Daily Dev Speedup - Use Lightweight Tools for Lightweight Work

Everyone is always trying to use the best possible computers to do their jobs. Developers buy high performance machines so they can write code faster. Some improvements can be made to your development speed without going and spending large sums of money amassing expensive tools and machines.

As any craftsman will tell you, "you need to have the right tool for the job". A lot of times there are quick queries that we need to write to check bits of data and such. If this is what you're doing, it is sill to open up SQL Server Management Studio just to check this. The overhead of opening up and application and using it will have you wasting plenty of time. Use a tool like LINQPad, so you have a lightweight application you can easily open and work with.

If you need to make a code change to a config file or some very minor edit to a text file of a variety of languages I recommend using a lightweight text editor like Notepad++. This will save you a lot of time over opening Visual Studio, and it is much more advanced than Notepad. It has a good amount of advanced features and isn't a full-featured IDE like Visual Studio.

Using these lightweight tools in combination with the heavy-duty tools like SQL Server Management Studio and Visual Studio will make things a lot easier.

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