Working with new developers means new tools, at least new to me

Having started work at Falafel I’m obviously working with a new, as in new to me, group of developers where previously I’d been working with many of the same guys (no women in Delphi R&D) for the past 7-8 years. As with meeting any new group of software developers you’re bound to learn about tools, utilities and technologies you either haven’t heard of, never had the chance to try out or had no specific use for at the time.

One of those is Notepad++ which I finally decided to install it after seeing Lino fire it up and tweak a web.config file with syntax highlighting and more. I’ve also started using Microsoft’s LogParser 2.2 which I remembered reading about long ago but never really had much use for until recently when got into ASP.NET development on a large deployed application developed by Falafel. I now wish I’d looked at it more closely a long time ago as it’s an incredibly powerful tool.

Some other tools I’ve been using recently are NUnit and FxCop which I’d read a lot about but since I didn’t work much on managed code while at CodeGear I never had the opportunity to use in production until now. Lastly, there are the portable versions of some of my most often used apps which I think are great and I’m using everyday.

Anyway, as you can probably tell I’m kind of like a kid in a candy store right now and really enjoying the chance to work with a whole bunch of cool "new" tools, and people.