What's this all about

My intention is that this is an occasional blog where I put code snippets techniques etc as I come across them in the hope they will be useful for others.

For some more background I use the following software

Visual Studio (2017) - as I have an msdn subscription I can take full advantage of this version and I already like it more then previous versions, for me, so far it's been more stable

NCrunch - Fantastic Continuous testing tool, worth every penny and if you have access to a server with spare capacity it can make use of that too.

Resharper Surely this needs no explanation other than to say that if you have the all singing all dancing version then it can do some of the same things that NCrunch does as well as all the rest of its magic

ServiceStack Calling it an awesome framework for creating web services, massively undersells it. I expect much of this blog will be related to this in one way or another.


VS Code  This has become my go to text editor, not forgetting the insiders edition which can be installed alongside. Microsoft at it's finest again.

Notepad++ A long standing favourite, though I find myself using it less now that I have VS code

Mercurial I chose this over Git and others some time ago and still have no compelling reason to change, it does everything I want, I also find it has less of a steep learning curve than Git which makes it easier to persuade non developers to use it

TortoiseHG One of the best Gui's for Mercurial, I still have found nothing comparable for Git, just a shame that it doesn't have HGFlow integration

SourceTree Nice looking Mercurial/Git gui but I use it mostly for the HGFlow integration

YouTrack Jetbrains issue tracker. Love the integration with version control and CI

UpSource Jetbrains Code review tool. Love the integration with issue tracking and CI

TeamCity Jetbrains CI server, love the integration with the issue tracker and Code review and slack

Slack Team messaging hub of choice

OneNote As I have a surfacebook I find this a really useful tool

Browsers

Chrome, Chrome Canary, FireFox Developer, FireFox nightly, IE11. I can't include Edge as it just hangs every time I try to use it.



On the hardware side I have a Macbook Pro and a SurfaceBook Pro. For anyone who is interested the Macbook is permanently sitting in my bag (sorry Apple fans). Both are fantastic bits of kit, but for me overall the Surfacebook wins out.