ilanchelian left a comment yesterday asking for me to share some of the utilities that I use sometimes. Of course, 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.)

But since you asked, here are some of the things kicking around my utilities folder (in no particular order):

• cdburn and dvdburn from the WS03 Resource Kit
• CodePlex Client (aka cpc and tfc)
• NcFTP Client (aka ncftp, ncftpput and ncftpget)
• Reflector
• Wizmo
• AMP FontViewer
• DiffMerge
• Process Explorer
• HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool (used for building bootable flash drives)
• Subversion command line utilities
• 7-Zip
• Notepad2
• TreeSize Free
• Foxit Reader
• Script Elevation PowerToys (PowerShell Here and Elevate)
• SyncToy 2.0

• Unity’s first CTP was just over two weeks ago, but according to Grigori Melnik, it’s shipping just over two weeks from now. That seems pretty speedy to me. By the time I get a change to take a closer look at Unity, it’ll probably have shipped.
• I discovered Matthew Podwysocki blog via DNK. I don’t typically subscribe to blogs that I discover via DNK, but Matthew has written about IoC/Unity, F# and DLR lately so I’m thinking I should be a regular reader.
• Corporate VP David Treadwell has an extensive post on updates to the Windows Live Platform Services that are being unveiled at MIX next week. The updates include the new WL Messenger Library, a new SDK for WL ID Delegated Authentication, a new WL Photo API, a new CTP of WL Tools, standardized support for AtomPub, updates to WL Contacts API and Sivlerlight Streaming and a new “experimental” service called Application Based Storage that “allows application developers to store a small amount of state/configuration data in the WL data centers on behalf of a user”. I’m sure there’ll be more WL news at the MIX conference proper, but that’s quite a good chunk of features to start digging into. Personally, I’m particularly interested in WL Delegated Auth, esp. how it deals with phishing, something I don’t think OAuth handles very well.
• Windows Live isn’t the only group making announcements in advance of MIX. Adobe announced a research project that allows “cross-compiling existing code from C, C++, Java, Python, and Ruby to ActionScript.” This seems pretty obviously a response to Silverlight 2.0′s embedded CLR, announced last year @ MIX. Support for C++ is very interesting – Adobe evangelist Ted Patrick claims they were even able to cross-compile Quake 1 to Flash. Interesting, but this is an internal research project @ Adobe with no projected release date while Silverlight 2.0 goes into beta next week.