The latest craze in the blogsphere seems to be posting what tools you install on a development machine (see here and here).

Given that I had the opportunity today to rebuild a development environment, I thought I would share with you what I installed on this virtual machine. As some of you know, I do all of my development on a virtual machine, which makes things like rebuilding your machine significantly easier. But I digress…

I downloaded the Windows XP SP2 ISO from MSDN earlier today, so that SP2 would be slipstreamed into the install. Quite nice…

That Windows XP SP2 base operating system also received the following tools:

• VS.NET 2003 (ok, this is obvious)
• Resharper (the absolute must-have add-in for VS.NET, bar none)
• Textpad (sometimes, for things like XSLT, VS.NET is just overkill)
• CodeSmith (talk about a timesaver)
• NUnit 2.2 (’nuff said)
• Raxco PerfectDisk (when the builtin defragger just isnt good enough)
• Araxis Merge (the ultimate diff/merge tool)
• Tortoise SVN/CVS (i’ve really gotten used to working with my source control system directly from windows explorer)
• .NET Reflector (sometimes you just gotta be able to see under the hood)

I think these lists are a good idea. By publishing your lists, you make people aware of tools that they may not have been familiar with.

It would also be nice if someone would compile a list of these, and track votes for each tool. This way, we could see the top tools at any given time… Anyone have any free time? :=)