Free Development Tools and the Command Line

My last company spent a lot of money on development tools. Every developer has an MSDN subscription with a Team System license. (They wouldn't buy me Resharper or another GB of RAM, but that's another story.) Since I've moved companies and now I have no budget, I've had to use cheaper tools.

Subversion and Trac have both done a great job. I spent a while looking for a way to integrate Subversion into Visual Studio and couldn't find a good way. It turns out that TortoiseSVN is just as good as VS integration. TortoiseSVN is integrated into Explorer and it makes your folder into the working copy of the repository. Right click and click on "TortoiseSVN Commit..." and all of your files are updated. Trac has really helped me get organized which is really necessary when there aren't any other developers.

I also finding myself using the command line more often. Subversion without TortoiseSVN is based on the command line. Trac projects are initialized and administered by the command line (although administration can be done via the web interface in the next version or with a plugin). I've almost become afraid of the command line as I got better with Visual Studio and had tools with GUIs, but it's pretty useful. I wish PowerShell didn't have such a steep learning curve, I may be better off writing simple one-off console-based applications.