(Not Only) Work Utilities Unleashed

For my work i use several tools that make life much easier.
I have gathered the most useful ones in one place.

• Everything for fast instant search files by name on drive.
• SpaceSniffer tool visualizes your disk space.
• Clipboard managers in windows can improve user experience a lot. They allow to save many items into clipboard. I like CLCL because it fast and easy to use but it doesn't support unicode. If you need unicode i suggest ClipX.
• Nice tool ServiWin for services managing (bulk start/stop/change start type).
• FreeMind - to keep your knowledge structured and clean there is a great tool
• Notepad++ with TextFX plugin
• Tools from sysinternals. They have windows share at \\live.sysinternals.com\tools or http://live.sysinternals.com/
• NirSoft tools - system tools like watch opened file handles or ports, similar to sysinternals
• Synergy - must have for people with many PCs at a workplace.
• TrueCrypt - can create encrypted drives.

For people who work with Visual Studio:

• ReSharper
• Productivity Tools from Microsoft Gallery (built-in to VS2012 and higher)
• IndentGuides

Video players:

VLC - media player. Also sometimes i capture desktop videos with it.
mplayer - an ascetic interface is compensated by the amount of supported formats. It can play almost anything. Also it is very low-maintenance.
MPV - super lightweight player. Sometimes this is the only option to view 4K videos.

Other great tools:

Tor - allows you surf anonymously. Though don't use unsecured pages via Tor because some smartypants could listen the traffic on the end node.
Tixati - after uTorrent went bananas, this alternative is the best and has portable version and cross-platform.
SumatraPDF - a great alternative to Adobe PDF Reader. Also it can open Djvu, PS and some other formats. No installation needed.
Synergy - tool for sharing keyboard and mouse between different PCs with different OSs.
lockhunter - sometimes we get message that file is accesed by another process. This tool will help in such situation.
passpack - online and desktop password manager. Fast and simple.
NoReplyAll - is and add-in for Outlook that allows to prohibit ReplyAll in emails. It is very useful when your colleagues are not that intelligent to avoid replying to the whole office.
Tomighty - is a tool for Pomodoro technique. It's ticking like a kitchen timer. UI is very neat.
7zip archiver - supports a lot of formats.
Desktop clock with skins.(Free desktop clock 2.2)
A Scheme implementation. Pretty neat and works well.
Virtual box - nice vm tool.
XBMC player - with a plugin it allows to have multiple audio devices. Very handy when you want attach digital and analog headphones at once.
WinDjView - djview viewer for Win.
WinMerge - compare tool.
Gizmo Central - includes Gizmo drive. Allows to mount iso images.
http://regexhero.net/ - online RegEx editor.
ConEmu -  is a Windows console emulator with tabs, which represents multiple consoles as one customizable GUI window with various features.
For sniffing the traffic use WireShark or Fiddler.
UniExtract - this great tool is able to unpack nsis packages.

Though the interface of many of those programs is quite ascetic they do their job fantastically.

Also i would recommend Scott Hansellman's blog. It has almost all utilities i ever found useful but not all of them. That's why this post is here ;)

View SDF (SQL Compact Edition databases)

In VS

I found VS 2010 to be the most sufficient environment to work with SQL CE databases because it can work with both SQL CE 3.5 and 4.0 unlike VS2012 which can only work with 4.0.
So what we need:

1. VS 2010 SP1 (SQL CE 4.0 VS tools need SP1).
2. SQL CE 3.5 (sp2) (you probably already have it with VS2010).
3. SQL CE 4.0. (sp1)
4. SQL CE 4.0 Tools for Visual Studio (link found in this article). (looks like it holds exclusive db connection so other programs can't connect to it)
5. SQL Server Compact Toolbox. (this tool doesn't lock the DB so other programs can connect to it)

Standalone tools

Here I found the tools to view SDFs, nice blog btw: http://sqlcequery.codeplex.com/releases/view/110204
And these 2 can query sdf 3.5 and 4.0  - they do not need anything to be installed but .net 4.
http://fishcodelib.com/Database.htm - this one can access Access DB as well
http://sqlcequery.codeplex.com/releases/view/110204

Advanced Browse CSV

CSV may have multiline entries with carriage returns. Also sometimes we need to JOIN entries from one csv with entries from another. This all can be achieved in LINQPad + CSV data context. Magnificent combination indeed.

The ultimate tool to browse through log files Advanced Log Viewer