admin

Apparently, I’m a DHSB

What type of programmer are you? Take the test here!

Enterprise Library 3.1: A new version of the Enterprise Library 3.1 was released in May. You can download it from here.

The Smart Client Software factory was also updated in May. The download link is here.

Subsonic was also updated mid-May to version 2.0.1. Subsonic is an ActiveRecord based Code Generation tool and is well worth checking out. You can literally get a website up and running in less than 30 minutes! You can download from CodePlex here and check out the screencast walkthrough. David Hayden’s short version of the same is here.

The Windows Forms site seems to have metamorphosised into http://windowsclient.net/ to include WPF. There are videos, controls and a windows forms FAQ.

Virtual: Over at Microsoft TechNet you can try out Windows Server 2008 via a collection of Virtual Labs. In fact, there are an extensive range of these here for many Microsoft products.

SQL Server 2005: Must read article Top 10 Hidden Gems in SQL Server 2005. Also of interest is the SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard, a collection of Reporting Services reports for monitoring and resolving performance problems. You can download the .msi file here. For a comprehensive overview of installing and running the reports have a read of Making the Most Out of the SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard by Brad M. McGehee

Biztalk: If you haven’t already seen it, this article contains 8 good tips.

If that didn’t give you enough to do, can anyone tell me how Microsoft thinks it’s a good idea that if I copy and paste something into an Outlook 2003 email from a web page, and I’m on dialup, Word 2003 comes to a halt too?!? To say it is annoying, is a bit of an understatement!

There are several free, downloadable e-books at Apress here including

• Programming VB .NET: A Guide For Experienced Programmers
• COM and .NET Interoperability
• Google, Amazon, and Beyond: Creating and Consuming Web Services
• Dissecting a C# Application: Inside SharpDevelop

The last one is of particular interest. It describes the design, development and refactoring of SharpDevelop, an open-source alternative to the Visual Studio IDE.

Eric Sink of SourceGear fame has posted that SourceGear have released DiffMerge, a free tool for comparing and merging source files and folders. It includes:

• Compare two text files
• Lots of supported character encodings
• Intra-line highlighting of the changed portion of a line
• Three-way merge, including automatic merge whenever possible
• Compare folders
• Cross-platform: Runs on Windows and Mac OS X. Oh, and Linux too.
• Full support for editing

There aren’t that many good, free merge tools around, and certainly not many that provide three-way merge and intra-line highlighting.

Last week I sat and passed two Microsoft exams, 70-551 and 70-552. Whilst this does not make me a better developer than someone who does not pursue the certifications (I know several developers who have none and are exceptionally skilled), it does force me to look at areas I might not use day-to-day.

This post, by Vishal Joshi, details the various upgrade paths to certification with a great additional comment by Rob Farley, which is the direction I’ve taken [MCPD:EAD = MCSD +551 + 552 + 554]

Having just mentioned “Team Development with TFS” I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to mention this gem of a post by J.D.Meier on How to Research Efficiently. It is a simple and highly effective way to be more productive. You might recognise the name J.D.Meier from the Patterns and Practices Guidance team, and from the numerous MSDN articles and books he’s either written or been involved with.

The Patterns & Practices Team has released a Beta version of their “Team Development with TFS” document here. The original “Team Development with Visual SourceSafe” document was just 7 Chapters long; the new one weighs in at 17 Chapters and 360 pages!

I came across this quote in a post by Scott Allen:

“It doesn’t matter what constraints were in place when you cobbled the code
together – it will end up in production for at least 5 years”

If you are still in the VB6 world and have a little .NET envy, a new version of the VB6 Interop Forms Toolkit has been released which you can download from here.

Saw this technique to create datetime values over at SQLTeam:

DECLARE @Year smallint

DECLARE @Month smallint

DECLARE @Day smallint

SET @Year  = 2007

SET @Month = 5

SET @Day   = 24

SELECT DATEADD(month, 12 * @Year - 22801 + @Month, @Day - 1)

(Due to Michael Valentine Jones and Peter Larsson).