Freeware and Open Source Software

Content

Open Source

Freeware and Open Source Software

Introduction

This list is a result of years of working in software & web development. It is a distinct list that does not overload you with alternatives, it has a focus on quality - the right tools for the job. Most of the software listed doesn't cost anything, I have only included commercial software where there is no alternative that does not cost money.

I encourage you to review the licenses and terms of use for any software package you choose to download. In general, most of the software listed below is free for personal or commercial use, though in some cases a paid commercial license is required.

PC Software

Standalone, desktop software:

Google Chrome - free, open source web browser. This browser loads and operates faster than any other and is lightweight - it is my web browser of choice. While Firefox goes head-to-head with its arch rival Internet Explorer, chrome is quietly sneaking in as a formidable competitor. A case in point is the google chrome frame - while IE & Firefox beat each other up over standards, chrome gives you both - standards that work in IE and chrome. This, and the imminent introduction of full-fledged plugins into chrome will likely see it dominate the browser market. Chrome still has some issues, for example, it cannot render the script editors in Oracle Application Express - however, I remain confident it will either tackle these issues, or Oracle might fix it at their end.
ClamWin Antivirus - free, open source antivirus software that rivals commercial products.
Microsoft Security Essentials - free virus checking/protection software. This is my pick of the free system protection bunch.
Open Office - a free open source complete office suite which is able to exchange documents in native and commercial formats. This software is very good, but NOT fully compatible with Microsoft Office products as claimed. You can create documents that are pretty good with compatibility, but reading and modifying existing Microsoft Office documents is a different story, so be careful.
7-Zip - free, open source; zip and unzip common archive types. An excellent program.
Outlook Duplicates Remover - a great program that removes all kinds of duplicates from Outlook 2002/2003. This software comes at the price of a prayer. It saved my day fixing duplicate calendar items from bad synchronisation with my Pocket PC. Don't pay money for similar products.
Google Reader - a free RSS feed program. Google reader requires no installation, and in using your google account it will persist your favourite RSS feeds wherever you go. Forget buying newspapers and DON'T buy an RSS reader... what life did I have before I found RSS?
ReplaceEm (AKA BK ReplaceEm) - This is a search & replace program that rocks! I use this all the time, you can do complex "starts with", "ends with" searches that may span unlimited lines of text and the ability to span subfolders. You can place rules in a sequence so that you can create a really complex search/replace strategy without having to be an expert! Hint, use Advanced Edit, you can do common replace tasks without needing to know weird mnemonics.
InfoRapid Search & Replace - powerful search & replace software. Not as powerful as ReplaceEm for doing replacements, but very powerful for outright searching. Certain binary files can be searched and the contents shown in the area of the search results. The good thing about this program is it doesn't need to be able to index your drive to be able to search. I generally use a combination of InfoRapid and ReplaceEm depending on my needs - they're both very useful.
Google Desktop Search - yet another search utility... Well, I do in fact use a third search utility so you're probably starting to think I'm some kind of search nut. This utility is great, it indexes your hard drive in the background, never taxing your resources while you're trying to work. It indexes absolutely everything, including your email, so it's great for finding that long lost document, or all the emails on a particular subject. Beware the index file size, I ended up with 5 1/2GB of index files. It cannot index mapped drives, but it will map files that you open from a mapped location, so that's a limitation where I use InfoRapid instead.
PDFCreator - create PDF files from any program you can print from - free, open source.
FlashGet - awesome free download manager. Do you tire of downloads that seem to crawl down the line at half your available bandwidth or less? Or get to the last byte of that huge download only for the connection to drop and you have to start all over? Well, FlashGet comes to the rescue. It uses very clever technology to create multiple simultaneous connections to your download to force the download at the maximum available bandwidth. You can pause a large download so that you can tend to other internet activities and resume again any time later! Unexpected connection drops will frustrate your downloads no more because FlashGet always remembers where it's up to in a download and can resume. Unlike other download managers you will not get a rude shock when trying to load large (>2GB) files, it will work!
SciTE free, open source text/code editor. This is my preferred editor. It doesn't have as many features as something like PSPad, but SciTE loads fast; you can right-click a file, select edit with SciTE and have it open very quickly. Conversely, PSPad will make you wait for its feature sets to load into memory which is painful when you want to make a few quick edits. SciTE is a tabbed editor and supports colour-coding of sourcecode and known filetypes. SciTE has all the features you need for editing files. You can edit scite's global properties (see SciTEGlobal.properties in scite's installation folder). One property that's worth changing is caret.line.back - all you need to do is remove the comment and it will start highlighting the line the caret is positioned on. I have baked my own SciTE MSI installer which is a one-stop installer to get the tabbed interface working from the explorer context menu here.
X-Chat - free, open source multi-platform IRC client. The windows build on the XChat is not free, it is shareware, but there are unofficial builds (legal under the GPL license) that you can get which should work just as well. The unofficial windows build I recommend is by Vaidrius Petrauskas. I must admit that I'm no IRC expert, and I guess that's one testament as to why I think X-Chat is so great. I installed it, chose a server, joined a channel, and started chatting! It is one of the few truly free IRC chat clients that is actually worth the wait to download. For both experienced and new IRC users I highly recommend this program.
JBidWatcher - This is an excellent sniping utility for ebay bidding. It has a number of other great features too, such as comments display. Using this software I managed to score $600 worth of Carico Donatello flatware for $1 plus $10 postage. Sellers may protest, however, if you know about this type of software you can also protect yourself against it (i.e., put a minimum selling amount on not-so-popular items). Before selling something expensive, know what you are doing - google "ebay selling".
SABnzbd+ - This free and open source binary usenet downloader is the simplest and most powerful of the free bunch. Don't rely on torrents to get the latest linux builds, usenet gives you full bandwidth every time.
BudgetSwift - Free home financial planning software.
DaFont - Free fonts site. This site has a huge selection of fonts and it allows you to enter text which will be displayed as a preview against each font so you can quickly decide on the look you are chasing. I use this site whenever I need a different font, I even used a selection for my wedding material! Each font is distributed under its own license determined by the author - usually free for personal use or unrestricted free.

Games

Free computer games:

America's Army - the U.S. army produced a game to try and increase their recruiting drive. I'm not sure how successful it is in getting new recruits but it is a top class first person shooter. Pitch your warfare skills against players from all over the world on a variety of maps.
Battlefield Heroes - This cartoon-based war game is a spinoff of the popular 'battlefield' series from EA games. It sacrifices realism for fun, and best of all, it's free. Oh, and it's a new-generation browser based game too which doesn't need a $1000 graphics card to run.
Utopia - free online strategy game. This is a text-based medieval war game where you have your own 'province' in a 'kingdom'. Your kingdom comprises of 25 provinces (which are people scattered all around the world), and you all work as a democracy to pitch the strength of your kingdom against other kingdoms in hostile, war, and even without any official declarations. Don't be put off by the text-only thing; this is a real game of courage, strategy, mateship, deception, diplomacy, revenge, spite and outright evil ;). The only downside of this game is you find yourself waking up in a cold sweat at 3:00am wondering if that big guy in the other kingdom has 'hit' you yet. This is a great game to make new friends, I was playing this for a long time - I actually stayed in the same team for 3 years! The only reason I stopped playing was because I wanted to channel my spare time into other stuff. Play it if you have a lot of free time with few commitments - great for uni students, probably bad for exam time.

CD/DVD/ISO

Whether you want to backup your movie collection, or mount or burn an ISO image I've found all the tools you need. Do NOT buy ANY program for handling CD's or DVD's or ISO's, use one of these free programs.

DoISO - My own creation (with much help from mkisofs). WinCDEmu needs ISO's; why use commercial software to create your ISO's when you can make them for free?
ImgBurn - From the maker of DVD Decrypter is this fantastic image and file burner. Don't buy Nero, use this program instead.
WinCDEmu - keep your full CD's in a single ISO file on your hard disk and access it via a virtual CD ROM drive. WinCDEmu is a no-nonsense, free and open source solution. Being free and open source, you will be forever protected from commercialisation and regular releases will ensure a stable working environment. Get much better performance from CD's you need to access constantly or administrators can make a software ISO archive so machines can be rebuilt without digging through mountains of CD's. You can install software to "run from CD", and use an ISO. Use DoISO to create your own ISO's.
IsoPuzzle - a brilliant program for making CD's and DVD's into ISO's. What sets IsoPuzzle apart is its ability to recover scratched discs. You obviously can't recover a disc that is practically mutilated, but you can recover most discs which report a bad read in other software. It will create an ISO just as quickly as any other ISO creation program, it will only slow down if it needs to recover a hard to read block.
DVD Decrypter - Project is dead but you can still find the software if you search. This is still a great DVD decrypting program. In the scheme of things, this software doesn't do any more than the decryption in DVD Shrink, so you might wonder why you would add this software for an extra, unnecessary step in backing up your DVD's? Well, the simple answer is that when DVD Shrink has trouble reading a DVD, such as when there is a small scratch, sometimes DVD Decrypter comes to the rescue and will successfully read the disk. It's a handy program to have for those occasions, however it won't save you from deep scratches.
DVD Shrink - the ultimate DVD backup software. Believe me, I have tried all the software and DVD Shrink wins hands down in ease of use and features. Making a complete backup or stripping out the main movie is a piece of cake, as is the ease in which you can remove menus, foreign language audio, director's comments and subtitles. If the resulting movie won't fit on one DVD, then no problem, it will compress the movie the exact amount it needs to fit while maintaining very high quality. This software will decrypt encrypted DVD's and optionally remove restrictions such as region and macrovision. For a straight-down-the-line guide, go to the Doom9 tutorial. Just follow the links inside the tutorial to expand it in the direction of the type of backup you want to do. It's simple to follow with good screenshots.
CDex - open-source CD ripper. This program is great, it circumvents copy protections to give you a perfect backup copy of your CD's. Forget spending good money buying rippers, this software will be your final stop. I'm not encouraging anyone to pirate recordings they haven't bought, but many countries allow you to make personal backups of your collection.

Multimedia

Whether you are a graphic artist, a musician or just want to touch up family photos and edit the family videos there is free software available for you.

MediaPortal - This is a fantastic media centre application, and it's free and open source! Get yourself a cheap (sub-$50) USB digital TV tuner, connect your PC to your TV, and with this software you've got yourself a PVR. Add your movie library and you've got a virtual video store. Plugins extend the capabilities of this brilliant software infinitely - three of which are a movie cataloguing plugin called Moving Pictures, a season management plugin called MP-TVSeries and a movie trailer viewer called MyTrailers. With the use of this software I have actually retired my $600 digital set top box, it is that good.
Handbrake - free, open source video encoding software. There are many, many options for working with video, and of them all this open source option is by far the best. You can easily convert video formats or create backups of DVD video. Video conversion can be batched to automate those big jobs.
Audacity - free, open-source audio editing software. Although I haven't played with this much, it seems like a nice, comprehensive piece of audio editing software that could be a good alternative to the commercial Sound Forge from Sony.
LMMS - Linux MultiMedia Studio. Free, open-source multimedia studio for Linux and Windows. Although I have yet to look at all the features of this software, it looks like the best free virtual studio out there.
VirtualDub - this is a very handy little video editing tool that is deceptively powerful, and it's free & open source. I use it mostly for repairing out-of-sync audio or for joining or splitting streams. It has a quick and easy option for 'direct stream copy' that does not try to re-compress everything when all you want is a quick edit - that is the major shortfall of most other similar types of software.
VideoLan - free, open source, cross platform media player that plays most available formats. This is a pretty handy program to have, even if you do use it as a second player because it solves having to have lots of various players for all the different formats. The only major format it doesn't seem to support is Real. It has playlists and is easy to use. You can even use it as a streaming server.

Graphics

Free software for touching up photos, creating original artwork, 3D modelling, vector graphics and diagramming.

2D

The Gimp - a serious open source free image manipulation tool. This is now my imaging tool of choice. For top notch creativity tips, visit GimpGuru.org. The ONLY reason you would need to purchase a program such as photoshop over using the Gimp is that the Gimp is restricted to 8 bit editing, which is not terribly useful for professional photo production.

Inkscape - free open source vector graphics editor. This seems to be the pick of the bunch, with professional features and complying to the W3C SVG standards I'd have to say this is the premiere open source vector graphics software. It has a large number of features, including text on paths, text overflow effects, bitmap tracing, the list goes on and on.

Picturenaut - free HDR software. Picturenaut stands out as probably the best free HDR programs around. It does such a good job that you probably don't even need commercial software for HDR work. I tried it on some 16bit TIF images I prepared and it did a great job.

OpenClipArt - now that you have some serious graphic design software, get yourself some free and open clipart.

Crystal Icons - a set of beautiful icons licensed under the LGPL for use in your projects. Don't re-invent the wheel!

Dia - a free open source diagramming tool. Has a number of technical diagram templates.

VisioModeler - a free (and unsupported) database design tool using semantic modeling from Microsoft.

Network Notepad - free network diagramming software. Software specialises in network diagramming and appears to be very professional and complete.

Hugin - free, open source photo stitching software. This software is simply amazing - given a number of well-overlapped photos you will get a seamless panorama just as good as the commercial stuff. If you get errors with autopano-sift-c, please visit this discussion which solved it for me: http://www.tawbaware.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?p=32271. Here is an example of a panorama made with Hugin here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ebswift/4104361481/. Cutting edge builds that include the compiled autopano.c can be found here: http://lemur.dreamhosters.com/hugin/

Convertico - free online service for converting png files into ICO files. The service is fast (as in immediate) and effective.

3D

Look at the gallery and screenshots for each product to get an idea of what you can do.

Blender - a seriously full-featured 3D modeller and renderer. Can import/export a number of formats, can be used for game scenario creation (with collision detection etc.) and create animations and videos. A mind blowing array of features for free. The features are daunting, so begin your readings with Blender 3D: Noob to Pro.

Yafray - 'Yet Another Free Raytracer' - free, open source ray tracing program. Yafray is the choice renderer for Blender, though not required for Blender. Yafray opens up some sophisticated render features not available to blender.

LuxRender - A free, open source unbiased renderer.

MakeHuman - free, open source humanoid modelling plugin for Blender.

ArtOfIllusion - free, open source modeller/renderer. This looks like a great product which allows you to perform some sophisticated modelling and animation. Support for skinning and animation are an example of the powerful features.

Pov-Ray - a free, open source rendering engine. This software in itself doesn't have a built-in modeller, but existing modellers can export the Pov-Ray format. Pov-Ray is a high precision renderer which is capable of renders which rival any commercial product available. With an outstanding array of effects, texturing and mesh options, this package is unbeatable. Combine it with your favourite modeller to get photo-realistic renderings.

K-3D - free, open source renderman modeller.

JPatch - free, open source spline-based 3D modeller. Can output formats for renderman compliant renders, or Pov-Ray.

PoseRay - import models from a number of different formats, and export to other formats. Tweak the models with the in-build manipulation tools before exporting. Very handy for converting model formats and texturing.

PovLab - free, open source modeller for Pov-Ray.

OpenFX - a serious 3D modelling, rendering and animation tool. Free and open source. Many plugins are available to produce special effects.

System

System software covers software that you don't interact with so much but sits in the background keeping your home or small office network/computers running in a managed fashion.

FlexRAID - If you're considering buying a NAS (Network Attached Storage) for backing up your important data, and it is mainly for bulk storage as opposed to a large, live data source like a database, then consider FlexRAID. This free solution allows for distributed storage to be treated as one large local drive. The advantage is that you can mix & match media and you can configure it for failover to taste. In general you can match your largest storage drive in your array with one redundant drive that synchronises parity. If any drive fails you can replace it and recover all data that was on that drive. You can also recover any accidentally deleted files providing you haven't re-synchronised before the attempt at undeleting. There is an upcoming eagerly awaited version of FlexRAID Live which will automatically handle synchronisation bringing it inline with other commercial solutions.
Softerra LDAP Browser - If you want to browse an ldap directory, this is the tool for you.
Partition Wizard - free partition management software is difficult to come by, and often there are limitations which make the software unusable on modern systems. I tested Partition Wizard on a laptop running Windows 7 64bit and it worked great!
Clonezilla - This professional-grade software allows you to clone your PC installation for quick re-deployment or as a backup. Both enterprise and single PC versions are available. Pretty surprising for free and open source software! For cloning a single PC you can simply burn the provided bootable Clonezilla ISO to a CD/DVD and get cloning in minutes.

Cloud

Cloud computing is the next generation web-based computing. Applications and storage are moving away from the desktop to online. In countries such as Australia we are limited by extreme restrictions on bandwidth (unless you can pay hundreds of dollars per month in internet fees), but people in other countries with fast connections and unlimited bandwidth can make the most use of this new era of computing. I hope countries such as Australia are liberated from the current third-world version of the internet soon.

Ghost - a free cloud computing platform with a huge 15GB of storage thrown in. Basically it is a full computer that you run inside a browser with document editing tools, image editors, a virtual hard drive and lots, lots more. If nothing else it's worth having just for the online storage.
Windows Live Spaces - 25GB of storage for documents, photos, music and more.

Informational/Educational (Read and Explore)

Although a number of the software tools I have mentioned are quite relevant to education, there are utilities that students would find most useful in referencing during study.

NASA Learning Technologies - breathtaking suite of free software which brings science to your home for entertainment or learning. There are a number of programs available for download, here are a few:
- World Wind: spin a 3D representation of the earth around, and zoom into any location on the planet using real satellite imagery. Several satellites can be used, and in most locations, details of landmarks are marked. Maps are available for many areas.
- NASA SVS: Scientific Visualisation Studio lets you visualise animated scientific data of earth while controlling a 3D representation of the planet.
- Virtual Lab: you control a virtual electron microscope where you can select samples and pan & zoom up to 3,600X! More samples are being added as the software is updated.
- Virtual Field Trip: "The Virtual Field Trip is an immersive multimedia application developed to support student and user exploration of areas on Earth that have been identified as analog sites to regions on Mars."
Celestia - free 3D space explorer. Explore our solar system and beyond. Extremely comprehensive, this tool is a great way to get to know the universe better.
Google Earth - free satellite imagery. this is one of the best services I have seen to-date on the net. If you have a fast enough connection you could spend literally years looking through this interface - how long do you think it would take you to have a detailed look at the entire land surface area of the earth? Although this software is very similar to NASA's World Wind software, poor under-resourced NASA is striving to provide a lot of detail, but it will take them a while to get there. Google on the other hand purchased a well-established company (Keyhole) and proceeded to add content as fast as they can. Basically you are presented with an outer space view of the earth which you can spin around using your mouse. Once you centre the location of interest on the screen you can start zooming in - in many areas you can zoom to the point where you can make out cars and trees, and easily read airport runway markers. You can follow roads, and where supported you can actually have map overlays. One of the most amazing features I've seen with Google Earth is the elevation data. Once you zoom in on a location you can actually tilt it up until you are looking along the ground so that you can see surrounding hills and valleys. Go into the Grand Canyon and you can literally follow the bottom with the walls of the canyon towering up either side. This is all topped off by the most accurate street maps available, street view, ocean topology and much, much more. You have to see it to believe it.
CIA World Fact Book - free downloadable/online world reference. Developed by the CIA for the CIA, you can find out just about anything on every country, including maps, GDP, birth rates, death rates, the list goes on and on and on!
Start Natural Language Question Answering System - search for facts in plain english. This is the smartest, most thorough fact searching utility I have ever seen (if someone finds a smarter one I'd love to know!). Ask a question like "what is the largest body of water in the world?" and you will get the answer: "With an area of 152,239 square miles, Caspian Sea is the largest lake in the world." along with references and links. You can ask "what does an African elephant look like?" and Start will give you hyperlinks to pictures of African elephants. Try an obscure question like "how far is it from rockhampton australia to new york?" and you will be presented a correct answer. All facts from the CIA factbook have been fed into Start, and many reference sites from the web have also been added as information resources to expand the knowledge base. It has to be tried to be believed.
WikiPedia - a comprehensive online encyclopedia. One of the criticisms of this is that if you were to use it for classroom reference it could be vandalised or have an incorrect edit at any time during use - which means that students will be viewing varying forms of the reference. A workaround is to review a page before dissemination, then use the history tab to get the tagged version of the page so that all students are referencing the same page. Of course, you must have enough knowledge or cross-reference material to ensure that the current version is true & correct. This is what separates wikipedia from a definitive encyclopedia relevant for classroom use. One controversial issue with wikipedia is its fear of dilution, even though it has no limits as does a paper volume (for all practical purposes). Its policies allow for it to be easier to remove material than to add it. Adding to all this, stubs cannot be created, only fully referenced, complete articles.

Version Control

I find this needs a section of its own because it fits into both desktop software and programming. You can use version control to manage document versions, as well as source code versioning:

KDiff3 - free, open source diff/merge program. This is probably the pick of the bunch.
WinMerge - free, open source file difference program.
Subversion - the self-proclaimed successor to CVS. Subversion is a terrific version control solution which handles text-based and binary files, both distributed and local, with support for UNC paths and levels of security. It can run with or without a server, but if you're going distributed, you'll need the server. This is a truly powerful version control solution that can't be overlooked. It does not enforce versions with locking - rather it assists to merge various modifications. Because I like this software so much I am now in charge of the win32 installer releases for Subversion.
TortoiseSVN - the desktop companion for Subversion. It integrates nicely into windows explorer, allowing you to manage your version control with a click of a couple of buttons. For example, to update files from a repository, you normally go to a command prompt, go to the right folder, then type in the command "svn update". That's simple enough, but with TortoiseSVN, you just right-click the folder and select the 'SVN Update' command. Most Subversion features are available from the shortcut menu.

.Net Programming Tools (incl. Mono), Controls, Classes, Add-Ins & Database

Tools you need to construct professional quality software in .Net:

SharpDevelop - a free open source .Net development IDE. Where possible, this is my primary development tool.
Microsoft Visual Studio Express Editions - Don't let the 'Express' in the naming of these tools fool you - this is one powerful set of tools that will meet the needs of most developers for most sized projects. Covering c#, VB.Net, Visual c++ and ASP.Net, you have access to complete development environments with intellisense and debugging. You don't get access to Microsoft's deployment projects and you are unable to create mixed-language solutions (however you can take a compiled DLL from another language and stick it in the references). You also unfortunately do not have access to pocket PC development tools which is a big shame because there are few options available. For creating high quality MSI installations I recommend making a separate WiX project in SharpDevelop to package your application.
Microsoft SQL Server Express - you need the power of SQL Server in a small scale application but don't want to spend thousands? Well I'm sure that 'free' sounds like a nice price. I love having access to User Defined Functions, Stored Procedures, Triggers, and all the rest.
VistaDB - I had a problem where I needed an application to have a small footprint and ease of installation for painless downloading from the web. While MS SQL Server Express is a great tool, it doesn't have a small footprint, though you can pretty-much make its installation transparent to the end user (last time I did this was by way of a bootstrapper). VistaDB gives you nearly all the goodness and performance of MS SQL Server Express squeezed into a package of less than 1MB(!) that can be embedded straight into the application, can run on Mono (yep, you can make a killer cross-platform app with a MS SQL Server compatible database), and even on the Pocket PC/Windows Mobile platform. I can't say enough about this powerful little database engine - give it a go yourself, there are both free and commercial license models - both have the same engine available, just different licenses for commercial use. VistaDB is free for use in open source projects (NON GPL).
NUnit - free, open source unit testing tool for .Net. NUnit supports all .Net languages and it is fantastic. If you don't know what unit testing is, learn today! Basically it allows you to write small test methods for your class methods and test return results. This is far easier than writing separate test applications or running the debugger everytime you make a code change. It also retains all your tests so that when you make numerous modifications you just run the unit tests and it tests all your methods with your preset conditions.
TestDriven.Net - free unit testing add-in for Visual Studio .Net. When looking for integrated solutions I had never heard of this product, but once I installed it I haven't looked back, it is great! You can write unit testing code and test it on-the-fly in the IDE - and you have full right-click control over what you test. You can right-click on a single test sub and choose to run that test on its own, right-click on the head of a test class and have all the test methods run, right-click on a source file and have all contained test classes run, or right-click on a project and have all tests in the test project run. That is the most flexibility you will ever need - I find it excellent for testing single methods until I get them right - it decreases the amount of time you need to be using the debugger exponentially. TestDriven works in Visual Studio .Net 2003 & 2005. It is slightly unstable, but it won't affect the IDE itself. If you need to continue testing, but TestDriven ceases to operate properly, just close the IDE and reopen.
MyGeneration - free code generator and O/R (object relations) mapping tool. This is a comprehensive, extensible tool for generating code. I have yet to explore this tool but it looks very professional.
DockPanel Suite - awesome open source docking.
VB.DOC - open source VB.Net documentation system, works both standalone or with Visual Studio .Net or as a NAnt task. It creates C# style XML documentation from your comments. Use NDoc to compile your documentation.
NDoc - open source; document your programming work in style: "generates class library documentation from .NET assemblies and the XML documentation files generated by the C# compiler (or with an add-on tool for VB.Net)". The output formats supported are terrific, including the MSDN-style HTML Help format (.chm), the Visual Studio .Net help format (HTML Help 2) and MSDN-online style web pages.
Custom Help Builder - builds help from your XML comments output to integrate into Visual Studio .Net 2003, including context-sensitive help for your own documented objects!
Ezfuscator.Net - simple and effective integrated or drag & drop obfuscation for your .Net Framework projects.

General Software Development Tools

Tools for general software development:

WiX - an open source toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. This is a project released to open source by Microsoft! Some of my software is packaged with WiX. SharpDevelop has a WiX editor built-in for easier WiX XML file creation.
DocBook XML - DTD for making those help files. Also see DocBooK SGML.
Mantis - free, open source online bug tracking software. This is what I use.
SoapUI - free, open source web services testing software. Test web services on the fly.

Webmaster Resources

Tools to manage and make your website better:

FileZilla - free, open source ftp client/server. I haven't tried this as a server, but as an FTP client it is great. It's as good as the commercial products but you don't need to pay a cent.
Wikka - free, open source wiki. This is a simple to install, simple to use full featured wiki.
GSiteCrawler - free sitemap manager for your website that covers Google & Yahoo. As good as the rest and free.
phpBB - a free, open source bulletin board (forum). I visit a lot of sites, and many have some kind of forum available. I must say though that when I do visit forums, those which use phpBB always provide the most friendly interface with the fullest set of features you would want to use. You can have your own avatar (depending on whether the webmaster allows it), get email notification on replies to your posts, get personal messages (with email notification), comprehensive search, and much more. Check out my own phpBB forum to see the features (and maybe drop a comment while you're at it ;) ).
Greentop Forum Operator program - many people with their own site don't have access to more sophisticated technology that allows you to host your own phpBB, or it may seem a bit of an overwhelming task to install it yourself and maintain the database behind it. Well, my friends at Greentop can help you out. They have free phpBB hosting with a generous size allowance, a big set of features and friendly, efficient support. I briefly hosted my own forum there before I got everything sorted to be able to host my own. Checkout their other services as well, free forum hosting is only a part of what they do.

Even More Free Software