What useful developer tools does Windows XP come with?

Question

I work in a pseudo-IT team that does development outside of a formal IT development environment - using Windows XP (and IE6). I can't install any software myself, so can only use what the central IT department makes available - which isn't much.

I have lots of UNIX development experience, so it's painful working without some of the tools I have previously taken for granted.

Notepad is my favorite thing about Windows. What else is there hiding in C:\Windows that I should know about?

[Dr. Watson](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2005/11/14/492483.aspx)! — Cody Gray - on strike, Apr 03 '11 at 13:13

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:19

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Not a great deal, if you're used to the plethora that comes with UNIX. The cmd.exe language has come a long way since the brain-dead version with MS-DOS. It's still no match for bash but it's not bad. Check out Rob Van der Woude's site ("Batch Files" link on the left side) for some fantastic little snippets.

I do know that findstr now does regular expressions so it's at least coming close to grep.

See also this question (which has a couple of answers from me and absolute bucketloads from everyone else) re Windows batch files.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:19

Community

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answered Apr 03 '11 at 12:19

paxdiablo

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Except that, for doing anything "serious", you must use some incredible trickery that will inevitably include a weird `for` with a ton of incomprehensible options. – Matteo Italia Apr 03 '11 at 12:21
@Matteo: yes but, as they say, if the only tool you have is a piece of wet celery, every problem looks like a ... well ... I can't actually think of anything funny to say here :-) OP stated that they were only allowed to use standard tooling so that's how I answered. – paxdiablo Apr 03 '11 at 12:24
@Matteo Italia: That's why I mentioned `cscript` in my answer. JavaScript may not be the world's best programming language, but it sure beats `cmd`. – Jörg W Mittag Apr 03 '11 at 12:29

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 03 '11 at 12:18

A JavaScript interpreter: cscript / wscript (can also interpret VBScript plus any other language for which a Windows ScriptingHost compliant interpreter is installed)
WordPad: practically useless except for one thing: it can read Unix line endings, unlike NotePad
if you're lucky: PowerShell

Note that plenty of applications are also packaged as so-called portable applications which need no installation: Firefox, NotePad++, even a complete Ubuntu distribution.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 03 '11 at 12:31

ntsd (the Windows NT debugger for user-mode programs - command line stuff, a bit like gdb) was available by default on Windows installations in the system32 directory, although I think that this policy has changed since I can't find it in my Windows 7 64 bit installation.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 03 '11 at 12:41

mmm... not much indeed, besides I think everything that comes out of the box have already been mentioned...

not really answering your question, but I would recommend to use portable software, there's a huge collection of them available, like notepad++, winmerge, grepwin...

What useful developer tools does Windows XP come with?

4 Answers4