It's amazing how many free tools there are available on the Web these days, that are as good as, or often better than their commercial rivals. Some of the most useful ones I've found to date are as follows :
Development
Not everyone needs the full version of Visual Studio professional, particularly if you are a sole developer or part of a small team. Microsoft make a Visual Studio Express version, which has everything in Visual Studio Professional minus a few enterprise features. Available languages are vb.net, c#, c++ and j# as well as a web development edition.
If you dont like the Microsoft way of the world, or fancy developing for multiple platforms, have a look at Eclipse, which is a free development environment which has been created by giants such as Borland, IBM and Red Hat to challenge Microsofts dominance. It's completely free, and supports a huge list of languages including Java, C, C++ and PHP.
Finally, for hobbyists there is the excellent phrogram, which is one of the quickest languages to develop in on the market, as well as being great for beginners to learn. Soon to be updated and rebranded as phrogram.
Database tools
Microsoft now make a free edition of it's popular database available, called SQL Server Express edition, and it's not badly restricted unlike previous freebies. It is limited to 1Gb of RAM and a 4Gb database size, which is plenty for small developers. Reporting Services, which is an excellent report generator is included.
MySQL has made great progress over the last few years, and is even producing the database for many SAP implementations, so is becoming pretty mainstream. With good SQL support, and being totally free its as good as it gets!
Troubleshooting
Got programs that wont work, and you cant figure out what the problem is? Turn to the excellent sysinternals site and download regmon and filemon. When you run them, they record everything that is happening in the registry and filesystem in real time, which is really useful to find out what is really happening.
Other great tools on sysinternals include PSTOOLS, which allow you to do all sorts of cool things like shut computers down remotely, or manage individual processes.
Graphics Tools
The GIMP is a free graphical tool that runs on Windows and Linux that is a bit like Photoshop, but totally free. Also worth looking at in the Windows world is Paint.NET which is a powerful image editor based on the dotnet framework being developed by Washington State University. Finally for simple image viewing and simple photo touchups (like redeye removal), IrfanView cannot be beaten.
Security
Last, but certainly not least, there are a huge number of security tools out there. For keeping multiple Windows computers up to date with the latest patches I recommend looking at WSUS from Microsoft, which is a central management console for patching.
Nessus is a security scanner, often used by hackers. Run it yourself to check your own network for vunrabilities, and I guarentee you will get some surprises. Now available for Windows, as well as the original Linux version.
For intrusion detection, take a look at Snort and probably run Base as well to report on the Snort logs. This keeps a record of suspicious activity on your network which you can use to track down intruders. Also available on Windows and Linux.
These are just a few of my favorites, there are many 1000's more out there. Let me know if you have any favorites you think should be on the list.
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3 comments:
Another completely free tool that I find really useful is WinMerge. It's primarily for comparing the contents of two text files to see where the differences are (especially useful if you have been editing an html web page and want to know what changed since you last made a backup or copy). However, it also has another trick up it's sleeve. This tool also lets you compare the contents of entire folders (including all sub-folders) to see whether or not there are files that have changed, and whether new files have been added.
Thanks Ro - got a bit more time on your hands now you have "retired"? ;)
Thanks Mart.
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