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These are some libraries and tools I regularly use when programming. I mainly code in C# so most of these will relate to .NET development, but I also use PHP and Javascript a fair bit, and am trying to pick up Ruby as well. I’m not formally endorsing or promoting these over anything else, they just happen to suit my needs a lot of the time and it’s good to keep a reference. For more general tools and utilities that I couldn’t hyperbolically live without see my tool list.

C# and .NET

NUnit – a unit testing framework

Ninject – dependency injection. Version 2 just released!

Rhino.Mocks – a mocking framework, very useful when testing.

nprof – a profiler. I haven’t used this nearly as much as I need to and all the documentation on the web seems to be for an earlier version (which is totally different to the current 0.11 release – I’m not convinced it’s the same program) but if you can figure out what you’re looking at it’s actually quite good at identifying bottlenecks.

PHP

CakePHP – a Rails-inspired MVC framework for PHP. It uses a bit too much magic for my taste and is very opinionated so I’m leaning towards my own (as yet unreleased) MVC framework at the moment. I’ve still used CakePHP as the basis for a number of sites.

Javascript

jQuery – Javascript library that is the basis of just about any JS scripting I do.

Jeditable – a jQuery plugin that enables inline editing using AJAX to update the server. I’ve blogged about how to set up a simple scenario here.

Sortable – part of the core jQuery UI library, this lets you set up drag and drop sorting.