Jon Paul Davies

What an awesome idea!

Like most developers I’ve written a hell of a lot of code in my time: including lots of little utility classes to do things like send emails, validate bits and bobs, format currency etc. Well this enterprising chap has gathered together 5 years worth of his utility classes into 1 handy little library that he is sharing here. Thoroughly recommended!

Also, as a side note on cool little libraries, I’ve been messing about with the free version of FusionCharts. They are great for little ‘dashboard’ style reports where you don’t want to use a large reporting framework. Again, another addition to the toolkit that I’m happy to recommend.

Get up to speed with Visual Studio 2008

The Visual Studio 2008 sessions at Mix 07 UK were really exciting events. There is lots of great new functionality built in, and it’s useful too! Unfortunately, ‘new’ and ‘useful’ don’t always go hand in hand when it comes to software, but elements like spilt view editing, enhanced CSS support, LINQ, the new ListView control etc. are things that I know I will be using on a a daily basis.

Here is the link to the Microsoft training videos that are already up - there are plenty more to come too.

Productivity tools for the busy C# developer

There’s no getting away from it….I’m a bit of an add-in junky. The visceral thrill of a new bit of productivity kit is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Here’s a short list of tools I couldn’t live without.

GhostDoc - A VSNET addin that generates XML comments based on your method and class names. Normally the results are pretty good and only require a minor amount of tweaking

Google Desktop - Switch off all the visual panels and stick with the utter magic of the ‘double ctrl’ search box.

Launchy - A new one on me. Very like the ‘double ctrl’ Google function but for launching apps and navigating your file structure. You can even coerce it into doing much cleverer things as outlined here on Lifehacker.

WinDirStat - Other disk visualization apps just can’t compete. Bow down to the master.

Subsonic - This bit of kit entirely changed the way I prototype applications. The ability to just throw away large chunks of code and then re-generate new versions is so liberating I can’t explain. It makes entirely usable Active Record based objects and editors ( called scaffold ) to get your projects from 0 to 60 without breaking a sweat.