These are my favorite software utilities for development and life in general. Everything listed here is free.

Text Editors

Notepad2 (Florian Balmer) – This is a notepad replacement that adds some nice features, like syntax highlighting, the ability to open large files, and many more. It’s not a whole friggin’ IDE, though, so it retains the lightness of the original notepad. If you get and run the installer download, it will automatically replace the Windows notepad.

Regular Expressions

Regular Expression Designer (Rad Software) – This is a utility to test .NET regular expressions. There are many such utilities out there, but unlike some, this one you can actually figure out how to use it by just looking at it. There’s also a handy reference in the right pane. 

Decompilers

ILSpy (SharpDevelop) – Most people weren’t too happy with .NET Reflector’s free version poison pill. This is a free alternative.

dotPeek (JetBrains) – Another .NET Reflector alternative, in “early access”. I haven’t used this one yet, but stuff from JetBrains tends to be solid.

JD-GUI (Emmanuel Dupuy) – A Java decompiler that is pretty simple and works well.

More to come…