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Stack OverflowWhat programming tools have you built for yourself?
[+33] [64] Ferruccio
[2008-12-01 12:58:37]
[ tools polls ]
[ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/330756] [DELETED]

One of the things I really love about programming is the tradition of building your own tools. Sometimes it's out of necessity. What you need doesn't exist. And sometimes it's out of ignorance (I hand-wrote many parsers before learning about lex & yacc).

What programming tools have you built for yourself?

Should probably be community wiki - naeblis
Removed subjective tag. I agree that maybe this should be community wiki, but it's not subjective. What programming tools I've built is something I could show you the source code for. That's definitely not subjective. - Bill the Lizard
[+9] [2008-12-01 16:04:54] Juliet
  1. Regex tool: I found myself writing code which required a lot of regex search and replaces, and I didn't want to learn Vim or pay for RegexBuddy, so I wrote my own tool and use it everyday.

  2. Source code line counter: a little tool which counts the number of lines of code in a folder. Has lots of different rules for excluding arbitrary lines in different languages.

Other projects include:

  1. Stock predicting tool: I was really into tracking the stock market, so I wrote a little program which would download data from the internet and perform a lot of technical analysis [1] on the data and forecast bulls and bears. My program could choose stocks with an impressive 60% accuracy ("accurate" prediction means that, within one month of the prediction, a bull increases in value by 15% and bear loses 10% value).

  2. Redneck speak: I owned a somewhat controversial political website. A rival website used to harass my users, so I wrote a little page that converted the rival website's content into Redneck grammar.

  3. Grocery list: contained a list of foods + prices, contained a list of recipes. Program allowed me to pick from a list of foods or pick a recipe, and it would automatically import all of the foods and proper quantities into a list and estimate the total cost. This program is used everytime I go shopping, and is frequently accurate within a few dollars.

  4. Cat fancier: screensaver I wrote for my cats. Has two modes: 1) Serene, which displays a scene of a window overlooking a street. 2) Insanity, which displays highspeed laser dots and flapping butterflies to drive my cats nuts.

  5. Keylogger: my sister wanted to spy into her husbands email, so I wrote a keylogger for her to capture passwords.

  6. Playing with XNA: I was fascinated with Microsoft XNA, so I bought a few books on the topic. My pride and job was a program that allowed me to plug in an XBox controller, fly a spaceship around in cornflower blue space, and shoot missles. You could dynamically load any model in place of the spaceship, which prompted some funny conversations, my favorite being "why is that frog flying around and shooting missles?"

  7. Message board statistics: I'm a messageboard junkie, so I wrote a program that would go through a database and crunch a bunch of meaningless statistics about users, such as their frequency of posts they write on different days of the week and times of day, average length of sentence, average length of post, etc.

There are lots of other miscellaneous projects I could add to that list, but I think if I say too much some of you will rightfully conclude that I have no life.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_analysis

VIM has a utility for building regexs? - Simucal
(2) +1 for redneck speak - Ace
Building your own regexp-engine is the best example of "reinventing the wheel" I've seen in a long time. Why on earth would you want to do that? There are other alternatives than Vim and RegexpBuddy, you know. - JesperE
RegExBuddy is worth 10 times what you have to pay for it. - whatknott
(5) @Jesper: why on earth would I want to reinvent the wheel? Because programming is fun :) Sometimes you just need to write exploratory code, or spend an afternoon writing an interesting program, or you just want to learn more about how some of your favorite programs are implemented, etc. - Juliet
1
[+6] [2008-12-01 13:25:52] Bill the Lizard

I used to write my own unit testing frameworks back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. This was, of course, before JUnit and TDD, and even before we called it unit testing. I'd written frameworks for testing functions in C, C++, QBasic, and LabVIEW before going back to school to get my CS degree and seeing all the really cool testing tools that we have now.


Unit testing for QBasic? That sounds awesome :) - Michael Stum
It might sound awesomer than it really was. It was the kind of code you look back on and wish you could blame on a co-worker. :) - Bill the Lizard
2
[+5] [2008-12-01 14:31:45] Steve Obbayi

i recently got tired of downloading, processing and presenting statistics from the company websites for the guys in marketing. I wrote this tool which they could install on their laptops. From there they could handle the whole process at the click of only one button. That's all the tool has, one button!!! How user friendly could you get for the guys down at marketing.


Sounds like an mac application. Just one button! - epochwolf
But not as pretty... - Redbeard 0x0A
(2) Hope it doesn't say, 'Button1' . . . - JasonFruit
3
[+5] [2008-12-01 16:24:22] Brian MacKay

So many things. Actually, our tool-building instinct is something we have to look at carefully. I'll just come right out and say this: I would rather build tools than build applications.

I think most of us have a little bit of that. I have heard it described as a recursive problem that can really eat a lot of project time.

To answer the question, my biggest tool: I read Rocky Lhotka's book on CSLA and built my own ORM tool.

That took awhile, but I believe it took me to a different level as a developer. We still use it here at Inntec, although the day is coming when it will be replaced. There are some awesome ORM tools now.


"I would rather build tools than build applications" - alfred barthand
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[+4] [2008-12-01 14:43:19] Patrick Cuff

I wrote a little applet that sits in my system tray to log configuration changes whenever I install, update or uninstall software, change the registry or tweak the system.


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[+3] [2008-12-01 14:35:23] leppie

Major works:

IronScheme [1]

xacc.ide [2]

Minor works:

SQL Stored Procedure Wrapper & Typed DataSet Generator for .NET [3]

[1] http://www.codeplex.com/IronScheme/
[2] http://xacc.wordpress.com/
[3] http://www.codeproject.com/KB/database/dbhelper.aspx

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[+3] [2008-12-01 13:05:54] Daok

Visual Studio Add-in that let me configure some XML files for the "in-house" multi-langage system. So in VS when I select a string and do right click and "Convert to language system" I have a form that popup and let me write the string in multiple language. After, all is saved... when I compile I see the string that was saved in the XML files. This is the tool I use every day.


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[+2] [2008-12-01 13:26:24] Michael Stum

Without wanting to spam/adervtise, but since you ask: All of the ones listed on my site [1] were initially built for myself.

  • A program to send e-Mail from the command line
  • A simple Hash Generator to hash files and strings (MD5, SHA1, SHA2)
  • A tool that replaces the AssemblyVersion in AssemblyInfo.cs with the SVN Revision

They are used in my buildscripts because I did not investigate on doing "proper" MSBuild tasks yet (did not want to spend time with that just yet).

[1] http://www.stum.de/cmdtools/

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[+1] [2008-12-01 14:09:46] Kieveli

I know this is a little sad, but I always have an Excel Macro ready to paste bugs from Bugzilla and format them as tightly as possible to get all my bugs on a single double-sided piece of 8.5x11.

Bug tracking software never seems to have a way to compress and list your current tasks on paper.


I totally agree with this! I have been working on my own task/project tracking web app, trying to get GTD concepts on the 'dashboard' and make it easy to make those old-school paper lists... - Redbeard 0x0A
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[+1] [2008-12-01 14:12:46] Gamecat

I wrote some code generators to avoid repetiting tasks.

I also wrote a metric and program structure tool. To analyse legacy software.


I just wrote a generator to create a simple .NET object to Database Table with simple type conversion, null checking, loading and saving functions. - Redbeard 0x0A
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[+1] [2008-12-01 13:06:41] MadKeithV

I once co-wrote an entire visual programming environment and compiler to an embedded visualization system. The first question that I was asked when presenting the final result was "why didn't you use Java?"
The reason for that was cost - there was a very weak processor in the machine, but in hindsight it would have been much better commercially to push for a better processor and use embedded Java.

Still, it was fun - and an unexpected trip back to the theoretical days of University.

More recently I wrote a Visual Studio plug-in that tracks build times, errors and warnings and reports them to a central database for various statistical purposes.

In day-to-day work I often hack together quick Python scripts to automate boring repetitive tasks.


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[+1] [2008-12-01 13:02:37] nickf

Waaaay back when I was first starting uni, they were teaching us Java, and I got sick of having to enter in all the commands to compile and run our programs, so I wrote an incredibly simple IDE using (wait for it), QBasic.


Waaaay back 5 years ago? - Dan
(1) hehe 7! it's a long time in this industry. - nickf
would it not have been easier to use a make file? - Rocco
(1) you're saying this to a person who wrote a slap-together IDE in qbasic - nickf
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[+1] [2008-12-01 13:03:51] jamesh

The first tool I wrote of any substance was a 6502 machine code disassembler. Like a lot of on-the-side projects, the tool quickly became the main on-the-side, and whatever prompted me to write it is lost in the attic of my memory.

I was probably 14, on a BBC B, writing the majority of it in BASIC, with some bits in assembler. I could bore you with the extra cool features (e.g. 2 passes for labelled jumps) but that'd get this answer into nostalgia.


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[+1] [2008-12-01 15:43:27] Jon Tackabury

ASP.NET ViewState Helper to help me troubleshoot issues with ViewState, and just to see what is being stored in there.

http://www.binaryfortress.com/aspnet-viewstate-helper/


you've done quite a bit more than that my friend :) - BPAndrew
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[+1] [2008-12-01 15:07:57] RedFilter

I wrote my own Windows Grep tool, which I have used almost daily for a year or more...it is a very satisfying feeling! For some reason it seems to be much faster than the other tools I have tried, probably through liberal use of memory :)


15
[+1] [2008-12-07 23:40:23] Giovanni Galbo

I've written a few code generators. If I do something more than twice, I look to automate it.


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[+1] [2008-12-11 19:35:15] Darius Bacon

Most recently, Halp [1] makes writing small programs noticeably faster and more fun for me. It's a little like having a spreadsheet for code embedded in my Emacs source-code buffer. I've noticed that I write programs now that I wouldn't have bothered to before, from trying things out and assembling them into a program with less friction from switching between coding and testing, etc.

[1] http://github.com/darius/halp/tree/master

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[+1] [2009-01-06 22:07:42] Mike Hofer

I wrote NValidate (at www.nvalidate.org), so I could replace this:

if(string.IsNullOrEmpty("myParameter"))
   throw new ArgumentException("myParameter);
if(string.Length > 200)
   throw new ArgumentException("myParameter is too long.");

with this:

myParameter.Assert("myParameter").IsNotNullOrEmpty().HasMaxLength(500);

I also wrote a stored procedure wrapper that fairly kicks butt. Still using it.

Ages ago, I accidentally wrote a recursive expression parser that let end users enter VB-like expressions to filter data. (Still scratching my head over that.)

And just two years ago, I stumbled into writing an ORM so I didn't have to write the classes to synch the database and the VB.NET classes. I didn't realize that was what I was doing at the time. Silly me.


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[0] [2009-02-01 08:15:45] unigogo

I wrote a javascript regular expression testing tool [1]. Once done, I found a lot easy to write regex patterns.

[1] http://www.pagecolumn.com/tool/regtest.htm

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[0] [2009-02-01 08:28:17] Peter Štibraný

Last few months I am building Foglyn [1], which is an Eclipse plugin which integrates FogBugz into Mylyn. It's helping me to be on top of my cases.

[1] http://www.foglyn.com/

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[0] [2009-02-04 16:59:52] Armagan

A Validator component for WinForms. It has several builtin rules like check length, if empty or null, if numeric etc..

Also posting here made me realize I wish I've found Mike Hofer's NValidate before starting with mine. Oh well...


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[0] [2009-02-05 12:47:58] Don Branson

I wrote DonsProxy [1] so that I could watch traffic between browsers and the web apps I was building, and between web apps, apps and proxies, etc. I wrote the original at a client site, then did this complete new implementation for the opensource community.

[1] http://donsproxy.sourceforge.net/

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[0] [2009-02-05 12:58:47] christian studer

Not really a tool per se, but still: As a web developer, I'm using a lot of frameworks (Code Igniter, jQuery, Blueprint...). And in everyone of those frameworks, I have to put in some methods, styling rules, scripts which I'm using all the time.

Those augmented versions of those frameworks are my tools.


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[0] [2010-08-10 12:02:19] jkff

I wrote this [1] to assist me in diagnosing performance of distributed systems.

[1] http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Timeplot

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[0] [2010-10-19 12:18:52] Patrick Smacchia - NDepend dev

April 2004, I was bored doing consulting work on a very ugly .NET client code base. I took a few hours at night to build a code analyzer that would spot major code quality issues. The tool was named NDepend. It became commercial in Feb 2007 and is now used by thousands of teams worldwide. See the complete Releases Notes [1].

[1] http://www.ndepend.com/ReleaseNotes.aspx

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[0] [2008-12-11 20:19:55] Scott Vercuski

Not an add in but where I work we have a standardized way of performing database calls with stored procedures. Well ... I got sick of writing basically teh same thing over and over with just different parameters etc. So in my off time I wrote a program that just allows me to choose a stored procedure and click "generate" and it spits out a chunk of code that I can just copy and paste into an application. It has saved me untold hours of rewriting methods with different parameters. Made my life alot easier.


26
[0] [2008-12-11 20:29:42] DR.

I created an Ant task to compile a Visual Basic 6 project. Some features of the VB6 compiler are not accessible from the command line, so I had to programmatically alter some of the project's properties.

The following properties can be set in the Ant script which are set either through the command line or through temporarily changing the project's source.

  • The executable name
  • Parameters for conditional compilation
  • Replacement of modules

(OK, this sounds pretty useless, but if you have to stick with VB6 you have to think of something to make your coding life easier)


27
[0] [2008-12-11 20:41:23] ieure

Gobs and gobs. A few notables:

  1. A fairly complete toolchain for managing PEAR [1] packages, including:
    1. Update package.xml changelog from SVN commit messages
    2. Sync on-disk files with what’s in package.xml
    3. Update timestamp
    4. Tag current release in SVN
    5. Python client for unattended package uploads to Chiara PEAR servers [2]
  2. Lots of bits and pieces for Emacs:
    1. An interface to deal with PHPUnit [3] tests. It’ll detect if the source you’re looking at has a corresponding test, allow you to easily (re-)run the test, open the test file, jump to places where errors occurred, etc.
    2. A wrapper around php -l (lint/syntax check)
    3. A wrapper around PHP_CodeSniffer [4] to make sure my code meets CS
    4. A command to open a shell in the same directory as whatever you’re looking at, which reuses an existing shell if it exists. All this stuff works both locally, or with files opened on remote systems.
    5. Persistent, preset SQL server storage/connections [5]
    6. Execution of SQL CLI binaries on remote systems (e.g. where there’s a bastion host in between you and the DB server).
  3. Various web-app tools:
    1. Bootstrap an install to a server from CVS/SVN, generate configuration files, deploy seed databases, configure Apache, etc etc.
    2. Update CVS working copies on remote servers when a commit is checked in.
[1] http://pear.php.net/
[2] http://pear.chiaraquartet.net/index.php?package=Chiara_PEAR_Server
[3] http://phpunit.de/
[4] http://pear.php.net/package/PHP_CodeSniffer
[5] http://atomized.org/2008/10/enhancing-emacs%E2%80%99-sql-mode/

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[0] [2008-12-11 21:01:03] Peter LaComb Jr.

Because LANSA source (RDML) is stored in a database on the iSeries with one or more records per line of source (1 for every 80 characters), and LANSA has no built-in version control (just a crude check-in, check-out with no diff/merge/roll-back), I built a windows app in .Net that exports source to text files and allows me to launch diffmerge or check-in/refresh from a subversion server.


29
[0] [2008-12-11 21:07:27] Dmitri Nesteruk

I wrote

  • Lots of Visual Studio plug-ins (e.g., CodeGenUtils [1])
  • Some custom tools
  • A few half-finished visual DSL designers
  • Some standalone programs (e.g., typografix [2])
[1] http://code.google.com/p/codegenutils
[2] http://code.google.com/p/typografix

30
[0] [2008-12-11 23:13:26] deemok

Awhile ago I developed a GDI/USER resource tracking tool [1] to help with the resource leaks. I figured, the time I spend getting to know any other tool(s) is best spent learning things. The implementation is strictly spartan, but the goal was to reuse as much as possible. It partly relies on code generation to tackle repetitive tasks - something I found to be very helpful.

Hope it'll be useful to someone else.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/leaktrap/

31
[0] [2008-12-11 23:28:01] Dillie-O

I wrote my own code snippet tool, aptly named "Snip-a-Dillie-O". While I enjoyed the Visual Studio snippet manager, I found it a little tedious to get up and running and maintain. I also had a variety of SQL snippets, commenting, and miscellaneous type things that I use frequently and couldn't put in there. I also wanted something to try out C# and SQLite with on the side. I have a "favorites" tab for it, drag and drop capabilities, and the standard copy paste type stuff. I need to retool it so I can minimize to the system try and access the favorites that way.

I have a web based app that will parse Log4Net logs generated in their default XML format called HackSaw [1] (in honor of the original ChainSaw) that I use to parse my log files. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done.

I also have a " Formatted Text Loader [2]" library that uses an XML "layout file" and will parse a given text file into a strongly typed DataTable. This became invaluable to my at my previous job since there were lots of legacy log/data files there that I need to process. I even set it up so that if you can write a regular expression with groups that captures all your data, you'll get a table out of that.

Oh, and thanks to the SO folks here, I have a small tool that will decode those ASCII Hex Encoded [3] SQL Injection attacks that may be hitting your server thanks to the ASPRox botnet virus that comes and goes. If you're interested in what code they're trying to execute, this'll show ya without having to decode it directly on your SQL Server.

I know I'm pulling out the golden shovel to describe these, but they're nothing to fancy. Hopefully somebody will make them look better unless I get more free time to code 8^D

[1] http://www.codeplex.com/hacksaw
[2] http://www.codeplex.com/fotelo
[3] http://www.codeplex.com/urldecoder

32
[0] [2008-12-12 09:17:20] Bananeweizen
  • Eclipse plugins that I needed, but didn't exist yet
  • Code generators to create fast Assembler code for sprite graphics, which were specified in a higher level language
  • several editors, like for phpBB MOD files

What eclipse plugins? I never have enough of them... share some details, please :-) - Peter Štibraný
33
[0] [2008-12-12 09:46:31] milot

I've written a tiny command line app to write my file header comments for C# and C++ source files, because I needed to write the same comment based on the filename and the date created and of course the author name which the user will specify, so my tool generated that for me because I've had the existing files and I just needed to put that on the top :)


34
[0] [2008-12-12 21:47:24] glamdringlfo

We use ant and gnat for some big projects, and the build tool dumps lots of "building, N% complete" messages.

I wrote an output filter that identifies these lines, jumps the cursor back one line so it is overwritten by the next line (instead of scrolling), and sets my "screen" window title to include the ant task and % complete, so I can see how the build is coming while I'm working on another window.


35
[0] [2008-12-12 21:51:09] Slace

My pet is the Umbraco Interaction Layer [1] which is a .NET class generator for Umbraco Document Types. It acts as an API replacement when you want to programatically interact with Umbraco

[1] http://www.codeplex.com/uil

36
[0] [2008-12-21 03:58:16] Norman Ramsey

I hated the interface to yacc so much that I built my own parser generator, which generates LL(1) and SLR(1) parsers in three languages. I don't have to declare keywords and I can use EBNF notation.

The project never got to the point where I was willing to let other people use it, and the professionals in Holland make far better parser generators than I can hope to emulate, but I learned an enormous amount by going back to especially the tutorial paper by Aho and Johnson and implementing what I found there.


37
[0] [2008-12-11 19:19:13] Mike Dunlavey

Various "diff" utilities. They weren't always available.

YAPA (Yet Another Performance Analyzer) that automated call-stack sampling and displayed the results in a butterfly view. Went obsolete with DOS.

Dynamic Dialogs little horn-tooting here [1], a technique that is so simple and nifty, but also so hard to explain, that I've practically spoiled myself for doing UIs any other way.

Lots of parsers, compilers, code generation hacks of different sorts.

Dumb theorem provers. Used to prove that bubble-sort works. woopee.

Spelling correction algorithm based on trie-search.

FFT algorithm in run-coded images.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=DynDlgDemo

38
[0] [2008-12-11 19:32:42] George Jempty

A tiny (60-line) MVC engine for PHP:

http://code.google.com/p/barebonesmvc-php/


39
[0] [2008-12-01 16:18:48] Slapout

Pretty much anything I do that's repetitive I'll try to write a tool to speed up the process if I have a chance to. We were recently rewriting part of our payroll system. I wrote a calculator that allowed adding and subtracting hours and minutes so I could check the reports it generated. There's also the program for quickly looking up SQL codes. And one for searching PowerBuilder pbls to find which one contains a given object. I wrote one tool that's basically just a textbox with the always on top attribute set to true. And a program to insert comments into a PowerBuilder window formatted according to company standards.


40
[0] [2008-12-01 15:08:05] Arkadiy
  • A Perl script that scrubs CVS log, presents check-ins grouped by comment and by bug database entry, and (the most important thing) allows me to generate cvs update -j commands to merge changes on per-bug basis.

  • Various framework for writing system tests, specifically for FIX protocol exchange trading systems and for XWindows GUI. All that in Perl.


41
[0] [2008-12-01 15:19:04] James Curran

Back in the dark days, I wrote a number of addins for the Brief editor using their pseudo-Lisp macro language. Later when I move to PWB (Microsoft's first multi-langauge IDE), I wrote a couple addins for it -- they were in compiled C code, which was kinda impressive, since this was in MSDOS back in the days before we had DLLs.

One, which I'd written for both Brief & PWB, would take a highlighted block of text and sort the lines. I've tried translating that into a VS Addin, but when looking at a selected block now, you lose the line & column coordinates.


42
[0] [2008-12-01 15:41:15] devio

LOTS (and thank you for the question ;) )

I guess it all started when I tried to write a LISP interpreter back in the BASIC times, with list cells being stored in DIM'ed arrays. And I always wanted to write a file format analyzer, but never found the time to do it.

From database that one of my projects used I derived a documentation database and a Word macro to create some reference documents, and a couple of ASP pages to display this information. These were mainly project-specific hacks.

Before ASP.Net came along, I developed an XML-based generic list-and-forms framework in ASP. Table information and list and form definitions where stored in XML. The ASP application used XSLT to generate ASP pages containing the data on the fly.

Forms Toolkit was written to search and manipulate Oracle Forms files using the Oracle Forms API.

Recently I try to be less project-specific, and try to share my dev tools: I wrote a utility to check for XHTML compliance, search and extract data from aspx pages (graspx), and a tool to script MSSQL database objects (SMOscript) similar to the sql2000 tool scptxfr.

The latest software I am working on is dbscript, which supports importing and uploading of database scripts, definition of value scripts for TSQL and C#, schema comparison, XML generation. It's sufficient for my needs, but a still work-in-progress for public use.

I describe and document these tools on my blog [1], downloads are available from my homepage [2].

[1] http://devio.wordpress.com/
[2] http://www.devio.at/

43
[0] [2008-12-01 15:52:07] epochwolf

I wrote a command line tool to find and clear out subversion conflicts. (With user input)


44
[0] [2008-12-01 15:55:49] torial

Way back in the dark ages, I wrote a tool that would generate callee/caller info (e.g. info necessary for a call graph) for VB6.


45
[0] [2008-12-01 14:47:20] ZombieSheep
  1. Nowtpad. I guess you need to be fairly familiar with Yorkshire dialect to get this, but Nowtpad is a text non-editor. In fact it does nowt [1] but display a windows form.
  2. A database scripting utility that calls sp_help and sp_helptext to generate our internal-format sql build script.
[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nowt

46
[0] [2008-12-01 16:27:25] Uri

I built a tool that lets me tag important information in method documentations (e.g., don't call this from the UI thread), and then highlights the calls to methods that have those tags so I get some advanced warning that I should probably look at the docs.

I also built a tool that tracks everything I do in Eclipse and lets me quickly record notes to generate and present a journal that I can browse.


47
[0] [2008-12-01 16:28:11] Lucas Jones

I wrote an assembler IDE in C# a couple of weeks ago. I would still use it - but I mucked up the regexes and once you get to abou 2 lines, it takes a minute to do the syntax highlighting!


48
[0] [2008-12-01 16:32:34] OscarRyz
Sting thisIsIt =  " I've build a \"quotator\" that transforms regular strings into java-code strings       \n"
 + " and the other way around.  Very handy for sql  tests        \n"
 + "         \n"
 + " For instance:        \n"
 + "         \n"
 + "        select * from dual        \n"
 + "        where 1 = 0        \n"
 + "         \n"
 + " is trasformed to:        \n"
 + "  \n"
 + "      "        select * from dual "        \n"
 + "      + "        where 1 = 0 \n"         \n"
 + "  \n"
 + " This is very easy to do in any decent Ide ( and even IntelliJ Idea has it built-in )        \n" 
 + " But the good thing here is that it takes and leaves the data in the clipboard so I just have to:        \n"
 + "         \n"
 + " ctrl-C  double-click-on-my-jar ctrl-v         \n"
 + "  "
 + "         \n"
 + " :)         \n"

yeap... that's and special class used to... mhhh ... confuse people :P - OscarRyz
49
[0] [2008-12-01 16:33:49] Zub

For Visual Studio, A small c++ class wizard that uses modifiable templates .h/.cpp files . A macro that creates function definitions in the cpp for the highlighted declarations in the corresponding header .


50
[0] [2008-12-07 22:22:31] SDX2000
  • Virus removal script (anti Redolf virus)
  • A CD/DVD cataloging program which could index files inside compressed archives
  • A game level editor for a snowboarding game in 320x200 256 color VGA
  • A C++ preprocessor with enhanced support for enums which could be converted to strings and vice-versa
  • A command line program to correct screen brightness through software
  • A power toy calculator like calculator with history and graphing
  • A command line tool to eject removable media (CD/DVD)
  • Tools to convert from hex to dec and vice-versa without clicking any buttons
  • Hex editors
  • a FAT32 hard-disk formatting utility which took a list of bad sectors and skipped them

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[0] [2008-12-07 23:03:35] kdgregory

The most valuable: (circa 1994) a VBA macro that would parse Microsoft Word 2.0 document to extract translation tables for our data warehouse. This gave the business users complete responsibility for maintaining these tables, with commentary, in a form that could be printed and passed around.

The most useful: (circa 1986) a minimal debugger for MS-DOS, that could be linked into a device driver and therefore available as soon as the machine started. Supported breakpoints and arbitrary peek/poke, but not disassembly (hey, if you were good you could do that from a hex dump :-). Allowed me to debug the printing hooks for one of the first PC faxboards.


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[0] [2008-12-07 23:31:39] nrich

A Lua implementation of Perl's Data::Dumper [1]. It makes debugging data structures breeze.

[1] http://search.cpan.org/~ilyam/Data-Dumper-2.121/Dumper.pm

can I have a look at your source? Do you have an svn repository or similar?! - freefallr
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[0] [2008-12-07 23:35:12] Dove

I've once written a program to generate about one or two thousand lines of repetitive code. I later realized I could have used the Method class.


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[0] [2008-12-01 13:04:58] ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells

I once wrote a javadoc like utility for maintaining documented database schemas with SQL create table statements and specially formatted comments on the table and column definitions. It parsed the SQL file and generated a LaTeX or MIF data dictionary document.

Also, I've done quite a few code generators of one sort or another.

My first ever C program was a hex dump utility.


I read that quick and saw "MILF data . . ." Oh boy it's gonna be a long week. - cciotti
Sorry, nothing to do with Sarah Palin ... - ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
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[0] [2008-12-01 13:05:08] Stefan

Extended Clipboard handler that worked over the local network. (Both text & files) Was handy back when TS couldnt handle files over clipboard.


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[0] [2008-12-01 13:02:47] Daok

A small HTML editor that highlight HTML keyword. This is back in the early 2000, now I use for small editor NotePad++


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[0] [2008-12-01 13:07:41] Michael Kohne

I've written a number of specialized code generators (usually outputting C++). These have tended to be project-specific and have saved me more coding than I can shake a stick at.


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[0] [2008-12-01 13:21:57] Mitchel Sellers

The two that I used the most were my .NET Class Generator application which generated information object classes from .xls input, saved a bunch of time in C# before Auto Properties.

Also the most popular of all is one that I made available to the public and that is a Regular Expression Tester [1] that supports groups and other items, it has made my work with RegEx a breeze!

[1] http://iowacomputergurus.com/free-products/regular-expression-tester.aspx

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[0] [2008-12-01 14:22:41] joseph.ferris

Recently, I have written a registration key system for distribution of commercial applications. Currently am fleshing out how to inject the dynamically generated code to handle the validation into an existing assembly. The primary interface is through a Visual Studio add-in that allows you to select the algorithm, define a custom algorithm, and apply it to a specific assembly.

In the past, I have written more data conversion utilities and scubbers than I care to remember, and countless refactoring macros that have (thankfully) been replaced by ReSharper.


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[0] [2008-12-01 13:26:45] VonC

Since I manage a Source Control Management (ClearCase), and I had to be able to integrate its various commands in a in-house release management tool developed in java.

For that, I developed (back in 2002) an encapsulation of System.Runtime [1] in order to:

  • execute the Clearcase CLI commands
  • follow in real-time the output of those lengthy commands and log those outputs

Example code here [2] (that one does not log anything)

The ability to literally follow what is going on when a java program execute a ClearCase command has been incredibly helpful. Even the more recent Java6 Console [3] does not achieve quite what I do with this 'Shell' class.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/236737#236873
[2] http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/6335
[3] http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/index.html

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[0] [2008-12-01 13:27:26] rmeador

For reasons I can't remember anymore, the toolchain I was using to target an embedded system couldn't be scripted using batch (this was on Win95). I needed a build script, so I created my own "script" in C++ that invoked the various tools and then initiated the download to the embedded device.

Also, when I was in highschool, I had permission to use gcc on one of the school computers so that I could work on random projects during my down time, but they had the system locked down so that copying executables to and from floppy disks was impossible using the cp command (perhaps to combat the spread of viruses?). I coded myself a new copy command with the compiler as my first project :)

Neither of those are very exciting, I'm afraid. I try as much as possible to not reinvent the wheel.


"Don't reinvent the wheel" is overused. ie: "Hello World" qualifies. My reaction to lex & yacc (see the original question) was 2 weeks writing my own lexer and parser, with a graphical parse tree browser. I learned so much doing this. 2 wks of playing with lex & yacc could never have come close. - darron
62
[0] [2008-12-01 13:28:00] BraveSirFoobar

A jar dependency-hell visualizer, to fix an extremely bloated ant script. Made me use the wonderful ASM library.


63
[0] [2008-12-01 13:40:50] Jay Bazuzi

I like to write code generators for the mundane parts. For example, if you have to write .NET DependencyProperties, the code is verbose, repetitive, and tedious. A code generator is just the ticket.

I usually use PowerShell for external DSLs.


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