Well in concordance with this, I've decided to post about my favorite tool.  Well in coming up with my favorite tool, I had to search through many of them that I use and love.  But most recently, I believe my favorite tool, that I use every single day has to be ReSharper from JetBrains.  This add in to Visual Studio (I use Resharper 2.5 for VS2005) adds so many tiny benefits it would be hard to list them all.  Just go their site and look through the feature list.  It's simple, fast (as of the new version, the past versions did have some speed issues) and it stays out of the way.  I've gotten to the point now where I don't even realize it is there.  I was at a coworker's machine, which does not have Resharper installed, and I was amazed that I was able to get anything done without it.

Hard to say what my favorite feature is, I really like the Usages (Alt-F7).  The Ctrl-Click Go to Definition is a huge time saver.  Surround With (Ctrl-Alt-J) is another tool I use alot.  I could go on and on.  The hardest part for me has been learning some new keystrokes, for some of the lesser used items, the keystrokes still escape me from time to time, but I'm getting better. 

I won't get into a ReSharper vs Refactor Pro holy war, as both products have a ton of nice features.  I wish I could take the best of both, combine then into one and you would have one killer app.

Oh BTW, JetBrains has just put out an update as I've mentioned previously

Here's a nice tool that Hanselman turned me onto a few weeks back.  SpeedFiler, has literally made my inbox management so much easier.  My inbox is now at zero at the end of nearly every day.  I've been slowly incorporating GTD into my life and have started with my email handling system.  Every email that comes in gets processed quickly or filed away for future consideration into the proper folder.   SpeedFiler assists with that, improving upon Outlooks standard move to folder tool by allowing you to find a folder in a short time, allowing for very speedy filing.  Read Scott's entry as he shows screenshots and gives more details.  I just wanted to give a little bit of promotion for this great tool.

Just for the record, this was an unsolicited endorsement and I have just purchased SpeedFiler no more than 10 minutes ago after a few weeks with the trial version.  I'm not affiliated with the Claritude Software in any way.

Wow...this is a bargain. I've used OneTime for a year or so now (started with 2005 version) and have been happy with it.  Well now they are giving the 5-user small team edition for $5.00 (normally $495) in social experiment and all proceeds go to the Red Cross.  Can't go wrong with this deal.  This deal ends Feb 24th.

Just discovered this today (yes I'm a bit behind, version 1.0 was release July 25, 2005..)....I had some legacy INI files that needed parsing and I've got a general class that I use normally in cases like this that handles all my INI needs.  Generally it works fine as it simply wraps the API.  I found recently that with .NET 2.0 (at least that's all I've tried with) there is a issue with reading an INI that resides on a networked drive.  Needless to say, I needed to do just that.  After a brief look I came across NINI, a nice tool that not only handles INI, but also XML configuration files, Registry,  .NET configuration files, and command line parameters.  The INI functionality at least was written without the use of API, so it runs just fine reading the INI across the network.  I haven't looked any deeper into the other files it can handle, but I've got a few uses for this library already.  Wish I would have discovered this one long ago.

http://nini.sourceforge.net/

Here's a handy tool to extract files from a MSI install file.  There has been a few times when I've wanted to either see what was in a MSI, other times when I only needed one or two files, and/or I needed the file in a custom location other than the install directory.  Well now I can with this tool....not something I'd use everyday, but handy to have in my toolbox for those special occasions.

Less MSIérables: A tool to Extract the contents of an .msi File

Where have I been that I haven't run into this before.  I recently wanted a compact yet secure password management tool that would ideally run from my thumb drive.  Found KeePass, a very slick package.  While I haven't delved deep into the full power of this tool.  It does exactly what I need.  It's quick, runs from my thumb drive and looks to be plenty secure enough and extensible enough to grow with me in the future.  One less thing I need to write for myself!!

Now this is slick.  Thanks to Scott Munro where I first saw this.  I've often wanted to see the sizes of folders, but always seemed to be more of a hassle than it needed to be, but the FolderSizes tool (freeware from SourceForge) does just the trick.  You have to add a new column to your Windows Explorer view and it will display not only the file sizes but also the folder size for subfolders.  The calculations run in the background and I really didn't notice any slowdown as this background count runs.  In the past I've used the properties on the folder and/or other 3rd party tools to display folder size, now it's all right there in the explorer window.  Very slick.