The Azure Engineer/Architect Toolkit

A while back on Twitter, William Durkin (@sql_williamd) / Twitter posted a tweet asking what tools were essential on your machine and that got me thinking what mine are. This is going to be a living post so I will update as and when things change.

Here’s my list, besides Office, Visio and Windows, they are all free:

Admin Tools

• Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer – For interfacing with Azure storage accounts and data lakes – (Azure Storage Explorer – cloud storage management | Microsoft Azure)
• PuTTY – When you need use SSH for connecting to Unix/Linux based hosts – (Download PuTTY: latest release (0.74) (greenend.org.uk))
• PowerShell – The cross-platform terminal for PowerShell development – (Get PowerShell – Microsoft Store en-GB)
  • Az PowerShell module
  • DBATools PowerShell module
• RDTabs – When you need to have multiple active remote desktop connections at the same time – (RD Tabs (avianwaves.com))
• Windows Terminal – (Get Windows Terminal – Microsoft Store en-GB)

Development Tools

• Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio & Azure Data Studio – IDEs for MSSQL and PostgreSQL development – (Download SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) – SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) | Microsoft Docs)
• Microsoft SQL Server Developer Edition 2019/2022 – (SQL Server Developer Edition)
• Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2019/2022 – (Visual Studio IDE, Code Editor, Azure DevOps, & App Center – Visual Studio (microsoft.com))
  • The following extensions installed:
    • GitHub Extension for Visual Studio
    • Microsoft Analysis Services Projects
    • Microsoft RDLC Report Designer
    • Microsoft Reporting Services Projects
    • SQL Server Integration Services Projects (Not released for VS2022 yet)
    • Visual Studio Intellicode
• Microsoft Visual Studio Code – (Visual Studio Code – Code Editing. Redefined)
  • The following extensions installed:
    • Azure Extensions by Microsoft
    • Bicep
    • C#
    • compareit by in4margaret – Allows you to compare two files side-by-side so you can see the difference
    • Databricks VSCode
    • JSTool by sunjw – Formats JSON documents
    • Jupyter
    • parquet-viewer
    • PowerShell
    • Poor Man’s T-SQL Formatter by Tao Klerks
    • Prettier
    • Python
    • Scala Syntax
    • Security Intellisense
    • SQL Server Tools
    • Terraform
    • Visual Studio Intellicode
    • YAML by RedHat
• MySQL Workbench – IDE for MySQL databases – (MySQL :: Download MySQL Workbench)

General Tools

• 7-Zip – For compressed archive file management – (7-Zip (7-zip.org))
• Adobe Acrobat Reader DC – (Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, free PDF viewer download)
• Bitwarden for Password Management – (Bitwarden Open Source Password Manager | Bitwarden)
  • They have a free tier
  • Desktop/Mobile apps and browser addons available
• grepWin – A great open-source tool for searching the contents of flat files – (grepWin – Stefans Tools (stefankueng.com))
• Microsoft Edge
  • The following extensions installed:
    • Az Mask Addon – You can hide your tenant/subscription ids when using the portal in your demos – (Az Mask – Microsoft Edge Addons)
    • Microsoft Editor – Really useful for improving that standard of your writing – (Microsoft Editor: Spelling & Grammar Checker – Microsoft Edge Addons)
    • Adblock Plus – Really makes browsing the web much simpler – (Adblock Plus – free ad blocker – Microsoft Edge Addons)
• Microsoft Office 365 incl. Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Visio 365
  • Highly recommend the Microsoft provided stencils for Azure for architecture diagrams
• paint.Net – Free image editing tool – (Paint.NET – Download (getpaint.net))
  • The following extensions installed:
    • Align Object – (Align Object – Plugins – Publishing ONLY! – paint.net Forum (getpaint.net))
    • ICO/Cur Format – (Icon, Cursor, and Animated Cursor Format v3.7 (May 2010) – Page 13 – FileType Plugins – paint.net Forum (getpaint.net))
    • Photoshop Document Format – (Paint.NET PSD Plugin | Paint.NET PSD Plugin)
• PortQryUI – Useful for diagnosing network connectivity over specific ports – (Download PortQryUI – User Interface for the PortQry Command Line Port Scanner from Official Microsoft Download Center)
• PowerToys for Windows – The extra functionality for Windows you didn’t think you needed. Personal favourites – Color Picker, Cursor Finder and Text Extractor (microsoft/PowerToys: Windows system utilities to maximize productivity (github.com))
• SysInternals Suite – Lots of useful Windows administration tools – (Sysinternals Utilities – Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs)
  • TCPView – Useful for diagnosing network connectivity problems
  • ZoomIt – Extremely useful when giving demos
• Windows 10/11 Pro or Enterprise
• WinSCP – A clean SFTP client – (WinSCP :: Official Site :: Free SFTP and FTP client for Windows)

Reporting Tools

• Microsoft Power BI Desktop – For the reporting front-end development – (Get Power BI Desktop – Microsoft Store en-GB)
• Microsoft Power BI Report Builder – For developing paginated reports for Power BI – (Download Microsoft® Power BI Report Builder from Official Microsoft Download Center)
• Microsoft Reporting Services Report Builder – (Install Report Builder – SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) | Microsoft Docs)