Shiny tools and magpie programmers

I was reading this post where Jeff Atwood complained about too many shiny tools that only waste our time and of which there are so many that the whole shining thing becomes old.

Of course, I went to all the links for tools in the post that I could find, and then some. I will probably finish reading it after I try them all :)

Here are my refinements on the lists that I've accessed, specific with .NET programming in mind and free tools:

• Nregex.com - nice site that tests your regular expressions online and let's you explore the results. Unfortunately it has no profiling or at least a display of how long it took to match your text
• PowerShell - Great tool once you get to know it. It comes complete with blog, SDK and Community Extensions
• PowerTab - adds Tab expansion in PowerShell
• Lutz Roeder's Reflector - the .NET decompiler and its many add-ons
• Highlight - a tool to format and colorize source code for any flavour of operating system and output file format.

There are a lot more, but I am lazy and I don't find the use for many of them, but you might. Here is Scott Hanselman's list of developer tools from which I am quite amazed he excluded ReSharper, my favourite Visual Studio addon.