External

Sam Gentile's Inessential List of Tools

I get asked a lot what tools I use, and have planned to write a post. As my buddy Harry got there first, I have also taken the title of "non essential" as he did for the same reason - Scott Hanselman keeps *THE* ultimate list of tools, hence my titling this list as "inessential" (note, it's the list that's inessential, not the tools themselves.)

I also note, for completeness, that I am doing a lot less direct coding in an Agile team and more large SOA and ESB projects for Microsoft and large customers so my tool choices are different than they might have been when I was at Algo. Another note is that some of my list reflects the excellent vendors that support the MVP program and the community.

My Big Ten Day to Day Essential

Well, of course, Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite for all my WCF, WF, and .NET Framework 3.5 work
I have replaced Notepad with E-TextEditor after trying Notepad++ and Notepad2. I like it and use it on the Mac as well.
Reflector is still the first thing I install on any machine but I find that I am using a lot less than back in the day
Office 2007 of course but more importantly, I am back in a very large way with Groove 2007 in ways similar to when I worked there. We at Neudesic, have moved over to using Groove for collaborative work, particularly for the National Technology Strategy Team (Office of the CTO) that I am a member of.
Launchy as my Program Launcher and replacement for Quicksilver on the Mac. Colbri is way too slow for me to use. Can't live without it. I never type more than 1 or 2 characters to start up anything
Switcher makes Vista usable as a real Alt-Tab window switcher
Tie: Resharper 4.0 EAP Builds and CodeRush/Refactor! Pro. Both tools are indispensable to daily life with coding in Visual Studio. Frankly, VS is unusable without one or both of these
PowerShell + PowerTab + PowerShell Community Extensions + PowerShell Plus - You already know why :)
Neuron ESB - Well it's the center of my life right now :) It's really accelerating my WCF/WF efforts in my coding with customers as well as infrastructure for integrating all sorts of legacy services and applications easily.
Everything from SysInternals

Development Tools

I am a HUGE believer in Contract First Service Development but NOT WSDL First. So I do a lot of Service modeling with the new VS2008 version of Web Services Software Factory Modeling Edition. This tool rocks!!!
soapUI - Free, Open-Source, powerful Web Services test and analysis tool of choice.
xUnit.net - I like my unit testing framework very simple. I don't need any more than is in xUnit and I like their attitude and approach
Can't live without TestDriven.NET of course!
I'm a practical guy and fall on the classic (or state) TDD. That's the way we have always done it and we spent two years on the Algo project writing unit tests that way. So I agree with Daniel and that's why I use moq
Unity is going to be my DI engine of choice - Get over it :) - but I feel like Nick that although IOC is tremendously useful it is both over-rated and over-used by certain people as a universal always kind of capability, and not needed for every solution.
Stylus Studio 2005 Enterprise - Much cheaper and better than XMLSpy for my extensive XML needs with BizTalk and Neuron
Everything from RedGate - Great MVP and community server. Particularly, SQL Prompt, I couldn't get through a day without
LINQPad
CodeSmith - Another great MVP and community supporter and my code gen tool of choice
DiffMerge is my Merge tool of choice
While I am there Team Foundation Server 2008 for source control