List of open source/free tools for development

This list (unfortunately) is not categorized or listed in any particular order.  When I get a bit more free time I will amend the list and categorize it.

Winmerge - Great Diff tool works on entire directories too!

 

.NET Reflector - Great .NET disassembler tool.  Can translate into different languages and also has several plug-ins to enhance your reversing experience.

 

Visual Studio Express Editions - If you want to code but just don't have the cash to purchase the standard or professional versions of Visual Studio.

LinqPad - Very cool snippet runner for linq and other langueges as well (C#, VB.NET, ESQL, SQL)

 

Postgres - Great open source database. Has alleged similarities to Oracle, I don't use Oracle so I wouldn't know, but for sure has up to date providers for the .NET developers out there including ADO.NET Entity Framework Support as of npgsql2.

 

MySql - Another great open source database recently acquired by Sun (and almost more recently acquired by IBM via Sun).  I'm fairly confident most are aware of this database as it's a very popular alternative to closed source solutions.  As of version 5 there is now support for Triggers and Stored Procedures, etc...  Has various storage types that make it a bit confusing and also introduces limits to features (i.e. - Foreign Keys - depending on the storage engine used).

 

Firebird - Open source RDBMS utilizing the SQL language.  Fast, lightweight, good for smaller projects.

 

MSSQL Express - Microsoft's lightweight and free version of their flagship product SQL Server. Good for developers using the MS platform/stack.

 

SubSonic 2.2 - Great ORM (and more) for developers working with databases including some of those listed above.

 

SubSonic 3 - Insane upgrade to the version above.  Now based on T4 templates to generate the data access layer.  Great hidden tools in the SubSonic.Core.dll as well!  A must have for all RAD developers.

 

Launchy - Great app launcher.  Setup a keystrock to open and type the partial/full name of the application you want to open and boom! There's your app. And I thought the 'Start' menu was quick.

 

Chrome - Great browser offered from the great Google shop.  Very fast and lightweight.  Looks nice and has some very simple but lovely features. 

 

Firefox - Great browser offered from the folks over at Mozilla.  A lot of users love this app, also great debugging tools for web developers that you can use in the form of a plug-in.

 

WinHTTP - Website copier/downloader.  Great for offline browsing.

 

Fiddler2 - Web/HTTP protocol debugger.  Very handy for AJAX debugging.

 

Web Developer - Great IE web debugging tool.  I think there is a FF version as well. 

 

Firebug for Firefox - great website debugging tool - a plug-in for FF browser only.

 

Filezilla - Great open source FTP client (and server as a seperate download).  Very stable and gives no probs.

 

Powershell Analyzer - Great tool for developing powershell scripts.

 

PowerGUI - Same as above, but a bit different, both very cool first offerings in the PowerShell department.

 

Mono - Awesome Linux port of .NET BCL and CLR.  Essentially, it's .NET for the *nix flavor and is pretty mature.  Run by OpenSource king Miguel De Icaza and is backed by the guys over at Novell.  I've been watching this project since it's inception back in 2001 and I have to say they've done a killer job.  There are a few things it doesn't support such as WPF, but I'm sure one day it will be there.  Silverlight is supported, but not everything from the 2.0 release.

 

MonoDevelop - The IDE for the above mentioned mono. Of course, you can also use visual studio to code...

 

IKVM.NET - Do you want to run or port your Java 1.6 app to .NET? Check out this insane child of a brainiac who is making this happen.  I successfully ported over the latest revision of the Java Lucene application to .NET.  I think there was maybe one error which was trivial and then, it ran!  Wow.  Don't act like you're not impressed. 

 

SharpDevelop - An open source IDE for .NET development. Great if you don't want to use the tools offered by MS and for a while (before MS released the Visual Studio Express series) the only free alternative to the Visual Studio series.

 

InfraRecorder - Great open source CD/DVD burning utility.  Awesome, never looked back at Nero.

 

Paint.NET - A photoshop alternative that, I must say, is quite impressive.  Especially for those people who don't want to pay the price for photoshop but still have a requirement for high quality image manipulation.  Say goodbye to Gimp on Windows!

 

MySql Workbench - Great application for database development (Forward and Reverse Engineering in the paid vesion) for MySql DBA types.  ERD diagrams supported.

 

CCleaner - Great utility for cleaning up your Windows installation. Never had a glitch after using.

 

FeedDemon - Great tool for RSS feed aggregation!  Don't know what I would do without it - no way I would remember all 100 of the blogs I subscribe too.

 

BlogEngine.NET - Speaking of blogs, this is a great open source ASP.NET Blog application.  Very feature rich and very impressive.  Can run on XML as the storage layer or many popular RDBMS's i.e. - mysql, mssql and VistaDB

 

Umbraco - Open source ASP.NET CMS solution.  Very robust, very clean and very open.  Doesn't force you into it's own style.  Makes use of XSLT which is very sexy.

 

YetAnotherForum.NET - Open source ASP.NET forum solution.  Clean and getting better with the next release that's in Beta. Does it's job well, but wish it was a bit easier to integrate into already existing websites.

Tangible Engineering T4 Editor - Free Visual Studio IDE T4 template editor/IDE.  A bit sluggish compared to the Clarius version, but it's free and includes intellisense.

 

CodeRush Express - Nice Visual Studio add-on.

 

DXCore for Visual Studio - from the website: "... developers can build their own productivity plug-ins to extend the Visual Studio® IDE themselves using a simple visual framework for IDE extension."  It's free too!

SharedCache - Really cool distributed caching server.  Great alternative to memchached and more robust than the built-in ASP.NET cache tool.  Can be "farmed" out to provide a high scalability scenario for the most demanding of loads. 100% managed C# code.

 

Lucene.NET - Great search/indexing server. A .NET port of the Java Lucene project that runs very well.  

 

LINQ to Lucene.NET - A LINQ provider for the afore mentioned Lucene.NET project.  Pretty cool, but haven't used it yet. Worth mentioning here though.

 

VMWare Server 2 - Great *free* Virtualization application.  You can run many, many flavors of OS's in this baby!  Will run in background and is highly configurable.  Great for learning or testing.  For example, creating a virtualized server farm/cluster for your development needs without having to purcahse real servers!  Also, you can load up a Virtualized OS and spy on a virus like Conficker to see just what exactly it does... Great tool! 

 

TortoiseSVN - Windows SVN client.  Awesome, best I've used so far.  And, yup, it's free!

 

Unlocker - Ever get those annoying this file is locked messages from windows!?  Well, now you can relieve your worries as unlocker is here to rescue you! After Windows tells you "you can't do that" it steps in and says, yes you can!  It will prompt you for an action to move/delete/unlock..etc... and in the rare event that it can't operate on the locked file, it will take care of the problem at the next boot up.  Sort of like your own personal virtual mafia hit man.

 

PowerMenu - Very convenient tool for minimizing regular applications to the System Tray.  Not a lot of people really care, but I like it as it enables me to free up some real estate on the taskbar.

 

SysInternals Suite - if you don't have it, you need to get it NOW.  The swiss army knife for Windows OS's.

 

Phalanger - OpenSource port of the popular PHP language on top of the .NET platform.  So, you can (you guessed it) code ASP.NET using PHP.  WOuld that be PHP.NET?  You can do cool things like run WordPress in IIS7 via ASP.NET.  Err, I mean PHP.NET.   Sounds funny don't it?  For all you non-believers out there, it's real.  Really real.  In fact, not only does it exist or entirely possible, but, it's fast.  Check out Peter Bromberg's blog about it here.

 

PDFCreator - Great tool for printing things to PDF. I love this for receipts, etc...  I can then store and save them digitally and save the trees too!

 

Notetab++ - Great open source alternative for Notepad in windows.  Great Text Editor in general, has support for various languages as well as syntax highlighting and code folding in the comment sections.

 

MyGeneration - A code generation tool.  Is now open source.  Similar to CodeSmith and the VS.NET T4 template.  Classic asp like script syntax.  I have since stopped using it for most of my projects as the T4 template editing system allows for scripting in .NET languages and libraries.  Great for people who use the express versions of VS.NET or are looking for an alternative to T4.

 

Visual Studio T4 Template Code Generator - Code generation tool similar, but more robust, to MyGeneration and CodeSmith. Not very well known amongst most .NET developers at the moment.

 

Microsoft Enterprise Library - Great Open source offering from MS. Compilation of tools for .NET developers.  Includes such things as Unity (Dependency Injection and IoC), Validation, Caching, Logging, cryptography, Data Access, security and Policy Injection libraries.

Microsoft Network Monitor - Free tool to monitor incoming TCP and/or UDP packet information.  Very helpful for system monitoring and debugging network scenarios.

 

System Rescue CD - Great tool to fix broken systems.

 

BartPE - A "Live CD" version of Windows XP.  Very helpful for system repair.

 

Ultimate Windows Boot CD - Similar to the first two offerings, many tools and utilities to fix a downed system.

 

7-Zip - Free and open source compression/archiving utility.  Nice alternative to winzip, winace and winRar.

 

xUnit - A nice and new unit testing framework designed to work with .NET 2.0 and up. 

 

RhinoMocks - Great testing tool for use with mocking scenarios.  Free! http://ayende.com/projects/rhino-mocks.aspx

 

Fedora - RedHat's Linux offering.  Great to learn and play with Linux!  

 

VisiFire - Free and OpenSource Silverlight charting tool.  Pretty nice charts and is now becoming somewhat mature of a project. Check it out!

 

Jing - Free Windows Screen capture/recording utility.  I really like it's ease of use.

 

Script# - Really cool server side Javascript development tool. Very nice concept/idea.

EQATEC .NET Profiler - Free and cool .NET profiler.  There are other free one's out there, but they don't seem to be maintained or updated to analyze .NET 3.0 and up.  This one does! 

Neebly - Free IRC client written in .NET.  It's not open source to my knowledge, but it's free.  Writtin using WPF with a slick interface, love this tool! 

While this is a pretty sizable list, check back for more additions as I remember/discover others.

This is a mini-tutorial on how to add BlogEngine.NET 1.4.5 into an existing website.  Some people have expressed their troubles in taking on this task, thought I would post this to clear it up a bit.  It's actually not too hard.  I'm sure there are several ways to go about this, but I list the method that worked for me and a site that needed a blog integrated into it.  So, although you might do some things differently - this is what was required for my specific site. 

1. Create an App_Code Folder in your web app root dir

 

2. Create a BlogEngine SubDir under the App_Code Folder

 

3. Do the Same as above but with the App_Data folder

 

4. Create a subdir under your webroot titled 'blog' if you already have that dir, then name it whatever you want.  This tutorial assumes you don't and assumes that

you will be crated this dir and it will be initially empty and reserved only for BE.NET. 

 

5. Copy the BlogEngine.Web files into the 'blog' sub dir you just created.

 

6. Copy the App_Code contents to your website's App_Code/BlogEngine/ dir you created earlier

 

7. Copy the App_Data contents to your website's App_Data/BlogEngine/ dir you created earlier

 

8. Move the Sitemap and Web.Config to the root dir of your site.  I renamed the BE web.config to web.be.config before I copied it.

 

9. Copy/Merge over the Global.asax and Web.Config settings specific to BlogEngine.NET

 

10. Update the sitemap with the new URL/Path structure i.e. - ~/blog/ instead of just ~/

 

11. copy/merge the robots.txt to the root web dir...  update the path of to reflect the /blog/ path of BE.NET

 

12. Copy/Move/Merge the App_GlobalResources dir from under the ~/blog/ path to your web root dir

 

13. Open the file ~/blog/pages/settings.aspx.cs and go to line 262 in method BindCultures() and change the following line from: string path =

Server.MapPath(Util.AbsoluteWebRoot + "App_GlobalResources/"); to string path = Server.MapPath("~/App_GlobalResources/");

 

14. You can copy/move/merge/delete the ~/blog/error404.aspx file as well.  If you have your own, then you can just use that.  There may be a BE.NET setting in the web.config where you can set this.  Can't remember now. 

 

15. IF you haven't already done so, delete the app_code, app_data, app_GlobalResources and Bin directories from your ~/blog/ subdir

 

16. Add the BlogEngine.Core project to the Visual Studio Web Application Solution as an "Existing Project"

 

17. Build your project.  You will most likely get minor errors, I got a few path errors with the Extension Manager related files initially...

 

18. Fix whatever errors you have - I will not cover every error here, instead, I will focus on the larger and harder errors to fix.

 

19. One thing I did to speed things up (assuming you created an empty ~/blog/ dir in prior step) was to do a solution/project wide replace of "~/admin" to be converted to "~/blog/admin".  This gets rid of several trivial path errors.

 

20. I also did a search & replace on "~/widget" to "~/blog/widget" to move things along... 

 

21. do the smae for "~/pics" to "~/blog/pics"

 

22. do the same for "~/themes" to "~/blog/themes

 

23. Compile project. At this point, my web application project compiled without a problem ;)

But if you run your web app and attempt to load the blog via web browser you might see this error: 

"The file '/(your web dir here)/blogthemes/Standard/site.master' does not exist."

you might have to adjust the web.config "<add key="BlogEngine.VirtualPath" value="~/blog"/>"  from ~/blog to ~/blog/

You can tweak out your web.config BE.NET settings now and make appropriate adjustments as you would have if you installed BE.NET at the root of your web dir.  

 

Hope this helps some folks out there who needed to do this!