What programming tools could you not live without?

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I'm a C# web/software developer and a massive JetBrains enthusiast. I couldn't with without Rider, WebStorm, DataGrip and TeamCity.

What's in your toolkit that you couldn't work without?
 
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I honestly couldn't go back to using VS after Rider I occasionally use VS Code for the extremely light stuff, but it needed so many extensions to be half as good, I gave up trying.

One guy at work uses nothing but VS Code, VIM and Terminal...

Jetbrains fanboi here too but on the java side, so IntelliJ. After that, definitely docker ! So much more convenient than installing stuff locally, faffing with VM's etc.
I need to look at Docker again!
 
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I need to look at Docker again!

Do it ! I can be dragged into supporting all sort of old systems at short notice when the brown smelly stuff hits the round spinny thing on customer site. At the simplest level, just being able to locally spin up whichever random one of mysql, several flavours of oracle or postgres I need in a docker instance and then kill when done saves all sorts of pain with VM's, incompatible installations, port clashes etc. All it costs is disk space. That was the simple use case that sold it to me - there's lots more once you get into using it.

It works well on windows, so well that I've stopped bothering to look at Unix for my development environment .. and there's nothing stopping me running a real unix env inside a docker container if there's something that can't work on windows, WSL 2 or cygwin !
 
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Stack overflow. ;)
The day Stack Overflow went down for hours a couple years ago was chaos! None of us knew how to do our jobs :cry:

Do it ! I can be dragged into supporting all sort of old systems at short notice when the brown smelly stuff hits the round spinny thing on customer site. At the simplest level, just being able to locally spin up whichever random one of mysql, several flavours of oracle or postgres I need in a docker instance and then kill when done saves all sorts of pain with VM's, incompatible installations, port clashes etc. All it costs is disk space. That was the simple use case that sold it to me - there's lots more once you get into using it.

It works well on windows, so well that I've stopped bothering to look at Unix for my development environment .. and there's nothing stopping me running a real unix env inside a docker container if there's something that can't work on windows, WSL 2 or cygwin !
I'll definitely take another look. We have a micro service architecture at work on Azure and it can be horrible having to manage 4 environments with over 20 APIs each... We took a look before but time and all that. I have a personal project which currently contains 1 web app and 1 web API, but likely a second web app with Identity Server. Something like Docker may help me a lot here.
 
Soldato
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You sound just like someone at work! He lives inside terminals, Vim (or VSCode) and uses the Git CLI (well, CLI for anything really)

I made the time investment in learning Vim a few years ago when I was doing a lot of SSH work, and now every other editor feels really slow :D
 
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On a whim I tried Jetbrains but struggling to get it to run/debug a MVC web project. :confused:
Any particular errors it's giving? I do find the JetBrains suite to be a bit "invest time on setup, save time with use". It can be quite fussy when it comes to things like MSBuild, I found that having VS installed as well as the VS Build Tools totally made Rider freak out and I had to tell it to use the specific version from the VS install.
 
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Any particular errors it's giving? I do find the JetBrains suite to be a bit "invest time on setup, save time with use". It can be quite fussy when it comes to things like MSBuild, I found that having VS installed as well as the VS Build Tools totally made Rider freak out and I had to tell it to use the specific version from the VS install.

All sorts of issues with IIS, configs and what not, gave up with that particular solution and just using VS and trying out Rider for my .net core API's and various other things (fine with those). Seems quite good so far, though unsure its offering that much(as yet) over VS. :)
 
Soldato
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https://www.linqpad.net/

Really useful for c# devs, it can do multiple things including connecting to DBs, running pretty much any code via nugets. It has a really useful output window for viewing data.
I use it for a lot of adhoc tasks and just playing with new nugets or patterns.

Otherwise just visual studio, I find VSCode a bit annoying to use after being used to full VS.
 
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