This is a post about some of the tools that I make sure are available on my system and which I have found to be highly indespnsible to my work

Greenshot –

It’s been almost 6 years now since I have been first introduced to Greenshot by our onsite manager who adviced on this fantastic piece of software for capturing screenshots. It’s absolute light-weight open source software. It takes over the Print+Screen functionality and can capture, some or whole page, adding annotations. Here are the main highlights which I feel are the best use of this software and that I routinely use besides the obvious annotations are  –

• Capturing only certain region and ability to mail right away
• Easy annotations
• 
• Obfuscation of selected area

• Copy to Clipboard (THE most important one)
• Add Counters – the best feature as shown below. It comes so very handy when doing documentations and detailing deployment steps. I just can’t thank them enough for incorporating this.The bonus is using these counters along with annotations, you just don’t need to write anything at all in the steps.

• Ability to just delete the parts you don’t need and move around the objects. What I mean by that is in the above example, you can just remove the obfuscation or remove the number 3, or move that around to a different place. It’s just like multiple objects on your image but you have the freedome to chose and pick what you want.

No other alternative that I have used so far has even come close to this tool’s super lightness (occupies only 20 MB when not in use) and ease of use with some unbelievable features. One of the worst offending ones is the behemoth Snag It that just not only eats up your RAM but has tons of bloated features that feels over done and also the most obvious problem of not having a clean uninstall.

Download it from – Greenshot

Stickies

Stickies from Zhorn Software is again one such tool which, once you start using it, you would wonder how did you manage yourself without it. Again it’s absolutely free. They are the virtual version of real life stickies and once you install you will be presented with the ever so familiar stock stickie on screen. Some of the features that I most often use and the reason why it stands out from the plethora of wanna-be’s are  –

• Ability to pin one up so that they are always even if there are multiple applicaitons running
• Ability to copy and paste images, text
• Setting alarms
• Ability to hide them for certain period

Apart from these there are other plethora of features that I haven’t used yet. I mainly use them to categorize and store frequently used information such as server names pertaining to environment, file locations, making a to-do tasks, adding reminders etc.

You can get it from – Stickies

Note: Just the mere search of Stickies would throw up this as the first result should be a reason enough to know how fantastically popular this is.

SSMS Tools Pack

As the name suggests it’s a tool pack that packs power to the punch. It’s an add-in to SSMS and has variety of features and some of the ones that I use the most are –

• SQL History – all the queries executed in a given script and session are stored in a dockable format in the SSMS using which it is very easy to scroll through the history
• Insert Statement Generator – You can generate insert statements right from a specific table or all tables or even through your query results.
• Search Database,Tables, View Data – Search through the whole database for a specific value.

Of course there are many more than the ones above. In the SQL Server world and especially talking about SSMS there are SO many out there and the one that immediately comes to everyone’s mind is the Red Gate stable. They are just different league altogether and servers seperate use case. The advantage of SSMS is it’s cheap and for SQL Server 2008 R2 and before it’s absolutely free and it’s best bang for a buck.

You can download it from – SSMS Tools Pack