.Net Reflector:
Comparing the different versions of the same application .Net dlls is not less than a nightmare. Sometimes we need to compare the different versions of the .Net dlls to fix the problem in the production environment. Also, we need to see the content of the .Net dll as well. Suppose if you have realized that some old .Net dlls in production environment have been changed unknowingly and causing the problem and you don’t have source code( .cs files) for production environment because dll in your development environment is different and then you are stuck up. Now you would like to know what code have been changed in new dlls which is causing the problem.
Fortunately, we have Reflector tool for .Net by Lutz Roeder. It is excellent and easy to use tool. Reflector is the class browser, explorer, analyzer and documentation viewer allows to easily view, navigate, search, decompile and analyze .NET assemblies in C#, Visual Basic and IL dissembler. Best part of Reflector is its ability to save functions and methods stored in the assembly. It helps you to compare the actual source code between 2 different .Net dlls and help you to pinpoint the actual problem.
HttpWatch:
Imagine you are doing regression testing on your web site and there is some problem occur on your website. But your problem is you don’t know which page is causing the problem. We have Httpwatch tool to help us to monitor the activity of all the pages of the web site. It show you list of all the pages in the order of their processing. It help you to determine easily what page request has been failed, It also tell you the name of the page causing the problem with error code. It will help to fix the problem in integration testing where you have no idea about order of processing of the web pages.
HttpWatch is an HTTP viewer and debugger that integrates with Internet Explorer to provide seamless HTTP and HTTPS monitoring without leaving the browser window. Please note that advance version of this tool is not free.
http://www.httpwatch.com/download/
Araxis Merge:
Araxis Merge is an excellent tool for visual file comparison (diff), merging and folder synchronization application from Araxis. Use it to compare and merge source code, web pages and other text files with native application performance. Compare images and binary files. Synchronize folders. Perform code reviews and audits. Work with source hierarchies containing thousands of files.
http://www.araxis.com/merge/index.html.
Irfan View:
Sometime we have lable in images file, if you need to change the label, it means you need to change the label in the image file which could be .jpg, gif etc. You can windows paint application to do that. But it is not very efficient and changes the color of the images.
We have Irfan View application to resolve that issue. IrfanView is a small, compact, very fast graphic viewer. It supports several types of files formats like gif, jpg, tif etc. It allow you to edit the picture easily without losing the actual color of the picture. It has many other features like support multiple languages, has thumbnail preview option.
You can download and look at IrfanView at the following link: http://www.irfanview.com/
Squirrel:
If you are oracle developer, you must be familiar with Toad and Sql Developer application. But if you are .Net Developer and working on As400/DB2 database as back end. You need special application to see database schema, database objects and contents, executing test sql statement using As400 navigation series or Squirel. Squirrel is an open source application called Squirrel SQL Client that provides an easy-to-use interface to DB2 UDB as well as a number of other vendor databases like Oracle and SQL Server etc. It will allow you to view the structure of a JDBC compliant database, browse the data in tables, issue SQL commands etc, If your job requires you to interface with many different databases in the course of a day, this may be the tool for you.
You can learn more about it at
http://squirrel-sql.sourceforge.net/kulvir/tutorial.html
You can download it from:
http://squirrel-sql.sourceforge.net/
I have personally used all of the above tools for my projects. I am sure those tools will be very handy if you need them for fixing different problems.
