.NETTER Characters...

In my last post, titled "10 Tools Which I Left After Using VSTS 2008",  I have included a list of 10 tools which I am not using currently, as I have the corresponding features available in Visual Studio Team System 2008. However, on the other hand, I am still using few tools even I have VSTS 2008!

Here are 10 of among them..

1. Code Smith: An excellent template based code generator.

2. Crystal FTP: Excellent FTP client tool.

3. Total Validator: One of the most powerful tool that I ever seen, which includes very nice feature to validate web standards. 

4. Diff Marge: A tool that enables us to investigate and/or synchronize the difference between two files or folders.

5. Design Pattern Automation Toolkit: An excellent open source tool, by which we can automate and generate source code with respect to established design patterns.

6. Office Visio 2007: Although Visual Studio has support for diagramming, however Office Visio 2007 is still # 1 choice for me, with respect to analyzing, modeling, designing the application system on which I am working on. It contains a wide range of support of notation, including UML, Enterprise Application, Prototyping. 

7. Copy Source As HTML: Bloogers like me, always needs to copy own source code from Visual Studio IDE, to be posted. This tool serves me this purpose.

8. Spell Checker: Its really a nice thing, if my code don't have any spell mistakes, which can occur frequently. Wonderful tool to help developers!

9. SysInternalSuite: A nice system spy tool for developers and system admin. It contains lots of useful tools, to investigate the system with respect to the current execution of your application.

10. Employee Info Starter Kit: An excellent ASP.NET starter kit, which includes most of the web and coding best practices. Helps web developers to reduce start-up preparation time for web application.

I have started using Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2008, recently. Previously I worked with Visual Studio 2005. As a matter of fact I had to use lots of external tools to perform and speedup my development process. However, while working with VSTS 2008, it's very exciting for me that, I found replacements for most of the external tools there.

Here are 10 tools which I left after using VSTS 2008:

1. Database Schema Compare

External tool: Redgate SQL Compare

VSTS 2008 tool: Menu -> Data -> Schema Compare

2. Database Data Compare

External tool: Redgate SQL Data Compare

VSTS 2008 tool: Menu -> Data -> Data Compare

3. Database Data Generator

External tool: Data Gen 0.9

VSTS 2008 tool (power tool): Add -> New Item -> Data Generation Wizard

4. Unit Testing

External tool: Test Driven.NET

VSTS 2008 tool: Menu -> Test -> New Test

5. Web Testing

External tool: Badboy

VSTS 2008 tool: Menu -> Test -> New Test

6. Load Testing

External tool: Neoload

VSTS 2008 tool: Menu -> Test -> New Test

7. Code Profiling

External tool: Redgate ANTS Profiler

VSTS 2008 tool: Menu -> Analyze -> Launch Performance Wizard

8. Code Analysis

External tool: Fxcop

VSTS 2008 tool: Menu -> Analyze -> Run Code Analysis

9. Code Matrics

External tool: nDepend

VSTS 2008 tool: Menu -> Analyze -> Calculate Code Matrics

10. Java Script Debugging

External tool: Code Project Java Script Debugging Tool

VSTS 2008 tool: see Scott Gu's post on it.

Microsoft is releasing new and exciting products and platforms for developers one by one, which are making developers pretty busy to learn, implement and utilize them at their production environment. Here are few latest hot cakes for developers:

1. Windows Presentation Foundation

2. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

3. Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)

4. Windows Forms 3.5

5. ADO.NET 3.5

6. ASP.NET 3.5

7. .NET Compact Framework 3.5

8. Windows CardSpace

9. Silverlight 2.0

10. IIS 7.0

11. Visual Studio 2008 Team System

12. Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server

13. Sql Server 2008

14. Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0

Well that's simply crazy! Even if I want, I can add more, given that each of the technologies has bigger and bigger branches, each of which requires lots of efforts to be specialized!

I am really a tech hungry, however right now I feel a bit overloaded to enter to all of these, even sometimes getting time to review the basic become harder for me. However I finally planned myself to be more organized to continue my learning process with good digestion, so that I can continue NOT only just learning, but also I can improve my developer life much better with stronger way.

Here are four steps that I wish to maintain with respect to all type of new technologies, which will be adjusted based on the relevancy at my current work.

1. Basic level: To be able to just run "Hello World" type sample successfully, along with ensuring successful installation and configuration process.

2. Pre-production: Getting prepared to implement in production, by making successful experiments, customization and fine tunings in samples found.

3. Production: Careful implementation and perform required adjustments for optimized result.

4. Production-advanced: Once a good sort of 'safe' experience archived, I would like to go for advanced concepts to implement the technology is highest possible way!

Not matter how much closely related each technologies are to my current work and projects, but I am sure each of them are at least 'loosely' related, so I will cover all of these at least at basic level, as I have the motto:

"As a good developer, always you have to know 'everything' for 'some item' and 'something' for 'every item' !

Cheers!

This is my first blog post here. It's really been very prestigious for me to be included as a blogger here. Previously I wrote my blog posts at http://geekswithblogs.net/joycsharp. From now I will continue my blogging at both places.

So, one simple question that lies behind my interest to blog is: why I do blog? Every blogger at blogosphere might have own set of reasons, here my point of views goes:

• Understanding new technology better: As technology is being changed and upgraded very frequently, I always try get in touch with latest best practices. Among those the things which are really grabbed my interest (due to relevancy in my current project or being so much interested to me), I write post on it. It helps me to make my understanding better about the ideas/technology in more structured way.
• Reuse my own concepts: While working on software projects, as a senior team member always I solve lots of real world problem, some of which are really classical and rare to find the solution in community or web frequently.  Writing blog post of one of them helps me to utilize it later for the similar cases.
• Improving my own concepts: As “Blog” is about to share it in community, sharing my own ideas/concepts/solution will able enable other experts to have their own point of view, inputs with respect to their own experiences, and thus having a good opportunity to improve my solutions.
• Share, share and share: Sharing own concepts really been a great feelings, as specially someone like me, who started learning .net, one of the most powerful technology around the world, without having any support, guidance from senior, but grown throughout the help of community resources, and been finally grown that much to become Microsoft MVP! 

Thanks all. Hope I can share some nice and useful experience with you. Stay tuned!