Recommendations
This page contains recommendations for applications and tools, favouring free and Open Source alternatives.
Development Staples
- Git for Windows
- NodeJS
Editors
- LINQPad
- Visual Studio Code
Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
- Visual Studio + JetBrains ReSharper
- JetBrains Rider
- IntelliJ IDEA
- Tizen Studio
- Visual Studio Code
Profiling & Debugging
- JetBrains dotTrace
- JetBrains dotPeek
- JetBrains dotMemory
- Debug Diagnostics
- MSBuild Structured Log Viewer
- PerfView
Testing
- JetBrains dotCover
Misc Development
- RegExr is an online tool to learn, build, & test Regular Expressions
- CyberChef “The Cyber Swiss Army Knife - a web app for encryption, encoding, compression and data analysis”
Visual Studio Code
Shell and terminal
- Windows Terminal + PowerShell Core
Browsers & Internet
- Mozilla Firefox
YouTube-DLYT-DLP (Fork of YouTube DL)choco install yt-dlp- Extract audio as mp3:
yt-dlp <url> -x --audio-format mp3 - Show available formats:
-F - Download specific format:
-f <formatcode>
Security & Password Management
- Microsoft Authenticator
- Firefox Lockwise
Design & Creative
| Application | Company | License | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Affinity Designer | Serif | Proprietary, one-time purchase. Free trial. | Vector and raster for drawing and illustration. Alternative to Adobe Illustrator. |
| Affinity Photo | Serif | Proprietary, one-time purchase. Free trial. | Photography and raster graphics. Alternative to Adobe Photoshop. |
| Affinity Publisher | Serif | Proprietary, one-time purchase. Free trial. | Print & web layouts and design |
| Clip Studio Paint (formerly Manga Studio) | |||
| Krita | |||
| MediBang | |||
| Paint.NET | |||
| Inkspace | |||
| Blender | |||
| Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve | |||
| GIMP | |||
| Paint Tool Sai |
General
7-Zip
Araxis Merge
GitKraken
Chrome Remote Desktop
Discord
Docker Desktop
Voidtools Everything
Git for Windows
KeePassXC
Libby
NodeJS
OBS Studio
Streamlabs OBS
VB Audio Voicemeeter & Voicemeeter Banana
OpenSSL
OpenVPN Connect
Parsec
qBitTorrent
VLC Player
VisualSVN
WiX, Orca
Mozilla Thunderbird
Postman
Slack
WizTree
WinDirStatMicrosoft Teams
Skype
Zoom
Signal
Sumatra PDF
Thunderbird
OneNote
Utils
SharpKeys
Azure
Azure Portal CosmosDB Emulator DocumentDBImporter DocumentDBStudio
Azure Storage Emulator Azure Compute Emulator Azerite Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer
Hosting
Namecheap
Databases & Data
- Azure Data Studio (formerly SQL Operations Studio)
- JetBrains DataGrip
- SSMS & SQL Server Profiler
- SQLiteBrowser