Albeit somewhat later than a week since my last post, due to work requirements and moving this site to a new cloud hosting company, here’s the second post in the recommended series on software for software developers.
Downloadable tools for software development
Visual Studio – powerful integrated software development environment. Heavy-weight with massive complexity and functionality, yet the community edition is free. Downloadable project templates and git integration make it relatively easy to get started, yet could be overwhelming with all the options and controls. Will take a significant amount of time to download, install and configure, so be prepared.
Sublime Text – simple and very usable text editor with syntax highlighting. Perfect for javascript development, creating and editing XML, HTML and CSS. Handily opens an entire folder and sub-folders in a navigable side-bar. Plenty of useful language specific plugins that came bundled with my install, so you shouldn’t need to do anything. To check what plugins you have you can click Preferences > Browse Packages. There will be a folder for each of the numerous languages supported.
Downloadable software utilities
Fiddler – logs, inspects and replays HTTP request and response data. This is especially useful if you’re debugging or developing web-services, and can also be useful for security auditing and request manipulation.
TeamViewer – remote access for Mac and Windows (free for non-commercial use).
Online software utilities
ip2location – get some information about the location of an IP address.
UserAgentString – determine the browser, version and operating system for a request.
CodeConverter – imperfect but relatively workable conversions between C# and Visual Basic.
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