Gingter Ale

Fluent stories of a software engineer

My developers toolbelt 2016

2016-12-15

I cought a tweet a few days ago asking for your developers toolbelt, specifically on windows. And I gave a very short answer and mentioned I would blog about this:

@modocache @devlead vs code & Atom. Cmder. Outlook. Actually, wait a bit and I’ll blog my toolbelt ;)

— Sebastian PR Gingter (@PhoenixHawk) December 8, 2016

So, this is a more elaborate answer to the developers toolbelt question. My default windows developer installation contains the following:

  • Windows 10 Professional (fully updated)

    • .NET Frameworks active

    • IIS Installed

    • Dev-Mode enabled

    • Linux Subsystem installed

    • Windows Defender as Antivirus solution & default Firewall

      (no external security software)

  • Dropbox

  • 1Password

  • IE, Edge, Chrome, Firefox (for testing, yes, I do quite a bit web dev :) )

  • Git for Windows for commandline usage

  • SourceTree as my graphical git client*

  • Beyond Compare as my diff tool

  • Cmder as my console of choice

    (my previous blog post is about using the Linux bash on Windows in Cmder)

  • Node Version Manager nvm for Windows, and as such a lot of node versions

  • Primary IDE: Visual Studio 2015 (with ReSharper Ultimate)

  • Secondary IDE: WebStorm

  • .NET Sourcepad: LinqPad

  • Primary Database: SQL Server 2016 Express

    other DBMS as required by projects.

  • dbForge Schema compare and dbForge Data compare

  • Office 365

    • OneNote for collaboration
    • PowerPoint for presentations
    • Outlook for e-mail comms
    • Word for occasional paperwork
  • Slack and TeamViewer for other comms / collab

  • VSCode as my main text editor

  • Atom as secondary text editor (i.e. large markdown files, where VSCode crashes)

  • Android Studio

  • Genymotion android emulator (quite a bit faster than the normal one)

In the list above, except for ReSharper, I am not listing additional addons / extensions to the other listed tools.

  • I also tried GitKraken, Tower for Windows and the GitHub client, but they are - in my opinion - not as usable as SourceTree. Especially Tower wastes too much screen estate.