Ultimate .NET development tools

I've been wanting to make a list for my own reference of all the best-of-breed tools that I prefer to use when doing .NET development.  I specifically decided to not include any third party control/report libraries.  I focus instead on the tools that assist me in crafting high-quality code quickly and effectively.

Categories

• IDE = Develop/generate/refactor code within the VS IDE or separate IDE
• SCM = Software Configuration Management (Source Control etc.)
• TDD = Test Driven Development
• DBMS = Database Management Systems
• CI = Continuous Integration
• FR = Frameworks (Persistence, AOP, Inversion of Control, Logging etc.)
• UT = Utility Tools
• CA = Code Analysis (Static + Dynamic)
• TC = Team Collaboration (Bug tracking, Project management etc.)
• MD = Modelling
• QA = Testing Tools
• DP = Deployment (Installations etc.)

Tools

* = free/open source

1. [IDE] Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition for Software Developers
2. [IDE] ReSharper for refactoring and to "develop with pleasure"
3. [IDE] CodeSmith for generating code.  Also consider T4 with Clarius’s Visual T4 Editor.  
4. [IDE]* GhostDoc for inserting xml code comments
5. [IDE] Altova Xml Suite for any xml related work.  XmlPad is the best, free alternative I know of.
6. [DBMS] SqlServer 2008 for DBMS
7. [DBMS] Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition for Database Professionals for managing databases as code artifacts
8. [SCM]* Subversion for source control
9. [SCM]* TortoiseSVN as windows shell extension for Subversion
10. [SCM] VisualSVN for integration of TortoiseSVN into VS.  Ankh is the best, free alternative I know of.
11. [SCM]* KDiff3 for merging
12. [TDD]* NUnit as preferred xUnit testing framework
13. [TDD] TestDriven.NET as test runner for "zero-friction unit testing"! 
14. [TDD]* moq as mock framework.
15. [TDD] NCover for code coverage stats
16. [CI]* TeamCity as build server
17. [CI]* MSBuild Extension Pack for additional MSBuild tasks.  Also see the MSBuild.Community.Tasks. 
18. [FR]* log4net as logging framework.  Also see Log4View for an excellent UI for the log files.
19. [FR]* PostSharp as Aspect Oriented Programming framework
20. [FR]* Ninject as IoC container
21. [FR]* NHibernate as Object Relational Mapper.  MindScape LightSpeed also seems to be maturing very nicely.
22. [UT]* Reflector to drill down to the guts of any code library (also check-out the nice plug-ins)
23. [UT] Silverlight Spy to dissect any Silverlight application.
24. [UT] RegexBuddy for managing those difficult regular expressions.  Regulator is the best, free alternative I know of. 
25. [UT]* SnippetCompiler to quickly test snippets of .NET code.
26. [UT]* LINQPad as a easy way to query SQL databases using LINQ.
27. [UT]* Fiddler to debug all your HTTP traffic in IE.   Also see the neXpert plugin for monitoring performance problems.
28. [UT]* Web Development Helper to assist with testing ASP.NET applications running in IE.  Also see the IE Developer Toolbar for additional IE web development tools.
29. [UT]* Firebug to assist with testing web applications running in Firefox. Also see YSlow add-on for performance testing and Web Developer add-on for additional Firefox web development tools.
30. [CA]* FxCop to enforce .NET coding guidelines
31. [CA] NDepend to get all the static code metrics I'd ever want
32. [CA] ANTS Profiler for performance and memory profiling
33. [MD] Enterprise Architect to do UML Modelling and Model Driven Design if required. Alternatively use Visio with these simple templates. 
34. [MD]* FreeMind as mind mapping tool
35. [TC]* ScrewTurn Wiki for team collaboration
36. [QA]* Eviware soapUI for testing of SOA web services
37. [QA]* WebAii for automated regression testing of Web 2.0 apps
38. [DP]* Windows Installer XML (WiX) for creating Windows Installers