What programming tools could you not live without?

MatteRB26 · 21 Aug 2021 at 09:04

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?

chroniclard · 21 Aug 2021 at 09:53

My PC.

Also c# web dev, I dont really use that much outside of visual studio.......Postman perhaps for testing API calls

FredFlint · 22 Aug 2021 at 14:48

I do desktop applications and a few mobile app's. Only use Visual Studio and SSMS, Paint.Net is useful for icons and stuff.

gpuerrilla · 22 Aug 2021 at 18:11

I use a lot of Notepad++ to check text or clean it when say drawing from an API or moving it about between systems.

peterwalkley · 22 Aug 2021 at 19:31

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.

MatteRB26 · 22 Aug 2021 at 20:01

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...

peterwalkley said:
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!

peterwalkley · 22 Aug 2021 at 20:45

MatteRB26 said:
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 !

ChroniC · 22 Aug 2021 at 21:14

Stack overflow.

MatteRB26 · 22 Aug 2021 at 22:44

ChroniC said:
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:

peterwalkley said:
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.

mid_gen · 23 Aug 2021 at 08:10

Visual Assist X

Just makes dealing with massive C++ projects about as painless as it can be.

Hades · 23 Aug 2021 at 09:25

The Jetbrains IDE's.

Tee Hee Johnson · 23 Aug 2021 at 21:55

I can get by with purely visual studio, actually I can do without when need be.

MatteRB26 · 25 Aug 2021 at 06:21

Tee Hee Johnson said:
I can get by with purely visual studio, actually I can do without when need be.

I couldn't go back to visual studio.. I haven't even touched it for months now

arty · 25 Aug 2021 at 09:21

A terminal with (neo)vim and git installed is pretty much all I use

MatteRB26 · 25 Aug 2021 at 09:24

arty said:
A terminal with (neo)vim and git installed is pretty much all I use

You sound just like someone at work! He lives inside terminals, Vim (or VSCode) and uses the Git CLI (well, CLI for anything really)

arty · 25 Aug 2021 at 09:45

MatteRB26 said:
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

chroniclard · 25 Aug 2021 at 09:54

On a whim I tried Jetbrains but struggling to get it to run/debug a MVC web project. :confused:

MatteRB26 · 25 Aug 2021 at 12:56

chroniclard said:
On a whim I tried Jetbrains but struggling to get it to run/debug a MVC web project.

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.

chroniclard · 25 Aug 2021 at 13:18

MatteRB26 said:
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.

DanF · 25 Aug 2021 at 15:08

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.