What are the tools you use every day… or at least on a very regular basis for web development? I sat down and made a list… leaving out the obvious Visual Studio and the stuff that was more specific to .NET (Reflector, windbg etc):

• IETester – great for testing display of different IE version without switching between 3 vms
• jsmin to minimize / combine javascript
• Firebug and/or IE8 developer tools… duh! Can’t get very far without one of those any more.
• IE7 developer tools – they tend to crash a lot on SlxWeb so I only use them when I need to troubleshoot an IE7-specific problem
• Sizer – very useful to see what the page looks like at various resolutions
• Fiddler – to snoop http… very neat
• Tamper Data – Firefox extension to troubleshoot HTTP headers etc, sometimes I use it instead of Fiddler, or when I am on Linux. Fiddler is a lot more user friendly but it does not let you edit the headers on the fly.
• Wireshark – a TCP capture tool… for when Fiddler is not enough! Thankfully I don’t have to use that one very often.
• ScreenRuler for Gnome: this is Linux-specific but I am sure Windows equivalents exist – it pops a virtual ruler on the screen. Very handy when trying to align controls

And a few others that are not strictly web tools, but still extremely useful in web development:

• KDiff3 – a diff tool. There are a number of other diff tools. WinMerge is a bit easier to use but I had trouble with some files with it (something to do with the newline styles, I think).
• Notepad2 – a notepad replacement with syntax highlighting and other features. I use it a lot to peek at source files because it loads about 1000 times faster than Visual Studio (and even a lot faster than Vim)
• Source control is a must: I use Git (actually msysgit, for Windows) for SlxWeb development and Subversion for most other projects. Subversion is a lot easier to use but does not work well for SlxWeb.
• VirtualBox – I tried VMWare and VirtualPC as well, but the free versions of VMWare are very limited, and I found VirtualPC to have very poor performance.