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  • Ultimate Productivity Tools List for Developers

    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.

  • LINQ Examples Posted

    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.

  • Discovering the Patterns of Web 2.0

    Tim O'Reilly recently held a workshop to discuss the emerging patterns of Web 2.0. The goal of the workshop was to build on his paper What is Web 2.0. Notable attendees included Martin Fowler, Bill Scott from Yahoo, Cal Henderson form Flickr, and Sandy Jen from Meebo. Gregor Hophe summarizd some of the key findings.

  • VSoft Releases Version Control Survey Results

    .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.

  • Five Habits of Highly Effective Software Developers

    What are some of the code-level practices of highly effective developers? Robert Miller wrote a detailed article on Java.NET covering 5 practices which could apply to any language, including minimalist constructors, methods with clear focus and intent, minimizing logic in mutating methods, and minimizing dependendies between behaviour methods.

  • Team Edition for Database Professionals ("DataDude") CTP 5 Released

    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.

  • Developers Petition Microsoft to Rename .NET Framework 3.0

    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.

  • VS.NET 2003 SP1 Released

    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.

  • Interview: Real-World Agile for .NET Developers

    Kathleen Richards interviews Robert C. Martin about his new book, co-authored with his son Micah: "Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices in C#," which puts Agile practices to work in a .NET environment,

  • Seven Deadly Sins of Programming

    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

  • InfoQ Article: Why Would a .NET Programmer Learn Ruby on Rails?

    .NET developer Stephen Chu gives us some insight into his transition to Ruby on Rails programming. Quote: "By being loyal to one technology stack, I am bound to unconsciously make biased decisions, which will ultimately hinder my ability to deliver business value."

  • MSDN Architecture Center Launches Vertical Sites

    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

  • Debate: Public Fields and Naming Conventions

    Jeff Atwood's blog post earlier this week has stirred up debate in the .NET community on properties vs. public fields and naming conventions for .NET. After first suggesting to use public variables in place of properties, Jeff retracted this suggestion. Also at issue, using case to distinguish public properties vs. m_ or _style-prefixes, and SCREAMING_CAPS constant declarations.

  • Opinion: Flex can transform the user experience on the web

    Adobe's Christophe Coenraets, recently blogged on how Flex can transform the user experience on the web. The Flex SDK was recently made free, and combined with the ubiquity of the Flash VM, Flex could have a potential to be the platform of choice for ajax-style rich web development. Christophe stressed a number of features that are not unique by themselves yet valuable when used together.

  • New Atlas Control Toolkit Released

    Microsoft has released a new version of the Atlas Control Toolkit with 5 new controls: DynamicPopulate populates an element with HTML content from the server, FilteredTextBox prevents unwanted characters from being entered, PagingBulletedList adds paging to a bulleted list, PasswordStrength provides feedback about password strength as entered, and Rating displays a "4 out of 5 stars" interface.

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