Ad Hoc Development Tools

[NunoSilva]

Most of my professional life I was (amongst other professions in the STEM area) an application developer.

Born in the nineteen fifties, I'm an old (Portuguese) geezer that started programming in:
- COBOL
- RPG II
over databases:
- SQL (various flavours)
and for scientific work:
- Fortran (IV, 77, etc.)
- PL/I
Later on I've done a lot in:
- C/C++
- Object Pascal

Not I'm semi-retired (in Brazil) but, although it is not frequent, I'm sometimes still called to do maintenance in my old work (mostly COBOL, Fortran, SQL, C/C++, Object Pascal, etc., for various organizations in several countries) as freelancer.

That always highlighted the utmost importance of good, solid and complete documentation - how else could I remember what I did (and how I did it) decades ago?

That is why I Carry around my "Pocket Ad Hoc Office" and my "Parallel" Developer Tools. Some are old, some are new, some are free, some are not - all are portable.

[NunoSilva]

I reread my old PDFs, change what needs to be updated (compile, test, etc.) and add new pages to the application(s) documentation PDFs.

Essential tool for that are:

* SumatraPDF
https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=1193
Lightweight tabbed document reader for PDF, CHM, eBooks and other formats.

* PDFTK Builder Enhanced
https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=1066
GUI frontend to the command-line PDFtk, which allows:
- add, split and reorder pages
- split
- reorder
- rejoin
pages of PDFs - and many more.

Companion Tools - apart from a SOLID Office (capable of PDF output and with a good spell checker) - are:

* PSPad - Text Editor and Coding Environment
https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=15
A solid text editor and complete coding environment.
Multi file tabbed editor, supports syntax highlighting.
May be integrated as a basic IDE with compilers and debuggers.
Integrates an hexadecimal editor, spell checks under several languages,
includes an FTP client, code explorer and more.
Allows user macro scripting.

* PhotoFiltre - General Bitmap Image Editor
https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=12
Full image editor and retouching program.
UI takes some getting used to, but is well worth the effort.
Open extensible architecture which accepts plugins, etc.
Capable of reading and saving many bitmap formats.

* IcoFX
https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=1224
Complete Icon editor and librarian.
Good for creating and editing icons and assemble icon libraries.

* AniFX
https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=2100
Complete Cursor editor.
Good for creating and editing cursor (also animated).

* Resource Hacker
https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=289
A tool to view, modify, rename, add, delete and extract resources
from Windows executables and resource files (*.res).

* HxD
https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=1454
In my experience, the best and most complete hexadecimal editor.
Handles files of any size, does raw disk editing and even edits RAM.

[NunoSilva]

To work with flat record files (quite common), some *NIX ported Tools (to run in a DOS-like window):

* BASH
https://sourceforge.net/projects/win-bash/
The command-like *NIX processor.

* GREP
https://sourceforge.net/projects/win-bash/
Fundamental search tool.

* SED
https://sourceforge.net/projects/win-bash/
Basic stream editor.

* AWK
https://sourceforge.net/projects/win-bash/
Indispensible for data set editing and conversion.

* SORT
https://sourceforge.net/projects/win-bash/
Flat file sorting tool.

and a few more...

Also one should look at:
https://ss64.com/bash/

[NunoSilva]

And for Free Portable Development Tools:

* BAT to EXE Converter
https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=1660
Don't laugh! It is most useful for the testing and integration of modules.
Converts batch file scripts (BAT and CMD) into executables (EXE)

Also one should look at:
https://ss64.com/nt/

* Cppcheck
https://portableapps.com/apps/developme ... k-portable
Analysis tool for C/C++ code.
Detects the types of bugs that most compilers normally fail to detect.
Mainly geared towards avoiding false positives.

* Dev-C++
https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=417
IDE for C/C++ over GCC including:
- project manager,
- syntax highlighting,
- class browser,
- code completion,
- integrated debugging
etc.

* Code::Blocks
https://codeblocks.codecutter.org/
Although an educational version, it is quite useful to test source code.
The current Code::Blocks release
https://www.codeblocks.org/
may be obtained portable:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/codebl ... /Binaries/
look for a file like:
(release#)/Windows/codeblocks-(release#)mingw-nosetup.zip

* Dev-Pascal
https://www.bloodshed.net/Dev-Pascal
IDE for Object Pascal over Free Pascal including:
- project manager,
- syntax highlighting,
- code completion,
- integrated debugging
etc.

* Lazarus
https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
THE Free - nearly professional - Object Pascal RAD IDE (Rapid Application Development / Integrated Development Environment).
And an application that starts Lazarus as Portable:
https://github.com/JoeJoeTV/startLazarusPortable

[NunoSilva]

And for Databases over which to develop

* DB Browser for SQLite - Database Editor
https://portableapps.com/apps/developme ... r_portable
Visual tool to create, design and edit database SQLite files,
the "de facto" standard for SQL driven relational databases.
Although ODB is a published standard, SQLite is the most
used database format in use for most developers.

[NunoSilva]

And to carry datasets between Databases, Spreadsheets, etc.:

* CSVed
https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=1101
Flat file database tool.
Exchanges datasets with spreadsheets thru the CSV/TSV file type.

[NunoSilva]

Usually I carry all this in a DVD (to avoid "infections") and them copy it into the machine environment locally provided for my work.