add a comment so I (and other techies) can try them out!