Paragon Office and Programming Productivity Hot Picks

FlashDevelop

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2008-04-13

Free Open source IDE for Adobe FLEX/AIR and Active Script (2,3) Flash development. It is written in .NET and sports intellisense, nice code editor. It lacks the WYSIWIG features of Adobe's FlexBuilder. OS: Windows

Quantum GIS

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2008-02-28

This is an Open Source desktop mapping and spatial analysis package. It supports Linux, Windows, Unix, and Mac OSX. It is ideal for viewing WMS, WFS, ESRI Shape, Postgis, TIFF and numerous other formats and is very beginner friendly.

StatCounter

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2007-12-06

This is a web statistics service similar to Google Analytics and deployed using javascript similar to the way Google Analytics works, but has some unique features that Google Analytics lacks. Check out the cool visitor map that allows you to track individual users. They offer both a free version and a non-free version. The free version has all the functionality of the non-free but has smaller logging space (so not suitable for big sites)

Visual Wget

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2007-11-04

Visual Wget is a visual (non-commandline) version of Wget that runs on Windows 32-bit and Windows 64-bit OS. In addition to providing a windows like feel to Wget, it has a simple job management feature that allows you to save jobs for future run. Requires .NET 2.0 Framework.

OpenLayers

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2007-10-14

This is by far our favorite javascript API for GIS. It allows you to overlay various GIS webservices against MS Virtual Earth, Google etc. It makes a nice companion with UMN Mapserver.

PSPad

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2007-10-14

PSPad is a free light-weight programming editor for MS Windows similar in style to NotePad++. Some nice features it has that NotePad++ lacks are an integrated FTP (pretty nice). A very nice text difference tool for comparing files. Very very basic intellisense for languages like PHP, HTML, CSS. TidyHTML functionality. Ability to do a google search on a highlighted text directly from editor. It however does not appear to be a plug-in based architecture like NotePad++ so probably harder to extend.

SharpMap

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2007-09-19

A free and opensource mapping tool kit for the .NET 2.0 Framework. It is written in C# and supports various GIS datasources such as PostGIS, MssqlSpatial, ESRI Shape, now SQLite, and other OGR datasources such as MapInfo. It works in ASP.NET as well as Windows desktop development.

Awstats

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2007-09-19

Awstats is a free and opensource Web Log analyzer and web statistics reporting tool. It is written in Perl and works equally well on Windows as well as other Perl platforms such as Linux/Unix

Dzone

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2007-09-15

This is a social bookmarking site that is focused on just programming and database related topics.

Square Gear Fonts: Matthew Welch

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2007-08-30

Free Barcode fonts among other custom fonts. I found this site when looking for free or cheap bar code fonts. The 3 Of 9 barcode fonts really work and are free for both commercial and private use. Its amazing that you can buy a bar code reader and they rarely provide prepackaged bar code fonts.

OracleXE

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2007-07-27

Oracle Express Edition. A free crippled version of the regular Oracle database, but has some nice features like Oracle Locator (that provides the oracle limited GIS OGC functionality but not advanced OGC functionality such as buffering, intersection etc.) all the base features of Oracle such packages, stored procs etc but of course no clustering or partitioning. Also comes packaged with an SQL Editor and browser. Only one processor will be used and 1GB ram and 4GB database, but you can install on a multi-processor server with more than 1GB ram. It’s a good bet if you want to get a basic feel for Oracle databases.

VisionApp Remote Desktop

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2007-07-27

Allows for management of Windows remote desktop and terminal services connections. Allows you to store password credentials and configuration settings such as size of screen, what to share (disk, printer, sound,clipboard) and how to connect (by console or non-console mode). Its very handy if you have a lot of remote desktop server connections to connect to consistently. It also offers tabbed view and a cute overview snapshot of each computer. OS: Windows

PsTools

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2007-07-05

This is a handy MS Windows SysInternals toolkit that contains command-line tools for checking what is installed on a remote pc, remotely checking who is logged on to a pc, changing passwords on a remote pc, executing processes remotely, checking what services are running on a remote pc and suspend and shutdown and reboot of a remote pc. Only works on windows Oses.

Microsoft SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2007-07-04

This free add-on tool allows you to export both structure, sqlserver objects (tables sps, functions etc), as well as data to T-SQL scripts for Microsoft SQL Server 2000/2005 databases. So it adds that missing ingredient that Generate Scripts functionality in SQL Management Studio is missing (ability to export data). It works for both SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000 databases.

This package is part of the SQL Server Hosting Toolkit codeplex project. For those who are also interested in the project, you can checkout the project details at SQL Server Hosting ToolKit CodePlex

FWTools

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2007-06-23

FWTools GIS toolkit is composed of a number of tools. It contains UMN Mapserver as one of its packages. My favorite tool packaged in the suite is OGR2OGR which allows you to convert data from various data sources into GIS datasources. Check out our tips on OGR2OGR usage.
OS Support: Linux, Windows

Toad for Oracle

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2007-06-23

This used to be free, but appears to no longer be

Wget

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2007-06-23

Wget is a mini web-crawler that is commonly found preinstalled on Linux/Unix machines, but may not be known by Windows folks. Well it does have a windows version. If ever you wanted a quick commandline that will call a web page, sequentially download files from an ftp, then look know further. Wget is it and nicely packed as a single self-contained command-line executable. I have provided the link to the Windows version since Linux folks probably already have the little tool installed on their servers/computers.

Toad for SQL Server

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2007-03-27

Toad for SQL Server by Quest Software is a very feature-full database management and development tool for MSSQL Server (2000 and 2005). It used to come in both freeware version as well as a commercial version, but they appeared to have discontinued their freeware version. The commercial version sports additional features like an sql tuning wizard that helps you rewrite your queries to be more efficient. OS: Windows

Toad for MySQL

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2007-03-27

Toad for MySQL by Quest Software is a very feature-full database management and development freeware tool for MySQL. OS: Windows

Eclipse PHP Plugin

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2006-12-31

PHP plugin for Eclipse. Has outline view, debugger, task list etc. for PHP. A must have if you are using Eclipse for PHP editing.

Eclipse

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2006-12-31

All-Purpose editor, most suited for Java Development, but plug-ins exist for PHP among other languages. Sports autocompletion, integrated debugger, error checker etc. Its built on top of Java so will run whereever a Java VM exists.

Boston GIS

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2006-12-15

This is a site sponsored by us. We provide examples using opensource, opengis or freely available GIS tools and GIS SDKs.

HotScripts

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2006-07-04

Many free and relatively cheap scripts and classes for web development. Sections include PHP, ASP.NET, ASP, Javascript to name a few.

Process Explorer

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2006-06-24

This handy tool allows you to see all the files being accessed or trying to be accessed by a particular application. Very handy for troubleshooting application crashes.

Junction by sysinternals

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2006-06-24

If you ever wanted to create Linux/Unix style symlinks in Windows, then this tool is for you. This tool can create directory symbolic links in Windows 2000/Windows 2003. I assume it would work in XP as well.

AutoRuns by sysinternals

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2006-06-17

This software allows you to quickly access commonly used windows registry locations such as where viruses commonly install malware, or programs get themselves in startup and allows you to quickly delete them or turn them off. Comes in windows GUI version Autoruns.exe and command line Autorunsc.exe. Very handy and no installation required. OS: Windows of most flavors

PgAdmin III

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2006-06-05

PgAdmin is a cross-platform PostgreSQL database administration application based on WxWidgets which comes pre-packaged with PostgreSQL. Sports a graphical explain plan and PgAgent - a service add on to PostgreSQL for scheduling tasks. OS: Windows, Mac, Solaris, Linux

DebugMode WINK

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2006-06-05

Wink is a tutorial and presentation screen capture software similar to TechSmith's Camtasia product, but Free for private and business use for most purposes and can run on most Linux desktops as well as windows desktops. Output formats are Macromedia Flash, EXE, PDF, PostScript, HTML, BMP, JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF. OS: All windows Platforms, Linux x86

Paint.NET

Paragon Corporation (mailto:support@paragoncorporation.com) — 2006-06-05

Free and Opensource photo-manipulation software for Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Server. Latest version requires .NET 2.0 runtime installed. Supports 32 and 64-bit systems. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. A Washington State University project.Paint.Net has recently been ported to Mono.NET as well so can now run on Linux

Portable VLC Media Player