As you know, you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want,"

This is what Rumsfeld said. I am sure this infamous saying also played a rule for his step down as Secretary of Defense. But I guess it also applies to a lot of developers like us. As a developer, you normally don't have the option to choose the best tools you have because you are the money maker, but NOT the money decision maker.

In the company worked before, we use visual studio professional to develop some performance sensitive application (GIS). The application involves a lot of graphics rendering, geometry processing, some real hard-core algorithm. We encounter some performance issue, and really would like some professional tools to profile it. But again, we cannot make the decision, because the visual studio team edition costs much more than the professional edition.

Now, I am working on Team Edition for software developer on my new job, but my current job uses so much database functionality, and I really hope I can have Team Suite, which contains the database piece of the Team edition. But again, I cannot make that decision.

Sometimes, as a developer, you just have to work the best with what you have. If you cannot make a decision or persuade the management to make a decision to offer sophisticated tools for you, just try to find some open source, or free tools.

Sometimes, you may have to go back to use some old fashion command way to finish your stuff.

I really hope I, as a developer, have more right in the company to decide what tools I want to use.