My Favorite Software

As of march 14th 2011, my favorite software (besides from Simple DNS Plus) is:

Software Development:

• Visual Basic.NET / Visual Studio 2010 - http://www.microsoft.com/vstudio 
  Awesome language and IDE. 
  
• Help & Manual - http://www.helpandmanual.com
  Great tool for authoring software help files and documentation.
  
• Advanced Installer - http://www.caphyon.com
  Nice MSI installer builder at a reasonable price.
  Easily beats Wyse and InstallShield both on features and price.
  
• Visual Build Professional - http://www.kinook.com
  Great tool for automating software builds. This just saves us so much time.
  
• Smart Paster - see this blog post
  Paste text from the Windows clipboard into the Visual Studio source code editor formatted as a comment, quoted string, or string builder code.

Software testing / optimizing:

• VMware Workstation - http://www.vmware.com
  Amazing virtual machine software. Can't imagine testing software without it.
  
• Reflector - http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/
  Fantastic tool for finding out what the .NET compilers actually do to your code.
  
• Hexago / go6 client - http://www.go6.net
  Great for testing IPv6 Internet applications when your ISP doesn't offer IPv6 yet.
  
• Fiddler - https://www.fiddler2.com
  Wonderful for testing web-sites and web APIs.

Photography / graphics:

• Adobe Photoshop CS5
  Way too expensive, but there's just no getting around this software.
  
• Adobe Lightroom
  Amazing for organizing photos and working with raw photo files.
  
• FastPictureViewer - http://www.fastpictureviewer.com
  Great for quickly viewing and evaluating large sets of photos - raw or jpeg. 
  
• Axialis Icon Workshop -http://www.axialis.com
  Great for converting/creating Vista ready icons.
  
• Windows Clippings - http://windowclippings.com
  Great for making screen shots for documentation etc.

Server software:

• blogengine.net - http://www.dotnetblogengine.net
  The software running this blog – works nicely with Windows Live Writer (see above).
  
• Backup for Workgroups - http://www.backup-for-workgroups.com
  Nice software for making backups to a remote server.
  Backs up our web-server every night.

Desktop software / Utilities:

• Windows Live Writer - http://get.live.com/writer/overview
  Nice software to write blogs - especially like the word style squiggly-line spell-checking.  
  
• Super FDisk - http://www.ptdd.com/manual2.htm
  Great free hard disk partitioning tool. Comes as ISO file for burning bootable CD.
  See Super FDisk to the rescue 
  
• SyncBackSE - http://www.2brightsparks.com 
  For synchronizing folders and uploading websites.
  
• KeePass Password Safe - http://keepass.info/
  Great (free) program for storing passwords.
  
• DropBox - http://www.dropbox.com
  Great for synchronizing and sharing files between different computers/devices over the Internet.
  
• CutePDF Professional - http://www.cutepdf.com
  I use it for scanning and converting all kinds of documents into PDF. 
  
• Power ISO - http://www.poweriso.com
  Mounts .iso files as a local drive with its own drive letter etc.
  
• inSSIDer - http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider/
  Monitor and troubleshoot wireless LANs.

Components:

• DotNetOpenID - http://code.google.com/p/dotnetopenid/
  Add OpenID login to your ASP.NET web-sites.
  
• SandDock - http://www.divelements.co.uk
  Great .NET windows docking component that actually works on all platforms including 64 bit.
  
• InnovaStudio WYSIWYG Editor – http://www.InnovaStudio.com
  HTML editor component for web-sites.
  
• DynamicPDF - http://www.dynamicpdf.com
  Great for creating PDF documents on the fly.
  We primarily use it for automatic on-line invoice creation.

I have tried many different tools in all these categories over the years, and I can highly recommend all of the above over any competitors that I know of.
Of course if you know of any better alternatives please do let me know and I might reconsider.