My Favorite Software

Besides from Simple DNS Plus my favorite software is:

Software Development:

• Visual Basic.NET / Visual Studio 2008 - http://www.microsoft.com/vstudio
  The new VB language features (especially type inference and lambdas) and the VS IDE are just awesome.
  
• Help & Manual - http://www.helpandmanual.com
  Great tool for authoring software help files and documentation.
  
• Advanced Installer - http://www.caphyon.com
  Nice MSI installer builder at a reasonable price.
  Easily beats Wyse and InstallShield both on features and price.
  
• Visual Build Professional - http://www.kinook.com
  Great tool for automating software builds. This just saves us so much time.
  
• Dotfuscator - http://www.preemptive.com
  For obfuscating .NET code. I especially like the ability to translate obfuscated stack traces back to original symbols.
  It is rather expensive but I don't know of any good alternatives.
  
• Smart Paster - see this blog post
  Paste text from the Windows clipboard into the Visual Studio source code editor formatted as a comment, quoted string, or string builder code.

Software testing / optimizing:

• VMware Workstation - http://www.vmware.com
  Amazing virtual machine software. Can't imagine testing software without it.
  
• Reflector - http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/
  Fantastic tool for finding out what the .NET compilers actually do to your code.
  
• dotTrace Profiler - http://www.jetbrains.com
  Very nice for profiling/optimizing .NET code.
  I actually won a license for this software in a "drop your business card" contest at TechEd Barcelona 2006.
  
• Hexago / go6 client - http://www.go6.net
  Great for testing IPv6 Internet applications when your ISP doesn't offer IPv6 yet.

Graphics / icons:

• Paint Shop Pro - http://www.corel.com
  My favorite imaging program.
  Unfortunately Corel screwed it up since they took over, but v. 9, the last version published by “Jasc Software”, is still going strong.
  
• Axialis Icon Workshop -http://www.axialis.com
  Great for converting/creating Vista ready icons.

Other deskop software:

• Mozy - http://www.mozy.com
  Continuous remote backup of irreplaceable files.
  
• The Bat - http://www.ritlabs.com
  Great template driven e-mail client software - automates a lot of typing when answering support e-mails.
  
• Windows Live Writer - http://get.live.com/writer/overview
  Nice software to write blogs - especially like the word style squiggly-line spell-checking.
  
• Kaspersky Anti-Virus - http://www.kaspersky.com 
  One nice thing about this is that it includes a command line scanning tool which is easy to include in our automated software build process.

Server software:

• MDaemon - http://www.mdeamon.com
  I have been using this e-mail server software since 1998. Keeps getting better.
  
• Zoom Search Engine - http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/
  Adds search to your web-sites.
  See my forum conversation with Raymond.
  
• blogengine.net - http://www.dotnetblogengine.net
  The software running this blog – works nicely with Windows Live Writer (see above).
  
• Backup for Workgroups - http://www.backup-for-workgroups.com
  Nice software for making backups to a remote server.
  Backs up our web-server every night.

Utilities:

• Super FDisk - http://www.ptdd.com/manual2.htm
  Great free hard disk partitioning tool. Comes as ISO file for burning bootable CD.
  See Super FDisk to the rescue 
  
• SyncBackSE - http://www.2brightsparks.com 
  For synchronizing folders and uploading websites.
  

Components:

• DotNetOpenID - http://code.google.com/p/dotnetopenid/
  Add OpenID login to your ASP.NET web-sites.
  
• SandDock - http://www.divelements.co.uk
  Great .NET windows docking component that actually works on all platforms including 64 bit.
  
• InnovaStudio WYSIWYG Editor – http://www.InnovaStudio.com
  HTML editor component for web-sites.
  
• DynamicPDF - http://www.dynamicpdf.com
  Great for creating PDF documents on the fly.
  We primarily use it for automatic on-line invoice creation.

I have tried many different tools in all these categories over the years, and I can highly recommend all of the above over any competitors that I know of.
Of course if you know of any better alternatives please do let me know and I might reconsider.