This is what I use and/or recommend for .NET development:

Visual Studio 2008

Get the VS 2008 Pro with MSDN Pro subscription, so you have all the operating systems licenses as well. It also includes SQL Server (developer license), which you need. This package costs a bit above $1,000 (12,000 SEK). The second year is a bit less, but I figure it’s better to let it lapse until there’s something new interesting to be had. Even if you skip just three or four months every year, it’s cheaper that way.

Perl

To let you work around all the obstacles Microsoft puts in your way to force you to buy the $10,000 Team Suite, while you’d rather eat an entire hat store or learn Perl, than succumb to that pressure.

Subversion

For version control, subversion is hard to beat and it’s free. Add in the free Tortoise client and the commercial VisualSVN plug-in for VS ($49).

Build tools

No doubt that FinalBuilder is great for this, but it’s pricey ($599). NAnt is an alternative, but is it worth the pain? Personally, I don’t think so. Go for FinalBuilder.

Installers

Installshield, Wise, and those guys are incredibly expensive. I can’t even think of them without getting a headache. NSIS is an open source project and if you add in HM NIS Edit (also open source), which is one of several available GUI front-ends for NSIS, it’s actually pretty decent. (There’s also a plug-in for Eclipse called EclipseNSIS that looks really decent, but I haven’t tried it.) Lot’s of things are strange and complex, but since so many use NSIS, you’ll find heaps of examples and problem solutions on the net.

NUnit

Get NUnit for unit testing. Free.

FxCop

FxCop is a free static code analyzer from Microsoft. Run it over any .NET code you produce and be amazed at the number of errors it finds. Then be amazed over the number of errors that aren’t errors, like variable names that make sense to you but not to FxCop. Disable all those warnings. Be amazed over what remains and start to fix it. Oh, before I forget, FxCop also detects unused code. Nothing else in VS seems to do that. (Unless you submit to Ballmer’s will and cough up the mountain of gold for Team Suite, of course.)

Coverage analysis

I would need coverage analysis, but have none. Any ideas are welcome. Except for Team Suite.

Performance profiling

A performance profiler would be welcome, too. Any suggestions? No, not Team Suite.

Code Documentation

There are these documentation utilities that extract comments from source and produce nice looking docs from that. I may be a deviant, but I don’t see the use of that. I’ve never met anyone that actually used those documents for anything. So I pass on documentation-from-code extracting utilities.

Actually, there’s a philosophical question buried here. Stand-alone documentation should document what you can’t deduce from the code, like overarching principles and architecture and stuff. Code should document what it does, as much as possible without comments. Comments in code should only describe the “why” and “why-not” of code, not the “how”. So there is actually no meaningful place for utilities that produce stand-alone documentation from code comments. Or there shouldn’t be.

Ummm…. ok, I just totally changed my mind after giving Doxygen (free) a serious try. It’s awesome. Others: NDoc has a bad rep apart from probably being dead, VSDocman looks almost as good as Doxygen but is a tad expensive ($200+), and MS’s own Sandcastle is a total mystery to me. Cost me a couple of hours of floundering around and I still can’t even begin to describe what it is. Haven’t even found out how to make it run. An enigma.

User Documentation

Help & Manual is the standard here. Pricey ($499), but worth it.