Buildmaster Toolkit

Application virtualization with xenocode

Application is the future of virtualization. Xenocode allows you to package up an application and deploy it in a virtaul exe to run anywhere, (anywhere on windows). I came across it when I wanted to create a portable application using the ,net framework. Xenocode is amazing. It allowed me to package up a winform application written in C# to produce a stand alone exe that could run on any windows... Read more »

Subversion

Subversion is our prefered tool for version control. With the latest version you have merge tracking and can compare history of word and excel documents, (when using the tortisesvn client). With this new functionality I can see it being our document management system as well. It is fast, easy to set up and transactional, (commits all your changes or none at all unlike pvcs). As a added bonus it... Read more »

Beyond Compare

In any serious development project you generally have at least two branches, (production support and development), of the code being worked on at once.  Branching and merging can become a real pain.  We use subversion and tortoise svn as out version control software that handles a lot of cases.  Sometimes the tortoise merge tool is not up to the task or developers just prefer the extra functionality... Read more »

Ghostzilla

Have you ever wanted to be looking at something on the web that you do not have anyone walking past to see what it is ? Or do you want a browser always integrated with the application you are running ? Ghostzilla is a browser that integrates with the application window you are currently working on. As soon as you move the cursor away from the window the browser is hidden. Ghostzilla has heaps of... Read more »

Gnuwin32

Windows has always lacked all those nice little tools that unix people take for granted.  I am always using commands like tail -f to display log files, grep to search for a string, ls for listing files and the list goes on.  Download the following port of these legendary unix tools and add them to your path.  It is inevitable that linux will become the dominant os over the coming years so you might... Read more »

ApexScript

We have been a big fan of the apexsql family of tools for sql server.  They are one of the core tools we get management to buy when we are doing a sql server project.  ApexScript is a tool that can script a database schema and or data out to several formats.  It has been very useful for us when we have the configuration of a vendor application that is configured through a ui and stored in a database. ... Read more »

Autohotkey

Want to automate a third party app that does not supply a command line interface or just create some keyboard shortcuts then you must try autohotkey. We originally came across this tool when creating a build and deployment process for microsoft crm. The problem we had was that there were a lot of gui wizards of different quality to run when you upgrade between environments or refreshing a developers... Read more »

Textpad

In the financial industry you deal with a lot of flat positional or delimited files. Not many places have been able to make the leap to xml and messaging. So there is not a day goes buy where I have the need for a good text editor. Some of the cool features I find in textpad are Portable - runs on a usb key Opens large files quickly and does not seam to suffer that much in performance as the files... Read more »

TiddlyWiki

Wiki’s have been around for a while. We use screwturn wiki for our internal development team but having a personal wiki is also very handy. What about if you could have your own personal wiki on a USB key and take it with you. Tiddly wiki is really cool. It uses html, css and javascript to give you a personal wiki on a stick. You can also host your tiddlywiki at http://www.tiddlyspot.com http://www.tiddlywiki.com/ Also... Read more »

Psexec

What a great tool. As part of our deployment process we often want to run a processes on a remote server. An example might be running a batch file, iisreset, start and stop services etc. With psexec you can be in a command shell on computer A and run a command on computer B. Note you need administrator privileges, (which we think the person doing a deployment to an environment should always have),... Read more »