Scott has just published a blog post titled Scott Hanselman’s 2014 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows. This is a most useful list for any developer. Read it here. Thanks a lot Scott. 

I too, have my personal list of tools & NuGet packages which I use regularly while building Windows & Windows Phone apps and I wanted to share them here. Just my 2 cents to above list.

• Phone Theme Manager
  In your app, you may want force the app to use one theme in particular, irrespective of system theme. OR use some different Accent Colour. A nice NuGet package can do a magic for your app.

  
   

• MVVM Light Framework
  Laurent has built this nice framework to expedite MVVM development. You can build your own framework and start from scratch, but it will be reinventing the wheel. Rather use this framework with Portable Class Libraries and build apps for both Windows & Windows Phone with maximum code reuse. You can read my old post about how to get started.

  
  

• Multilingual App Toolkit
  A useful tool to build multilingual apps for Windows & Windows Phone. You may read my previous blog post about how to use this tool.

  
  

• Syncfusion Metro Studio 2.0
  While developing Windows & Windows Phone apps, you’ll need icons for Application Bar. You can design your own icons using this tool. It allows you to customize the icons and allows allows you to export it as PNG or as a vector data for resolution independent scales.
  An alternative can be: The Noun Project

  
  

• PerfecTile
  You require to design number of icons, images (with different resolution and scale) to attach to your project as logos and other items. Use this tool to generate those images.

  
  

• Windows Phone Power Tools
  These tools are extensions to what Windows Phone SDK provides. e.g below table can give you more details.

  
  

• Windows Phone Emulator Skin Switcher
  This tool just changes the skin of your emulator. Nothing fancy, but cool to showcase different device during presentation

  
  

• IsoStoreSpy for Windows Phone
  This cool utility can be used to explore Isolated Storage on Windows Phone and explore what data goes inside the apps.

  
   

• XAML Spy
  As the site says: XAML Spy is the visual runtime inspector for Silverlight, Windows Phone, Windows Store and WPF apps. It provides unprecedented access to all aspects of any running XAML app. Interact with the UI visual tree, monitor events, extract XAML, explore the contents of the package and isolated storage, view statistics and more, much more.

  
  

• Windows Phone Desktop App
  This is for both developers and consumers. You may want to sync your data between machine and Windows Phone device. You can easily plug-in the device and move/sync content. For Windows 8 there is Windows Store app which makes it easy. For Windows 7 you can use this desktop app. Most interesting feature of this app, which I can’t find difficult otherwise, is to sync podcast. Give it a try

  
  

• Zune
  If you’re Windows Phone 7 developer or consumer, you’ll require this tool to sync data between device and your laptop. This is also a great media player and podcast downloader.

  

These are the basic tools and NuGet packages required for everyday Windows or Windows Phone developer. There are some third-party control sets from vendors like Syncfusion, DevExpress, Telerik, ComponentOne, Mindscape, Infragistics and I’ll talk about them in future posts.

I hope, I’ve covered most of them here. If you’ve any suggestion or you know any tool and want to include here, do let me know.

Cheers,

Mayur Tendulkar