Late 2009 Software List (Windows)

Inspired by Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Developers and Power Users Tool List for Windows (the latest version I could find was 2007), I'ved decided to create my own. FYI, I'm running Windows 7 (64-bit) on a Mac Pro.

Update: You can find my Mac list here

Development and Design

• Visual Studio 2008: The standard IDE for .NET development; free Express editions are available; if you have it, don't forget to install Team Foundation Client (in the TFC folder) before SP1. If you don't care for Visual Studio, there's always MonoDevelop.
• SQL Server 2008: Microsoft's database offering, including tools. Yup, there's an Express version of that available, too. There's an SP1 for SQL Server 2008, too.
• ASP.NET MVC 1.0: Microsoft's own Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework built on top of ASP.NET
• Reflector: Decompiler for .NET assemblies
• Silverlight 3 Tools: Includes Silverlight and add-ins for Visual Studio
• Silverlight Toolkit: Contains many custom controls and the Silverlight Unit Testing Framework if you poke around in the source
• Expression Studio 3: Has a web editor, XAML editor, graphics editor, new prototyping tool (SketchFlow), and video encoding tools

Browsers

• Internet Explorer 8: Built into Windows or available as an upgrade; be sure to upgrade to version 8 if you haven't already!
• Google Chrome: Google's browser; fast and small, but lacking in extensibility; I'm also subscribed to the Dev Channel, giving me frequent auto-updates
• Mozilla FireFox: Fully featured and extensible browser; very popular for its features and standards support; you'll probably want to install FireBug, a web development plugin for FireFox
• Safari: Apple's browser; allows for Mac and iPhone compatility testing, since all of Apple's version are based on WebKit; version 4 plays much nicer with Windows

Web

• uTorrent: The best and fastest torrent client out there
• 7-zip: Open source zip file utility; integrates nicely into the shell
• Adobe Flash Player: Only on the list for youtube and the occasional game trailer
• Foxit Reader: The free and best PDF viewer out there; dump your Adobe Acrobat garbage immediately if you haven't already

Media

• QuickTime: Yes it's slow and doesn't play nice on Windows, but the video quality is good, and there are a lot of movie trailers on Apple's website
• iTunes: Only installed to get MP3s on my iPod
• PowerISO: Great utility for creating and extracting .iso files; supports CD/DVD burning too
• VLC media player: Plays every file I've ever thrown at it, with a minialistic interface

Communications

• Windows Live Messenger: While others are available, supports what I need without much fuss after some tweaking
• Skype: Free voice-over-IP (VOIP) client; you can upgrade your account to make phone calls too
• SharedView: Screen sharing application from Microsoft; very handy for remote folks

Utilities

• WinSplit Revolution: Great utility for moving/resizing windows; includes quite a few defaults and can be customized

Office Suite

• Office 2007: Includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and others, depending on the version; if you can't afford Office, don't want to pay for Office, or don't care for the ribbon interface, give OpenOffice a try