10 Tools every Desktop Engineer should have.

While working on various projects and troubleshooting more than a few problems, I have found a few tools that are an absolute necessity to perform my typical duties. All but one of these tools are free. I'd like to present them here in no particular order.

1. Process Monitor
Some people may have used FileMon or RegMon. This tool consolidates both tools into one. For those who haven't used either, Process Monitor adds itself as a low level device and allows you to monitor all activity on your disk and registry. I do mean all activity. Running this for a matter of 5 seconds can generate over fifty thousand entries easily. Luckily for us, there are excellent filters that allow us to comb through all this data. Also, Mark Russinovich has several recorded sessions showing how to use Process Monitor.

2. Process Explorer
This is a task manager replacement with a ton of extra features. You can simply check an option to actually replace the task manager. I should point out that this tool and the above tool were created by SysInternals and were eventually acquired by Microsoft. At the SysInternals site you can find more tools that are just as useful as these two tools.

3. Wireshark
Just as Process Monitor showed you events on your system. Wireshark shows you events going across your network connection. This application was previously called Ethereal. You can break down every packet coming from your system and see exactly what is being sent across the wire.

4. Beyond Compare
This is the only application that isn't free. You may be able to find other applications to do this work, but this application is great. Beyond Compare allows you to compare files and folders. You can look line-by-line and see what is different in an individual file, or look at a folder structure looking for files that are different.

5. Irfanview
If your work is anything like mine, you likely need to write a decent amount of documenation. A lot of my documentation contains screenshots. This application will help by taking a jpg screen capture anytime you hit a hotkey you define (Ctrl-F11 by default). it saves the file in a directory. You can save the whole screen or just the foreground window.

6. Notepad++
I used notepad a lot. Until I came across this application. It has a tabbed interface, allowing for multiple documents. It will detect when a file is updated and prompt you to reload. It also includes syntax highlighting for a ton of languages. It provides Regular Expression support, but probably not as much as you may find in vim. Nevertheless, it is a good replacement for Notepad.

7. VMWare Player
Testing and retesting, is a daily routine for me. Because of that, it is important to have something to easily test with. VMWare solves that problem. You may say that this only plays existing images. That problem is easily solved with EasyVMX, which allows you to create VMWare disks for use in the VMWare player. If this is more work, then you can buy the actual VMWare Workstation, but for me this works well.

8. Orca
This is the free tool provided by Microsoft to view MSI files. It is quick and dirty way to see MSIs and their tables. The biggest drawback is that you have to get it off the Windows SDK in order to get the MSI to install.

9. WScript Shell Documentation
I make it a point with scripting and writing code in general to not memorize code. I do this for a few reasons. First, I have enough junk to remember that I shouldn't bother stuff that is easily found in a book or a help file. Secondly, I should always be aware that my code can be better. If I simply remember a way to do task X, then I'll never bother to improve that task. For those reasons, I always have the documentation for VBScript readily available.

10. TortoiseSVN
Anyone who scripts should have some way at looking at where they came from with any particular script. Too many times I've seen a script in a directory that has about 10 different types of backups for that one script. You'll see script.vbs. Then script2.vbs, script.old, script.bak, or scriptREALLYOLD.vbs. Why bother when you can use free source control. Sure you have to learn how to use Source control, but shouldn't you do that anyway? Besides, learning the basics, can be done off of YouTube if you wanted. Personally I like Jeff Atwood's blog entry on setting up source control.

So, that does it. This is not an exhaustive list and perhaps one day I'll compose an addendum to it. But, I really think that each of these tools are essential to a normal Desktop Engineer.