Useful Tools
We have encountered a multitude of systems, applications, tools, and utilities while working on projects across various client sites. Some of them have been fantastic to use and incredibly useful, many of them have not.
This page contains information about a selection of the tools we have found most useful, or are the current favourites used by our consultants when on assignment. Through personal experience we have found that each of them "does what it says on the tin" and does it well. We have no commercial affiliation with any of the application vendors in the list, in fact the majority of the products are free or open source.
Command line scripting
Windows is great for many things, but command line programming or shell scripting just isn't one of them. Thankfully Cygwin has been created to allow a Unix/Linux like command line environment including things like awk, grep, sed, wget and so on. It has a bit of an unusual setup, but we're willing to overlook that because of the array of useful Unix command line tools that work under Windows via Cygwin.
Data Modelling and Database design
Over the years we have used most of the enterprise class data modelling products including: Computer Associates' Erwin, IBM's Rational Rose, Microsoft's Visio, No Magic's Magic Draw, Oracle's Designer, Quest's Toad Data Modeller and Smart Draw.
The pick of the modelling tools we have encountered is Datanamic's Dezign for Databases. It is a simple to use modelling and design tool that works well against all the relational database platforms we work on. With reasonably priced licensing and product support that have proven to be responsive and helpful it is the modelling tool we use.
File Compression
While Winzip has been made largely redundant by the built in file compression functionality within the newer versions of Windows, another product we find useful is 7-zip. It can do the standard zipping and unzipping of files, but also understands some of the more exotic compression formats such as CAB, LHZ, RAR and TAR.
File Transfers
WinSCP is a handy graphical tool for copying files using SCP or FTP. It is another free product that is good at what it does. It can store profiles and preferences for connecting to remote sites, and has a handy bookmark feature that provides shortcuts to frequently used locations on the source machine.
Telnet and SSH client
The pick of SSH and telnet clients we have used is Putty. It does everything the expensive ones like Exceed do, but is free. The team responsible for producing Putty might not win any awards for the visual appeal of their website, but have produced a great light weight connectivity tool that works.
Text editor
We use Textpad for text editing. It is a feature rich text editor with fast search and replace functionality, support for regular expressions, and syntax highlighting. The product is similar to Notepad++ and Ultraedit, but without the regular expression new line bug of the former or the unsolicited evangelism of the latter.
Virtual Machines
Often times there is a need to simulate a production setup in a development or test environment. Sometimes you may want to run a server operating system on your home laptop, or test networking features, or whatever. One option is to buy heaps of physical kit and do the work for real. The budget option is run up a bunch of virtual machines and simulate the physical side of things. The pick of the virtual machines vendors we've used is VMWare.