There are few tools reasonable developer can’t really work without. Well, actually maybe he can, but lack of those seriously impacts quality and pace of his work. Dedicated IDE is one of those, but there are some minor ones as well: source version control tool, unit test runner, debugger, profiler and at last but not least - file comparison tool: preferably one capable of 3-way comparison: critical to proper handling of file merging and conflict resolution. Some go for the easiest (and cheapest) options: WinDiff, WinMerge (http://winmerge.org/) or kdiff3, but I was never stingy on tools…