In honor of Labor Day today in the United States, here is a list of the top productivity tools for those who labor at software development in .NET: Scott Hanselman's ultimate productivity tools for developers. Many .NET developers know about Lutz Roeder's Reflector (included in the Big Ten Life and Work-changing Utilities), but some of the others are less well-known, and all are worth exploring.
Scott Guthrie has posted the materials from his recent Language INtegrated Query (LINQ) talk at Tech Ed Australia. For those looking for detailed code samples to understand LINQ further, download these materials. LINQ is a set of extensions for .NET to provide a native query syntax for C# and VB, allowing developers to perform SQL-like queries against any .NET collection or drop down to raw SQL.
.NET tool vendor VSoft recently released the results of a survey among 400 VSoft customers on version control product usage. Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (VSS) remains at the top of the list, though its numbers declined since the 2005 survey which may be due to customers migrating to Team Foundation Server (TFS), though TFS is cost-prohibitive for many smaller development shops.
Microsoft has released the 5th CTP of Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals, Microsoft's new database development product designed for managing all database change. Team Data for short, or "DataDude", is the first Microsoft tool to provide automatic support for database unit testing, generating test data, and refactoring.
A group of developers are petitioning Microsoft to change the name of the announced ".NET Framework 3.0" back to "WinFX" or another less-confusing name. The source of the confusion is that the .NET Framework 3.0 will still run on version 2.0 of the CLR, which many consider synonymous with "the .NET framework." The petition has 210 signatures at the time of this writing.
The long-awaited Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio.NET 2003 was released earlier this week. SP1 fixes over 400 VS.NET 2003 bugs , including the top 50% of VS.NET crashes reported using through the Windows Error Reporting Service. Most notable from the fix list are several IntelliSense fixes, plus resolutions to assorted IDE crashes.
Eric Gunnerson, C# Community Coordinator at Microsoft, has posted his list of the Seven Deadliest Sins of Programming: * Excessive Coupling * Inappropriately Clever Code * Deferred Refactoring * Premature Optimization * Overuse of Virtual (C#) or Overridable (VB.NET) * Overuse of Inheritance * Premature Generalization
The MSDN Architecture Center has released 3 industry-focused vertical sites, and one devoted to Microsoft Office as a solutions platform: * Financial Services Industry Center * Manufacturing Industry Center * Retail Industry Center * Office System for Architects
