Developer Windows Box Tools

I recently needed to create my development environment from scratch and here is my (probably incomplete) list of tools I tend to install for may daily work and on a Windows box.

• PowerShell (if Windows XP) a Windows Shell done right
• CygWin what ever is missing in PowerShell, here it is
• IntelliJ since there is the community edition, there is no reason not to have it
• Krento fast access to the most used apps
• Launchy (if Windows XP)
• ClipX for hitory and batch processing Copy and Paste
• gVim sometimes if I need a second different text editor
• Notepad++ my preferred Text Editor
• Google Chrome (Beta) with Extensions
• FireFox with FireBug and other plugins
• Sysinternals Suite by Mark Russinovich
• Groovy mostly for writing unit tests
• Ruby just in case
• Scala
• WampServer makes it so easy to install Apache, mySQL, php
• Skype - sometimes I need it
• DropBox to easily share files between distributed computers
• Password Safe - how do you manage your passwords
• Java in different versions from 1.5 to 1.6
• Tomcat in different versions
• Maven
• Ant just in case there is a project that does not use Maven
• ThinkingRock for GTD

I know there is more. In follow up posts I will start to list plug-ins for different apps like Google Chrome, Firefox, IntelliJ, etc.

SVN Frontend and Monitor

I recently installed SVN-Monitor which is a front end to SVN which runs on top of TortoiseSVN. What I like about SVN-Monitor besides its user interface is the ability to manage and monitor SVN working copies spread over different folders in one single location and if needed to update them all with one single click.

SVN-Monitor lets you set up SVN event alerts which when fired can trigger different kind of actions like for example showing a bubble on your task bar with corresponding information to the event.