Useful software

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  • Visual Assist makes Visual Studio a pleasure to use. I don't know how anyone uses Visual Studio without Visual Assist for C++, together they are almost as good as Eclipse is for Java programming. It's hard to believe that the refactoring and navigation features it offers are not a standard part of Microsoft's IDE. See the Visual Assist page for more information.
  • Perforce is the best version control system I've come across. It's free for personal use too, and integrates with Visual Studio for convenience. See the Perforce page for more info.
  • Open Command Window Here is a Windows Explorer right-click extension for XP that opens a command window with the current working directory set to the highlighted folder. Saves a lot of typing. n.b. This is not needed in Windows 7 as holding shift before right-clicking in explorer displays this option (don't ask me why it's not there by default).
  • RealVNC free edition is extremely handy for taking control of PCs on you home network remotely. The free edition does not support encryption, so you may not want to use it to connect to other machines over the internet.
  • TreeSize Free adds a command to the Windows Explorer context menu to allow you to get the breakdown of drive and folder usage in terms of file and directory sizes. Where has all my space gone!?
  • FileMon for Windows is great to inspect file accesses on your machine. For example finding out the location of a dll used by an executable, or just what your PC is doing when the hard-disk indicator won't stop flashing! It is now part of Process Monitor, which is a whole suite of free system monitoring tools.
  • UltraEdit is a great fully featured text/hex editor.
  • XML Notepad is handy for editing XML documents in a tree-like fashion, rather than wearing yourself out deciphering tags and elements by eye in large documents.
  • KeyTweak lets you remap keys on the keyboard. I like to map the right alt key to left alt so I have an alt and a ctrl key for each hand when coding.
  • Eraser takes a file you want don't want anyone to ever recover from your hard drive and overwrites it multiple times with garbage.
  • Synergy lets you share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers, even if they are running different operating systems. When the mouse leaves the side of one computers display it reappears on the next!
  • Cppcheck is a free static code analysis tool. Helps you find difficult to spot bugs such as int a[ 2 ]; a[ 2 ] = 0;
  • "UnitTest++ is a lightweight unit testing framework for C++.". A good link to a page on testing floating point numbers for equality in there too.
  • "RockScroll extends the scrollbar in Visual Studio to show a syntax highlighted thumbnail view of your source." A handy feature is that you can double click a word in your source file and it highlights all matches in red in the scroll bar for easy location. 100 mile view also draws your attention to patterns in your code that can lead to useful refactors.
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