This is list of various tools for Dynamics CRM that I find useful and work with as often as I can. To get things done much more effeciently, you need to have the right tools.

XrmToolbox

The absolute #1 most useful tool. Was built by the community for the community. Has heaps of plugins that can achieve things for quickly checking a user’s effective permissions, to updating the site map or manage web resources. It’s fully extensible so if you knw some C# code, you can write your own plugin. Personally I haven’t found a need yet, but if anyone thinks of something useful I may just build it…

Website: https://xrmtoolbox.codeplex.com/

Ribbon Workbench

This is the best tool for working with anything around RibbonDiffXml. If you need to hide a button, add a new one or add some rules, this is the right tool. Its not immediately intuitive, but that’s probably due to the RibbonDiffXml complextities, so spend 10 minutes and watch the tutorial to understand some of the options. This tool has saved me hours of fiddling with XML files.

Website: http://www.develop1.net/public/page/Ribbon-Workbench-for-Dynamics-CRM-2011.aspx (not really CRM 2011, its fully updated to CRM 2015)
Heaps of info: http://www.develop1.net/public/category/Ribbon-Workbench.aspx

Dynamics XRM Tools

This is a solution you install inside a CRM Organization and it provides some extended developer capabilities such as traces and a nice query designer. It’s useful to have this installed in your dev environment as it can save quite a bit of time.

Website: http://dynamicsxrmtools.codeplex.com/

CRM Solution Manager

This is a visual studio addin that integrates Visual Studio to Dynamics CRM. It’s incredibly useful, especially on larger projects. They just released version 3 and will soon be fully CRM 2015 compatible. The fact that you can simply right click on a JS file and publish it to CRM, then open a debugger for that entity saves so much time!

Website: http://crmsolutionmanager.com/