What's in a RIA Software Engineer's Tool Chest

Major Power Tools

• Microsoft Visual Studio
• Adobe Flex Builder, Flash Builder
  
• Adobe Coldfusion Builder
• SQL Server Management Studio

Browsers

• IE
  
• FireFox
• Google Chrome
  

Eclipse Plugins

• Subclipse: SVN client
  
• Flex Formatter: auto indent and format Flex code
  
• Aptana: excellen JS, HTML, CSS editors
  
• CFEclipse: Coldfusion editor
  

Firefox Plugins

• Firebug
• Html Validator
• Screengrab: take screenshots of browser content (including Flash)
  
• YSlow
• Web Developer

Free or really affordable utilities

• Data Dictionary Creator: manage and generate data dictionary
  
• Service Capture: capture HTTP traffic in/out of local computer, with built-in parser of Flash Remoting content
  
• Fiddler: capture HTTP traffic, well known in .NET community
  
• JSON Viewer: all you can ask for to navigate, search, format JSON data string
  
• VNC: remote desktop
  
• Tortois SVN, CVS, GIT: version control with Windows Explorer integration
  
• Tour De Flex: Air application showcasing Flex controls and sample code
• Skype: IM, talk, video conference, share desktop, ...
  
• Google Desktop: search code, design document with ease
  
• GIMP: free replacement for Photoshop
  
• Sysinternals: a group of Windows Utilities now owned by Microsoft. Here are a few of my favorites:
  
• Process Explorer: advance task manager, mostly used to search for locked resources
  
• Port Mon: serial port traffic analyzer
  
• Autoruns: manage autorun programs that can start through various mechanisms
  
• Depends: Dependency Walker
• WinMerge: graphical diff, can be easily integrated with Tortoise clients
  

Online Resources in Browser Bookmarks

• Google Code Search: search open source code
  
• Google Analytics: keep tab on web site usage
  
• Stackoverflow: ask questions, search for answers, and answer some questions. Occasionally get job offers due to your answers here
  
• EETimes: resource on embedded, semiconductor development
• TechCrunch
  
• DZONE: daily digest of tech blogs similar to TechCrunch
  
• ScottGu's Blog: MSFT VP of several .NET products
  
• MIX: Video, PPT of past conference
  
• PDC: Video, PPT of past conference
  
• GOOGLE IO: Video of past conference
  
• BeanStalk: online SVN server
• Github: onlien GIT server
  
• Gist: code snippet management
  
• CFLib.org: Coldfusion library
  

Open Source Software

• FlexLib: Flex controls
  
• AS3Core: Actionscript 3 utilities
  
• PureMVC: MVC framework, popular in Flex community
  
• Cairngorm: official MVC framework in Flex community
  
• Report.NET: .NET PDF library
  
• ZedGraph: .NET chart library
  
• SQLite: light-weight database, popular in embedded community
  
• NUnit: .NET unit testing framework
• FlexUnit: Flex unit testing framework

Icons

• Java Look and Feel Graphics Repository: official JAVA icon set
  
• Visual Studio Image Library: came with Visual Studio Installation
• Web Application Icons from WebAppers.com
• famfamfam.com
  

Free Screen Capture Tools for Windows

Here are two free screen capture tools that work decently well for small tasks:

1. CamStudio 2.0: Open Source software that comes with Visual Studio solution, and Win32 installation package. It works very well. Can capture to .AVI, and has a tool to convert AVI file to .SWF file and a HTML template to embed the Flash file. The captured file size is big. 40 seconds capture generated 20MByte AVI file and 1.5MByte SWF file.
Links:
SourceForge Host: http://sourceforge.net/projects/camstudio/
CamStudio - Free Streaming Video Desktop Recording Software: read the "Issues" section on this page. You will need to manually edit the generated HTML template in order for it to play in Firefox or Netscape.

2. Windows Media Encoder: Free Microsoft tool for video capture and editing. Capture result is WMV file format. File size is very small. But I recommend to use at least medium quality option which will generate a 500 KByte WMV file for 40 seconds capture.
Links:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx

My environment: Windows XP Professional, Dual Monitor

Regular Expression Designer

Writing regular expression is always tough for me, not to mention trying to read regular expressions written by other programmers. I found this excellent FREE tool: Regular Expression Designer provided by radsoftware.com.au a Sydney based company.

As you can see from the screen-shot below, it makes it very easy to experiment and visually inspect output of regular expression applied against various text input. You can try MATCH, SEARCH or REPLACE with one click. Match results are displayed in a tree format, so that you can instantly see all the matches and captured groups. An online help of regular expression language elements is provided as a quick reference.


This application only runs on Windows computer with .NET Framework 1.1 or 2.0.

Loading Indicator in Animated GIF

http://www.ajaxload.info/
This web site provides more than 20 different styles for free (foreground and background colors are configurable).

• Very easy to use.
• Seems like no string attached.
• Nice Graphics