06 November 2013

The soul of a new dev box

The dev box isn't new, really: just adding a 256 GB SSD for the primary drive and repaving it.

I made a list of all the things I need to install to get back to a working environment. Yes, the original was backed up, but I'm moving to Windows 8.1, so it's a full remodel.

  • Windows 8.1 Pro (I've avoided 8 up until now: we'll see...)
  • Google Chrome
  • Microsoft Security Essentials (corporate requirement)
  • Virtual CloneDrive (for mounting ISOs)
  • Visual Studio 2008 (yes,we still have code built with this)
  • Windows SDK 7.1 (we're tied to this specific SDK at the moment)
  • Visual Studio 2010
  • Visual Studio 2012
  • Visual Studio 2013 (some new code is being written in this, for no good reason I know)
  • Windows SDK 8.1 (for WinDbg, Application Verifier, etc.)
  • Office 2013 (I'm primarily working on Exchange 2013 restore at the moment)
  • Subversion 1.7 (haven't switched to 1.8 yet, mostly because this is for older products)
  • TortoiseSVN 1.7
  • git (I get it now, and I love it: it's a floor polish *and* a salad dressing)
  • Atlassian SourceTree (it's always useful to have a GUI when you go spelunking)
  • Notepad++ (I do more with vi in git's bash shell these days, but I still use it for searching through huge log files)
  • MarkdownPad 2 (all my personal notes are in Markdown, including the wiki on my phone)
  • Dropbox (all my ebooks and other documents are here)
  • Trillian (we have to use Skype, and it got even more annoying after Microsoft took over)
  • Code Collaborator (mostly for old code: most code reviews these days are done by repository owners via pull requests)
  • Event Log Explorer (if you have to search and filter event logs, this is a great tool)
  • Foxit Reader (because I hate Adobe Reader)
  • Visual Assist X (kinda like ReSharper for C++)
  • JetBrains ReSharper (Best. Tool. Ever.)
  • JetBrains dotPeek (instead of Reflector)
  • DisplayFusion (for multiple monitors, which I now hate: I'd rather have a single 27" or 20" display)
  • S3 Browser (all our support packages - log files, event logs, etc. - wind up on S3 as Zip files: this is useful for retrieving them)
  • VMware vSphere Client (we have a lot of test VMs running on ESXi)
  • VMware Workstation (we have a lot of test VMs running on our dev boxes too)
 
At home, I'm turning into an occasional system administrator: too many devices on what used to be *my* network alone. I'm setting up a server for media (mostly photos) and local backups and gradually thinning the herd (I'm down to only *cough* three notebooks, not including the one with the bad screen sitting under my desk, but that number will be one in a couple of weeks).