My Favourite free Software tools

Over the years, I have tried out a huge range of different tools for various aspects of software development, web design and general windows use. Many of the tools I have found have been free, which is always greatly appreciated, as I haven't always had a lot of cash to play with - as programmers, we don't have the glamorous, well paid lifestyle that people think - especially not here in the UK.  Gripe over - on to my favourite list of freeware tools. This is not an exhaustive list, but If you do any kind of development work on windows, or even Linux (some of these are cross platform), then I'm sure you will find them very useful.

Filezilla -  does everything I ever need an FTP program to do, and probably more.

Paint.NET- excellent graphic manipulation tool, with free plugins that do an awful lot that Photo shop does, and for a fraction (as in zero) of the cost. Shame about the appalling download sit

Foxit Reader - light weight PDF reader - unlike adobe reader, this is not bloatware. Its fast, uses minimal resources, and lets you read PDF files. What the hell else do you need?  jeez

Google Chrome - Chromes' developer tools are amazing. I use them all the time for analysing the HTML that is spewed out by Visual Studio. Having trouble with your CSS? - Chrome tools will allow you to disable/ enable individual style tags for any element in a page. This can be incredible for determining which part of your style sheet is misbehaving (programmer slang for shoddy code).

Teamviewer - need to take over a friends PC (or a customer in the paid version), then Teamviewer is your man. This baby can save an awful lot of driving.

Defraggler - great free disk defragging tool, with a nice visual interface, and some very useful SATA error reporting. This helped me to determine that my main drive was acting like a geriatric old codger and was about to buy the farm. I backed up my latest data pronto.

Spacesniffer - This is a tool that I recently came across while trying to work out why my hard drive was being mauled by some rogue software process. it requires no install, and it is very intuitive. You will quickly see which folders and files have become bloated - you can then deleted them without having to revert to windows explorer. It's almost Apple-esque in its "it just works" philosophy.

CCleaner - cleans the junk up on your machine. Not sure if this is still the best tool for the job, but it deserves a mention as I've used it for many years.

Virtual Clone Drive - If you are a developer, constantly installing and updating packages from ISO files, then this is the kiddie you need. right click on an ISO, mount it and bingo - its now your F: drive.

Notepad++ - for reading any kind of text file, and having it formatted in the programming language of your choice, this cant be beat (unless you know something better). Any hoo, I love notepad++ to death, and it has made my life so much easier at times. You dont always want to open PHP or javscript files in visual studio or netbeans for crumbs sakes.

Putty - has nothing to do with holding glass in window frames. Great for opening up a SSH  or telnet session to your remote server though. I used to use it for administering a red hat server with apache and tomcat server with no problems. groovy.

PADGen - if you sell or promote your software through shareware sites, then you need to create a PAD file. And for that, you need PADGen. PAD files drive me crazy - but this tool makes it just about bearable.

MySQL - yeah, I know. It's not really a tool. But, it's free - and contains great data manipulation tools for setting up a test or production server for all of your very important data. I'm a bit scared about the future of MySQl, with all the talk of NoSQL, XML storage, Amazon storage and god knows what else. Poor old Mysql is owned by the godfather of database companies - oracle, and I've got a feeling they aren't gonna be spending a lot on future development of this much loved platform in future. They are getting a bit of an ass kicking now that SAP have developed their own database system, that they claim makes oracle look like a dickensian scribe.

And finally - one of my own.  CodeSpark . This is a ASP.NET web form and code generation utility. It works by examining your existing database, and creating code and forms from the schema, that can be added to a new project (VB or C#), and compiled immediately !.  It really is a great tool, and I have used it extensively to rapidly create new database apps for clients.