January MSDN Toolbox Column Online

Friday, December 28 2007

The January MSDN Magazine is now available online and includes the first of three Toolbox columns that I wrote (filling in for Scott Mitchell). I wanted to focus on open source tools and agile books as much as possible during this opportunity so for the first column I featured:

  • MbUnit - Which I have been a fan of for quite some time.
  • Rhino.Mocks - The best of the .NET mock frameworks in my opinion.
  • dotTrace - The one commercial tool for this column, and one of the few commercial tools that I swear by.
  • Continuous Integration - Cool to see a book focused just on CI, and from AW Fowler series to boot.

Already saw some good feedback on the column, would love to hear what you think.

-James

Comments

#1 Duane Fields on 12.28.2007 at 3:42 PM

Two more useful tools from Exact Magic Software that I would add to the list. StudioTools is free and has Code Metrics and navigation tools, while TestMatrix adds unit testing to Visual Studio. TestMatrix currently supports nUnit, MbUnit, and csUnit.

#2 kevin on 12.29.2007 at 8:03 PM

great stuff!

I wonder if an entire article on ruby/rails stuff from your 22books experience would fly ;P

Beyond Subsonic in my open source/freeware tool box, I also make use of UrlRewriting, RssToolkit, ValEverywhere, CipherLite, Markdown and I use to rely on lognet but now I just have my own little logging utility.


#3 Marc Fields on 1.24.2008 at 10:46 AM

Theres been a pretty big explosion in the ORM/data tier space lately, loads of code generators of course, but one standout for us was Diamond Binding. Pretty cool mix of minimal code generation (definitions only), an NHibernate backend (damn fast!), and some pretty slick Visual Studio integration. Takes you from a database schema to a complete data layer in a couple of clicks, and then has CI features to keep up to date - without blowing away your code.

Theyve got a free version, but are pretty relaxed about the licensing. The rep we spoke to just said "Try it out, get a license before you ship." - free version has all the features, just non commercial use only.

Using Diamond Binding with the new UI frameworks from Microsoft seems to slash the amount of effort in making apps. 2008 is going to be a good year for developers ;)

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