Did you know that there are 40 command line utilities in .NET?
I bet most ASP.NET developers are at least familiar with aspnet_regiis to fix the extension mappings for ASP.NET so that IIS knows to what to do with an .aspx or .asmx page. This is probably getting a lot more use now as people begin using .NET 1.x and .NET 2.0 side by side.
But there are many many more.
One that you may use implicitly is XSD.exe. That's the magic tool that creates .NET classes from an XSD file. Ever notice the "Custom Tool" property when you select items in your project? And when a dataset item is selected that property value is MSDataSetGenerator? And lastly if you right click on the dataset item in the project, there is a "Run Custom Tool" choice on the context menu? What happens there is the XSD tool is run with the option of /dataset. But if you look at XSD, it has a lot of functionality that you aren't tapping into by limiting yourself to using it only via the IDE.
I think the average dev is probably more comfortable with UIs than command line tools. Funny how we are daunted by the DOS prompt after all these years away from it. But knowing how to use these (which I also need to challenge myself to do more of) brings us one step closer to being better than average.
The command line tools that I have used is not an impressive list.
Which command line tools do you use? Which ones did you discover that are of interest after reading this post?