I thought I’d make a list of the applications, consoles and utilities that I consider essential for my line of work in IT development / scripting / system administration.  Other people might find this list useful and perhaps discover something new.  I know some of these tools have made my life considerably easier over the years…

 

Here are my weapons of choice:

 

Consoles

Window Remote Server Administration Tools

Windows 7 / Server 2008 Resource Kits

Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager

App-V Console

SQL Server Client Tools

Exchange Client Tools

Microsoft SCOM Console

Microsoft SCCM Console with ‘Right Click Tools’ (third party add-in)

SCCM Client Centre (third party utility to assist SCCM client issues)

VMware VSphere Client

 

Development, Scripting & Packaging Tools

Visual Studio 2010

Primal Script

Toad

Notepad++

WMI Explorer

PowerGUI

Quest ActiveRoles Management Shell for Active Directory

Orca

Wise Packaging Studio

Flexera InstallShield

 

Utilities

Virtual Box – (Run a test lab or alternate Operating Systems as Virtual Machines)

SysInternal Tools – (Essential Windows utils by Mark Russinovich)

DiffMerge – (Compare contents of two two text files – think logfiles)

Baretail (Real-time file viewer – invaluable for monitoring log files in real-time)

Baregrep – (A file finding and text searching tool)

McMapi – (Used for investigation of Exchange and Outlook issues)

FileZilla – (Popular FTP application)

Wireshark – (Network capture util, great for investigating client/server connectivity)

WinSCP – (SFTP client, SCP client, FTPS client and FTP client)

PuTTY – (Telnet and SSH client, along with an xterm terminal emulator)

Angry IP Scanner – (IP address / port scanner)

VNC – (Remote Control Client)

LogMeIn – (Remote Control your systems over the Internet)

WOLCMD – (Wake On LAN command line utility)

iWol – (Wake up a remote PC/Server over the Internet)

 

Feel free to comment and let us know what your favourite tools are…