.Net

Paint.NET is a great and free lightweight alternative to Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Microsoft Photo Editor, The GIMP, and of course the crappy Microsoft Paint. Of course Adobe Photoshop is my preference, but this also a $999USD piece of software compared to a free alternative.

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins. It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple image and photo editor tool. It has been compared to other digital photo editing software packages such as Adobe® Photoshop®, Corel® Paint Shop Pro®, Microsoft Photo Editor, and The GIMP.
The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with a small amount of C++ for installation and shell-integration related functionality. The source code is available under the terms of the MIT License.

Paint.NET can be downloaded at GetPaint.NET

In the recent year I tried using various .Net tools (C#) supplementary to what Visual Studio offers, and the tools listed below really has great functionality. If you know of more useful tools please post a comment.

JetBrains ReSharper

ReSharper provide you with various code productivity enhancements, it is analyzing code while typing finding and highlighting errors and warnings. Furthermore ReSharper offers code suggestions, analysis of possible flaws in code design, and suggestions to improve them when typing. Key features are Code Analysis for C#, Code Templates, XAML & XML Support, Code Formatting, Code Formatting, Coding Assistance, and Code Refactoring.

Reflector for .NET

Reflector is the class browser, explorer, analyzer and documentation viewer for .NET. Reflector allows to easily view, navigate, search, decompile and analyze .NET assemblies in C#, Visual Basic and IL. Furthermore various add-ins are available to boost the potential and functionality of Reflector.

Rhino.Mocks

A dynamic mock object framework for the .Net platform. It’s purpose is to ease testing by allowing the developer to create mock implementations of custom objects and verify the interactions using unit testing. Alternatively use the non-free Typemock.

TestDriven.NET

TestDriven.NET makes it easy to run unit tests with a single click, anywhere in your Visual Studio solutions. It supports all versions of Microsoft Visual Studio and it integrates with the best .NET development tools.

NCover – Code Coverage

NCover is an essential tool to measure code coverage while creating automated tests, and it helps to test intelligently by revealing which tests haven’t been written yet.

NCover Explorer

Once you have used NCover to produce an xml result of your coverage, you can open it in this tool to browse the source code with the coverage information highlighted.

Liquid XML Studio 2008

Highlights the results of your XPath query in real time against any XML document. Intellisense XPath expression builder. Code samples are provided for mainstream languages (C#, java etc).

Sisulizer

Sisulizer is a visual software localization tool, which is able to work directly with your C++ Builder, Delphi, C#, Visual C++, Visual Basic, Turbo languages, Java, Windows binary files, HTML Help (.chm), XLIFF, or with .NET.

JetBrains dotTRACE Profiler

dotTrace provides an extremely fast way to profile the performance of .NET applications (frameworks 1.x, 2.0 or 3.x).