Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie

Developer Tools and Resources

  • 18-09-2009 10:19am
    #1
    Registered Users Posts: 7,468 ✭✭✭


    Found something useful, then let us know.


«13

Comments

  • Registered Users Posts: 7,468 ✭✭✭Evil Phil


    Here's some of my toolkit

    Some good online resources


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 453 ✭✭nuttz


    jarFinder
    solve classpath problems quickly
    http://www.jarfinder.com/


  • Registered Users Posts: 40,055 ✭✭✭✭Sparks


    • Vim and particularly gVim with a half-dozen addons. That's my primary work environment, right there.
    • Gcc is my main compiler for C programming.
    • Make is, well, make :D
    • Artistic Style is a nice filter to run code through to ensure consistent formatting. It's a small thing, but small things count. And it can be fired from vim as well.
    • Boxes, also fired from vim, is handy for formatting some comments and other stuff.
    • Trac is my current ticket-tracking software. I've also tried (and bugfixed) Mantis and Bugzilla, but Trac is just more user-friendly, especially on smaller projects.
    • Mercurial for version control.
    • PgAdmin3 for working with Postgresql
    • MySQL Query Browser for most of my MySQL work (though MySQL Admin gets used a fair bit too)
    • PEAR and PECL for PHP libraries
    • XDebug for LAMP-stack debug work and DDD for debugging C/C++


  • Moderators, Music Moderators Posts: 1,481 Mod ✭✭✭✭satchmo


    Some resources more oriented towards graphics & game developers....
    • Real-Time Rendering - one of the best books out there, and a great resource for up-to-date rendering-related links. Their blog is regularly updated with good stuff too.
    • GameDevelopers.ie - a community for Irish game developers in Ireland and around the world.
    • A good graphing applet that I often use for plotting various functions.
    • nVidia's developer zone - full of good stuff, including full online copies of GPU Gems 1, 2 and 3. Their Photoshop DDS plugin is especially useful.
    • AMD developer central - similarly good resources, but for AMD chips and ATI GPUs. Home of handy tools like RenderMonkey and GPU MeshMapper.
    • Gamasutra - home of Game Developer magazine and various good online articles. The post mortems are always a good read.
    • GameDev.net - probably the biggest indie game developer community site... the forums are a good resource for finding answers to problems you're having (someone else has probably had the same problem)
    • DevMaster.net - Similar to GDnet but smaller.
    • Valve, Insomniac and Crytek all have great pages collecting various presentations and publications given at conferences about their work. Insomniac's is especially good, going above and beyond the usual GDC presentations.
    • And finally xkcd, just because it's awesome.


  • Registered Users Posts: 40,055 ✭✭✭✭Sparks


    satchmo wrote: »
    • And finally xkcd, just because it's awesome.
    Amen to that. I keep about forty-odd webcomics in my bookmarks, because some days, they're all that stand between me, a project manager, and a murder conviction...

    Oh, and add in VirtualBox because it's so bloody useful - testing in IE6 from Linux, running sandboxed LAMP servers, the works. Virtualisation (be it VirtualBox, VMware or whatever) is an immensely useful tool.


  • Advertisement
  • Registered Users Posts: 515 ✭✭✭NeverSayDie


    I've been using the Regex Coach for years as quick little tool to debug/design regex's, very handy;
    http://weitz.de/regex-coach/

    Post from Scott Hanselman a few months back, listing a bunch of utilities and developer tools he uses, some good stuff in there;
    http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2009UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolListForWindows.aspx

    On a .NET specific note, if you're P/Invoking back to the Win32 and other APIs, this site is very useful for getting calling profiles;
    http://pinvoke.net/

    Also re MS tech, they have a very handy Web Platform Installer, for getting set up with a Windows development environment in a hurry - Visual Studio, IIS, SQL, ASP.NET or PHP, etc. Also lets you grab various open source apps - wikis, blogs, forums, etc.
    http://www.microsoft.com/web/Downloads/platform.aspx

    If you want to get started/get further with ASP.NET development, lots of video tutorials and other resources here;
    http://www.asp.net/

    The MSDN Magazine tends to have some pretty interesting stuff, plus some in-depth material;
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/default.aspx

    Back when I worked with Perl, I used to use a text editor called Context, was simple but good. It's still going, AFAIK;
    http://www.contexteditor.org/

    These days as a lightweight/backup text editor I've been using Notepad++, pretty nice app. Does code folding, search across files, syntax highlighting and various other handy tricks.
    http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm


  • Registered Users Posts: 981 ✭✭✭fasty


    satchmo wrote: »
    Some resources more oriented towards graphics & game developers....

    <snip>

    Real Time Collision Detection - Great book and the author has a pretty amusing blog. His rants about design patterns and C++ are amusing to say the least.

    Lockless Programming Considerations for Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows


  • Registered Users Posts: 981 ✭✭✭fasty


    LINQPad - Great for testing LINQ like you would SQL.

    .Net Reflector - Browse the code in .Net assemblies. Very useful little tool.


  • Registered Users Posts: 7,182 ✭✭✭Genghiz Cohen


    3rd level student?
    Want professional tools?
    DreamSpark
    Thank you Microsoft.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 259 ✭✭weiss


    • Mingw GNU toolchain for windows - C/C++
    • JWASM x86 PE/ELF compatible assembler
    • Codeblocks IDE - free IDE
    • Qemu - great if you wanna program MIPS, PowerPC, ARM, x64 architectures without hardware
    • ResEdit - free resource editor


  • Advertisement
  • Moderators, Music Moderators Posts: 1,481 Mod ✭✭✭✭satchmo


    Oh and how could I forget RockScroll, one of the best Visual Studio plugins out there. The double-click highlighting is so handy... almost as handy as Visual Assist (sorely-needed intellisense replacement), but free.


  • Registered Users Posts: 2,781 ✭✭✭amen




  • Registered Users Posts: 1,529 ✭✭✭zynaps


    A little surprised nobody has mentioned AutoIt yet - a ridiculously useful scripting language for Windows which focuses on GUI automation, but is good for lots of other things too - I only wish there was a similar thing for OS X (AppleScript doesn't really suffice). The editor of choice in their release bundles is SciTE, which seems very nice in its own right, but since I'm on a Mac at home I use Aquamacs Emacs (and vi for quickie jobs on the command line).

    Process Explorer and... well, actually all of the Sysinternals utility suite.

    TortoiseSVN is a nice shell extension for versioning your files with Subversion repositories.


  • Registered Users Posts: 40,055 ✭✭✭✭Sparks


    zynaps wrote: »
    TortoiseSVN is a nice shell extension for versioning your files with Subversion repositories.
    And there's also TortoiseHG which does the same thing for Mercurial repositories.


  • Registered Users Posts: 442 ✭✭bothyhead


    zynaps wrote: »
    Process Explorer and... well, actually all of the Sysinternals utility suite.

    +1

    Process Explorer, Process Monitor and Autoruns should be standard on all PCs


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 8,016 ✭✭✭CreepingDeath


    zynaps wrote: »
    TortoiseSVN is a nice shell extension for versioning your files with Subversion repositories.

    +1 On TortoiseSVN but you need to tweak it to exclude caching everything other than your versioned files. Otherwise it's badly affects your PC's performance.
    zynaps wrote: »
    Process Explorer and... well, actually all of the Sysinternals utility suite.

    +1 Especially TCPView for viewing open network connections.


    HTMLKit
    is a good HTML editor. (free)

    Apache Ant - great Java build system, also XMLTask which is a powerful Ant task to alter XML files via XPath expressions.

    Tora - a free alternative to the commercial "Toad" ( Oracle database browser )

    GSpot - displays the video & audio codec information for video files

    Canoo - powerful automated test system for web based applications.

    BouncyCastle - open source security libraries for java


  • Registered Users Posts: 1,529 ✭✭✭zynaps


    Tora - a free alternative to the commercial "Toad" ( Oracle database browser )
    Nice, looks like it's cross-platform too, with binaries for Windows/OS X/Linux :)


  • Registered Users Posts: 825 ✭✭✭3fullback


    • Paint One of the greatest pieces of software for a developer.
    Useful tools from drawing squares to circles. Plus includes a ABC editor :D


  • Registered Users Posts: 171 ✭✭conorcan2


    FireBug - A plugin for Firefox, IE (perhaps Chrome?), essential in a web developers toolbox for debugging and analyzing web pages.

    NetBeans - An IDE that's free. I use it for PHP coding but there's a wide range of languages it can be used for.

    DropBox - File storage in the cloud. Useful if you're hopping around internet cafes or travelling.

    XAMPP - Web server setup. Easily setup Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, useful for developing web apps on your localhost.

    Snippely - Keep track of your code snippets.


  • Registered Users Posts: 5,246 ✭✭✭conor.hogan.2


    May seem obvious but

    apples site for objective-c etc and microsoft for c# etc.


  • Advertisement
  • Registered Users Posts: 15,065 ✭✭✭✭Malice


    I've been using Resharper daily since March 2010 and I can't recommend it highly enough. If you're working in .NET, grab the demo and check it out for yourself. The most useful features for me are the context actions, the integrated unit testing and the code completion. There is a big list of features available here.

    I also recommend Paint.NET for quick graphics editing on Windows.


  • Registered Users Posts: 196 ✭✭AnonymousPrime




  • Registered Users Posts: 435 ✭✭doopa


    Safari books is amazing if you have access to it. Uni students probably will for example.

    http://safaribooksonline.com/Corporate/Index/

    Worth checking in the uni library for. Basically its all the O'Reilly (and more) books in a searchable format.

    From their site: Safari Books Online has the most extensive collection of important technology, creative, business and management books from the world's most trusted Authors and Publishers, like O'Reilly Media, John Wiley & Sons, Addison-Wesley, Peachpit Press, Adobe Press, Apress, Manning and many more.


  • Registered Users Posts: 14 blahound


    DrJava http://www.drjava.org/

    Free java IDE that runs from a USB stick


  • Registered Users Posts: 1,529 ✭✭✭zynaps


    blahound wrote: »
    DrJava http://www.drjava.org/

    Free java IDE that runs from a USB stick
    That interactions pane is a nice touch, like the REPL available in many other languages (Lisp, Ruby, Lua, Python etc).


  • Registered Users Posts: 1,829 ✭✭✭lil_lisa


    I'm preparing for an interview and came across this article:

    Intro to Object Oriented Programming Concepts

    A nice run down for anyone starting out.


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,945 ✭✭✭Anima


    Some audio signal processing links if anyone is interested.

    Online books by Julius Smith -- This guy has put up a number of his books online. Including all about the discrete Fourier transform as well as Digital Filters. His site in general is fantastic.

    Home Page
    Digital Filters
    Discrete Fourier Transform

    Digital Audio FX -- They have a conference every year where people submit papers and present new algorithms for audio. You can browse through each years papers on the site.

    DSP book - Another online one, seems to be a bit more general but can be good to get an idea of things.

    MusicDSP Source Code -- This site has lots of source code (C, C++) for various different audio algorithms like filters, oscillators and stuff like that. Can be very handy.


  • Registered Users Posts: 428 ✭✭Joneser


    To add to the post about DSP above, this is also a great reference: http://www.dspguide.com/pdfbook.htm . If a mod wants to add my link to the one above I don't mind, it's probably best to have them together in the 1 post.


  • Registered Users Posts: 397 ✭✭lukegjpotter


    For Objective-C There's Apple's developer resources, but iTunesU has a really good "Developing for iOS" video lecture series from the Stanford University Semester 1 2010.


  • Advertisement
  • Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators Posts: 8,781 Mod ✭✭✭✭mewso


    I'm sure most Visual Studio users will have heard of NuGet but if you haven't then install it asap. It's an extremely useful way of installing third party tools like nUnit, nHibernate, StructureMap and so on. It can be installed from within Visual Studio by browsing add-ins and can also be installed on the express editions.

    Secondly if you want to host your own NuGet repository I use this powershell script to populate a folder on our development server on a regular basis. I can then use this local folder as a repository. (\\web-dev\team\Development Tools\nuGetRepository in the script below is what you would need to change for your own folder)
    # --- settings ---
    $feedUrlBase = "http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669"
    # the rest will be params when converting to funclet
    $latest = $true
    $overwrite = $false
    $top = 500 #use $top = $null to grab all
    $destinationDirectory = "\\web-dev\team\Development Tools\nuGetRepository"
    # --- locals ---
    $webClient = New-Object System.Net.WebClient
    # --- functions ---
    # download entries on a page, recursively called for page continuations
    function DownloadEntries {
     param ([string]$feedUrl)
     $feed = [xml]$webClient.DownloadString($feedUrl)
     $entries = $feed | select -ExpandProperty feed | select -ExpandProperty entry
     $progress = 0
                 
     foreach ($entry in $entries) {
        $url = $entry.content.src
        $fileName = $entry.properties.id + "." + $entry.properties.version + ".nupkg"
        $saveFileName = join-path $destinationDirectory $fileName
        $pagepercent = ((++$progress)/$entries.Length*100)
        if ((-not $overwrite) -and (Test-Path -path $saveFileName))
        {
            write-progress -activity "$fileName already downloaded" -status "$pagepercent% of current page complete" -percentcomplete $pagepercent
            continue
        }
        write-progress -activity "Downloading $fileName" -status "$pagepercent% of current page complete" -percentcomplete $pagepercent
        $webClient.DownloadFile($url, $saveFileName)
      }
      $link = $feed.feed.link | where { $_.rel.startsWith("next") } | select href
      if ($link -ne $null) {
        # if using a paged url with a $skiptoken like
        # http:// ... /Packages?$skiptoken='EnyimMemcached-log4net','2.7'
        # remember that you need to escape the $ in powershell with `
        $feedUrl = $link.href
        DownloadEntries $feedUrl
      }
    } 
    # the NuGet feed uses a fwlink which redirects
    # using this to follow the redirect
    function GetPackageUrl {
     param ([string]$feedUrlBase)
     $resp = [xml]$webClient.DownloadString($feedUrlBase)
     return $resp.service.GetAttribute("xml:base")
    }
    # --- do the actual work ---
    # if dest dir doesn't exist, create it
    if (!(Test-Path -path $destinationDirectory)) { New-Item $destinationDirectory -type directory }
    # set up feed URL
    $serviceBase = GetPackageUrl($feedUrlBase)
    $feedUrl = $serviceBase + "Packages"
    if($latest) {
        $feedUrl = $feedUrl + "?`$filter=IsLatestVersion eq true"
        if($top -ne $null) {
            $feedUrl = $feedUrl + "&`$orderby=DownloadCount desc&`$top=$top"
        }
    }
    DownloadEntries $feedUrl
    


Advertisement