Today is my last day at my current company.  I wanted to take a moment and create a list of all the great SharePoint tools I use here – in case I need them in the future.

I really recommend these tools to anyone doing WSS 3.0 development.

Application Pool Manager – System tray tool for restarting individual application pools.

Debugging Tools for Windows – My main use for this is to store .PDB files in a symbol server.  This makes debugging in SharePoint much easier.

SharePoint Best Practices Analyzer – This is great for checking your SharePoint installation and configuration.  Like all the other “practice analyzers” that Microsoft has put out.

SharePoint Solution Installer – This is the best way to deploy a solution to a client.  No command line nonsense for your client to worry about.

SharePoint Manager 2007 – GUI to dig into the SharePoint DOM.  Makes it easy to quickly find and even set properties of your farm.

StsAdmWin – GUI for discovering available stsadm commands.  Even finds custom commands!  Great for beginners.

Visual Studio Extensions – Not completely necessary in my opinion, but nice to have.

WSPBuilder – Invaluable!  Builds your wsp files for you – no more messing with ddf and manifest files!

WSS SDK – Who doesn’t need documentation?  This is everything you want to know about WSS.

At work we have many SharePoint environments: each developer has their own, plus staging and production.

I went on a small crusade to standardize and sync the port which each environment’s Central Administration site used.  I thought this might be difficult to track down and make all the changes, but it wasn’t stsadm to the rescue.

Just try this:

stsadm -o setadminport -port 100