Choosing an editor or IDE for development is a personal thing, like choosing a car. What is a perfect ride for one person offers no interest at all to another. Personally, I was never happy with only one car and usually want different ones in the garage so that I can choose the one that most closely matches my mood or the kind of driving that I need to do.

Some folks like the help and tooling of a fully integrated environment like Visual Studio. Others like the hardcore elitism of EMACS or Vi. I’m a pragmatist, I like tools that just help me get the job done.

For right now I’ll focus on tools for the client side of web development. Here’s what I’ve chosen. All of these tools are free. There is one commercial application that I’ll add at the end because I think it’s worth the money.

• jEdit
• Blue Griffon
• CSSEd
• Aptana Studio 3
• Firefox w/Firebug

jEdit is a good general programmer’s editor with syntax highlighting support and, though it’s feature rich, it doesn’t get in your way while you’re writing code.

jEdit is written in Java and so it runs on Linux. Mac and Windows. I especially like the rich plug-in repository where i can get and add all kinds of specific features that I’m interested in.

You can install jEdit via the Ubuntu Software Center.

And you can get plug-ins here – http://plugins.jedit.org/

Though jEdit is a great general purpose programmer’s editor, I tend to like something with HTML specific features when doing HTML work.

Though there are many HTML editors available for Linux and most of them are free, most of them lack any specific support for HTML5.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some years ago Lutz Roeder, a clever your guy at Microsoft built a decompiler for .NET assemblies and made it freely available to the developer community. (Reflector)

A couple of years ago Red Gate Software acquired Reflector and earlier this year announced that it would no longer be free. Due to the massive backlash of that announcement they reversed their decision and old versions will continue to work without being paid for.

Please understand, I make no dispersions on Red Gate as a company, they make fine products and are entitled to do with their acquisitions whatever they please.

The folks at JetBrains, who also make great products has producted a great, FREE alternative to Reflector and the first preview release is now available and very promising.

In the screen shot below I’m walking the ASP.NET System.Web.Razor assembly from the GAC.

And here you can see some of the exploration options available.

From the JetBrains Web Site

What’s Cool about dotPeek?

1. Decompiling .NET 1.0-4.0 assemblies to C#
2. Quick jump to a specific type, assembly, symbol, or type member
3. Effortless navigation to symbol declarations, implementations, derived and base symbols, and more
4. Accurate search for symbol usages
   with advanced presentation of search results
5. Overview of inheritance chains
6. Support for downloading code from source servers
7. Syntax highlighting
8. Complete keyboard support
9. dotPeek is free!

Though this is an early access version – I’m finding it perfectly usable. If this is the pre-beta, the future for dotPeek holds great promise.

Check it out [ HERE ]

Doug Holland has released an updated code snippets set for C# developers using Visual Studio 2010 on CodePlex.

The project was formerly known as CodePlex.Snippets and the version for VS2008 had nearly 5,000 downloads.

Check it out at : http://vssnippets.codeplex.com

Also, check out an  associated project:

http://vstemplates.codeplex.com

VSTemplates ss under development and today provides StyleCop compliant versions of the Visual Studio Project & Item templates for standard C# projects, Silverlight projects, Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 projects.

Doug will refactoring additional templates for ASP.NET etc. over the coming few weeks.

Download them and send feedback to Doug via twitter at @dougholland and use twitter use the tags #vssnippets and #vstemplates.

Build your own FaceBook applications with ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, WinForms or Silverlight !

Read More

Download the SDK

• Facebook.dll: This is the main assembly that will be used by all applications. This has all the logic to handle communication with the Facebook application. This assembly also has specific support of XAML applications (Silverlight and WPF) to enhance the Facebook platform to make databinding and data caching easier.
• Facebook.Silverlight.dll: This is the Silverlight version of the main assembly that will be used by all Silverlight applications. This has all the logic to handle communication with the Facebook application. This assembly also has specific support of XAML applications to enhance the Facebook platform to make databinding and data caching easier. The REST API in this assembly is Asynchronous only.
• Facebook.Web.dll: This assembly should be used by Canvas applications. The main functionality supported in this assembly is to encapsulate the handshake between the Facebook application and a canvas application (both FBML and IFrame)
• Facebook.Web.Mvc.dll: Provide a support building canvas applications using ASP.NET MVC. Separated from Facebook.Web.dll to avoid all developers from needing to install the MVC bits.
• Facebook.Winforms.dll: This assembly provides support for writing Facebook applications using Winform technology. This provides a Component that wraps the API to make it easier to use from Winforms. This also contains some user controls to help display Facebook data easily. 

More and more teams are distributed and agile !

Telerik has entered  the Microsoft TFS space with two FREE tools.

Inspired by agile development methodologies, these two free applications have been designed to make working with Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server faster and easier. By promoting robust yet flexible project management practices, TFS Work Item Manager Beta and TFS Project Dashboard Beta allow for rapid delivery of high-quality software. Both tools have been used extensively internally at Telerik and Imaginet for over six months with great results. The applications have been built by Imaginet Resources using RadControls for WPF and are available for free download.

Check them out, they’re free !

The guys at JetBrains make a good Java IDE and now they are making a Web / PHP IDE

You can try the Beta Here !

http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/WI/Web+IDE+EAP

I do a lot of interop work.

Make everything talk to ASP.NET.

Thanks means editing PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl and hand editing test data and XML on Windows, Linux, and the Mac.

Lately I’ve been putting SickEdit 2009 thought it’s paces.

It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux (in fact there is a multi platform price) and it’s 99% the same on all three.

It’s HIGHLY configurable so I can make it look and WORK like Visual Studio (There is even a VS key mappings pre-set.)

There is also a C-Like programming language so that I can program repetitive tasks and port the macros across platforms.

If you have similar needs you may want to check it out at http://www.slickedit.com/

There is a free trial on any supported platform !

Telerik, a leading vendor of .NET UI components and tools, has a special offer for all active MSDN subscribers !!

A free Developer License for RadControls for WPF ($799 value), with community support only.

This license gives you access to all of the Telerik WPF controls for use in unlimited personal or commercial projects.

Take advantage of the offer and enjoy a powerful WPF grid, scheduler, animated 3D charts and gauges, and everything you need to build rich and visually stunning WPF line-of-business applications.

The offer is valid through July 31st, 2009. To claim your free license, log-in to your MSDN Subscriber account and look for the “Exclusive Deal from Telerik” on the MSDN “Special Offers” tab.

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer is a free tool that makes it simple to download and install the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 and 7.0, SQL Server 2008 Express, .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1. The Web Platform Installer offers a single installer to help you obtain the software you need to build and run a complete Web solution on the Microsoft Web platform, whether you are using Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, or Windows Server 2008. In addition, the Web Platform Installer checks online to ensure the most current versions and new additions to the Microsoft Web Platform are downloaded.

[ Click HERE to get it. ]

ComponentOne announced the initial CTP release of our “ComponentOne WebParts for SharePoint” product, available for discovery and download at http://labs.componentone.com/WebParts/.

It’s ht be interesting to see their direction on melding Silverlight and SharePoint

From their web site…..

 

ComponentOne WebParts leverage the power of Microsoft’s Silverlight technology for superior performance, styling, animation, and interactivity. Version 1 of ComponentOne WebParts for SharePoint includes three feature-packed web parts:

• ComponentOne DataGrid™ for SharePoint
• ComponentOne Chart™ for SharePoint
• ComponentOne Maps™ for SharePoint

These web parts access both SharePoint lists and SQL Server data. They are easily configurable by administrators and, if permissible, by end users alike.

I’ve long been a Fiddler fan. It’s been a super valuable tool for debugging SOAP and REST based code.

http://www.fiddlertool.com/

It rocks, but I often need to debug on the Mac, especially now when doing network programming in Silverlight.

So I recently found WireShark.

It’s free, runs on Windows and Mac, is Open Source, and there are 3rd party builds for other operating systems.

http://www.wireshark.org/

 OnTime 2009 final is now released! http://www.axosoft.com

• Single User Version is still FREE!
• OnTime Express, 5-user price dropped to just $5! (down from $395)
• Unlimited users reduced to $995 (down from $2,995)
• Full support for Scrum
• Full support for Release Management
• Full support for Wiki comments
• Full support for item voting. 

We use Axosoft OnTime 2008 to manage our daily work on www.asp.net. www.silverlight.net, www.windowsclient.net, and www.IIS.net and I use it for all my personal projects.

They JUST shipped version 2009 and slashed prices.

Since the single user version is free and the 5 user version is only FIVE BUCKS you gotta try it.

Issue management is KEY to good applications development, I can’t wait to check out the SCRUM support.

 OpenAccess ORM Express

Telerik OpenAccess is an Enterprise-grade ORM that does the data access plumbing in desktop and web applications. Supporting both forward and reverse mapping, the tool offers transparent persistence for your DAL and business objects. OpenAccess ORM provides tight Visual Studio integration and allows you to seamlessly create database independent code. OpenAccess ORM Express Edition provides the same functionality as the commercial version, but supports only the free databases (MS SQL Server Express, Oracle Express, MySQL and Firebird). List of features [ Click HERE ] …

Check tomorrow for another freebie for developers !!!

Alachisoft has released TierDeveloper 6.1 as free software (previous version priced at $1495/developer). TierDeveloper lets you develop major chunks of your .NET applications in a matter of hours and days instead of weeks and months. TierDeveloper is one of the most feature-rich ORM code generators in the market.

 It provides you the following:

 - Map and generate .NET persistence and domain objects in C# and VB.NET

- Design and generate custom ASP.NET and Windows Forms GUI seamlessly

- Generate web services and WCF server layers and proxy client objects

- Powerful Template IDE to let you customize existing or write new code generation templates

- Full support for .NET 2.0/3.5 and Visual Studio 2005/2008

Download TierDeveloper 6.1 Free Software
http://www.alachisoft.com/rp.php?dest=/download.html

TierDeveloper 6.1 Information
http://www.alachisoft.com/rp.php?dest=/tdev/index.html

 Reporting may not be “sexy” but it’s the meat and potato of every profitable business !

You could call Brian Bischof a “Crystal Wizard”.

Some time ago I listed one of Brian’s books in my asp.net/forums book picks but he hasn’t been resting on the success of his works.

Click on the books above to check them out on Amazon.com

I’m finding them REALLY useful as I’m building some web site reporting features.

You KNOW I’m a Control Junkie !!

ComponentArt makes some cool stuff and they have a HUGE deal right now.

Click Here to Check it Out http://www.componentart.com/store/

… And if anyone else has a HUGE sale going on forthe holiday season. EMAIL IT TO ME so I can tell my readers about it !!

I often want something between Visual Studio and NotePad

ActivieState makes some GREAT software and I recently installed Komodo 5 (I’m a longtime Komodo user)

I especially use it or Python, Perl, and various script dialects !

Some of the new stuff as described on the Komodo web page…

 I spend most of my time doing Web Development, but sometimes it’s fun to get RICH with Client Side UI work.

 Telerik thinks so too and is staring a contest.

 I can’t enter, but YOU can !

Here is the official blurb from Telerik …

 Telerik is pleased to provide you with the opportunity to receive a FREE $500 Amazon Gift Certificate!

 We are currently running a RadControls for WinForms Challenge and we will soon launch a Telerik Client Showcase Gallery on telerik.com.

 We would be happy to feature interesting applications with Telerik RadControls for WinForms.

 All you need to do to participate in this contest is to send us at least 3 screenshots of your application and a short (up to two paragraphs) description of your application.

We’re very interested to see how different people are using Telerik RadControls for WinForms to create innovative and elegant solutions in the .NET community, so now is your chance to show-off your WinForms skills. And the best part of the challenge is that everybody can win!

More information about the contest and the prizes is available here: http://www.telerik.com/products/winforms/contest.aspx

Please note that the contest will be open until October 31, so hurry up!

Enter the contest here

You might know I do ALOT of PHP work on Windows, getting PHP to talk with different finds of .NET objects and COM Objects, etc.

Lately I’ve been prototyping a PHP class to access the ASP.NET Membership and Roles store.

I’m also an IDE junkie and whatever increases my productivity I’m in for !

If you’re a Visual Studio developer, you are used to the productivity of forms based, event driven developers tools (Visual Studio)

We’ll I tried out the first version of Delphi for PHP and liked it, but ….. It was young

Well 2.0 is the REAL DEAL and I LOVE IT !

And I’m actually working with the 2.1 beta that adds some great features. Yes, the Borland Dev Tools guys are still around and well!

I ran into DavidI (David Intersimone), THE Father of the Developer Community Concept, Anders Ohlsson, and Delphi Product Manager, Nick Hodges where they showed my the cool v.Next features.

They have new 2009 versions of Delphi for .NET and Delphi for Windows as well.

Get a free trial of Delphi for PHP here http://cc.codegear.com/free/delphiphp

One of the very BEST parts of my job is the opportunity to use many of the great developer tools that are out there in the wild !

Like most of the big controls venders, the kind folks at Component Art keep me up to date with the Web.UI suite !

I’m hoping to start blogging my walk through Impressions of ALL the tools I get to use, but often I only get to writing a blog post when the company sends me an email with an update !

I got this yesterday from Component Art.

ComponentArt is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Web.UI 2008.2. The latest release of the industry’s best performing ASP.NET AJAX user interface framework features three new controls, expanded capabilities of the Grid control as well as accessible output and Section 508 compliance for all Web.UI controls.

Look at how sexy these UI components are !!!  I love the AJAX support and the increased focus on performance, which is really necessary as folks add more and more ‘Ajaxy” functionality to their applications.

You can check out the live demos here http://www.componentart.com/webui/demos/

60 Free controls are available from DevExpress.

Some for ASP.NET and some for Windows Forms.

Check them out at ……

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/Free/WebRegistration60/

I LOVE component suites !

I regularly use web components from Infragistics, Telerik, ComponentOne, Dundas, eXceed, and others.

I recently tool PureComponents Ultimate Suite for a Spin !

The first thing that struck me ……..

The Price = $79

Need the source code ? It’s only another $60 !

It includes controls for Calendars, Lists, Navigators, a Ribbon UI, and about every input control you can think of.

For the price, you really can’t beat it.

[ Click HERE for more info. ]

The folks at DevExpress are releasing a FREE DataGrid for Silverlight.

Here are come of the features…..

• Data Grouping against multiple Silverlight Grid columns
• Data Sorting against multiple Silverlight Grid columns
• Comprehensive Summary Computation support against multiple Silverlight Grid columns
• Column Movement
• Column Resizing
• Column Auto-Width
• Row Editing
• Row Preview (with animation)
• Template Support (for cell content, cell editing, row preview and headers)
• Auto Height Support for cells, headers, and totals.
• Virtual StackPanel Row Container (simply means we are able to handle an unlimited number of rows)
• Focused Row and Focused Cell
• Multi-Row Selection Cell Text Wrapping
• Vertical/Horizontal Lines
• Multiple column types/editors

[ Click HERE for more info. ]

Some time ago, my buddy Jesse posted about his new favorite utility.

As a matter of policy, we record How-Do-I videos while doing the programming in VB and than I have to re-write the sample code in C#.

So, automatic code conversion was really interesting to me.

So – I got the VB to C# and the C# to VB Converters from Tangible Software Solutions.

$179 for one language or $299 for both.

My thoughts…..

WOW !

They work great and will save me TONS of time!

Thanks Tangible !

[ Click HERE to visit Tangible Software Solutions]

Daniel Crenna shared my frustration that Visual Studio drag-n-drop doesn’t always leave our markup nicely formatted.

So, he wrote a plug-in to do it for us.

Click [ HERE ] to get it for Visual Studio 2008 or 2005

He also offers up the source code so if you want to add some custom formatting rules, you can !

THANKS DANIEL !

 
This looked interesting so I thought I would share it.

Please let me know what you think…..

From the CodePlex Description.

The Ajax Data Controls is a DotNetSlackers project. Developed on top of Asp.net Ajax Extension, the main goal of this project is to provide rich set of data controls for Client Centric Development Model. Since the data controls of Asp.net like GridView, DataList, Repeater etc does not have any Client Side Object Model thus it is not possible to work with these controls with Web Service / Page Methods call. The included controls exposes same API in the client side as the Asp.net version with few more enhancements. Currently the project contains the following controls:

• Repeater
• GridView
• DataList
• Pager

http://www.codeplex.com/AjaxDataControls

Mindmapping tools can be great for flushing out design ideas.

Here is a cool FREE Mind Mapping tool built with .NET 3.0

http://cayra.net/

 This program was announced in February but it seems like alot of students still don’t know about it.

Students, get the details HERE.

$49

I’m a tools junkie! Anything that helps be work more efficiently is HUGE for me since every 10 minutes I can “save” in a day is 10 minutes with my Children, talking to my Wife, on my Harley, in the gym, etc…..

I’ve been a Visual SlickEdit user for many years, you can set it up to look/work like Visual Studio and it has syntax highlighting for EVERYTHING (even stuff I’ve never heard of) and there are versions for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, etc.

Introducing SlickEdit Tools for Visual Studio.

Now they’ve come out with 2 tools add-ins for Visual Studio.

• Editing Tools
• Versioning Tools

Each is priced at $49

You can read full feature lists here.

The versioning stuff is interesting but for me the Editing Toolbox ROCKS.

Here are the highlights from their site – download the trial, if you decide to keep it, it’s only %40

Aliases and Acronyms:
Use directory aliases to save keystrokes and mouse usage when opening files. Use acronym expansion to save keystrokes when typing class, namespace, or function names in your code.
Auto Code Doc Viewer
Extract header comments into MSDN-like documentation, fully linked HTML help that can be browsed in Visual Studio as a tool window and exported for sharing with others.
Code Annotations
Insert comments and notes about code without actually modifying the source file.
Comment Wrapping
Enable automatic wrapping of any type of multi-line comment as you type. You can also reflow existing comments in the current file.
Icon Extractor
Simplify the task of finding quality icons and applying them to your applications.
Quick Profiling
Fine-tune your profiling to get information about a specific section of code. This feature allows you to time many cases that are not possible with standard profilers, such as timing complex loops, recursive functions, and the time between an object’s creation and disposal.
Regex Evaluator ( *** a must FOR all web developers)
Interactively create and test regular expressions, which are used to express text patterns for searching.
Code Navigation
Use keyboard shortcuts to jump from a symbol to its definition and to list all references for the current symbol.
Word Completion
Use commands to search for and insert additional text from a matching string.

With more code to write than time to write it, I’m a huge fan of anything that helps me code.

Someone recently sent me a link to Home Tomato’s Visual AssistX for Visual Studio.

This is a great example of how the 3rd party ecosystem makes the .NET platform great for developers.

I’d type a list of features here but the list is HUGE.

Instead, check it out here http://www.wholetomato.com/products/default.asp

Personal Licence is $99

The PowerPoint Decks and the First Webcast are now available on-demand.

Visual WebGui: An Enterprise AJAX application in 20 minutes PPT Deck.

View it On-Demand. (The webcast starts at 10:45 into the video.)

Visual WebGui: Silverlight for line-of-business application PPT Deck. 

Do to a recording error, this webcast is not available on-demand.

 AJAX opens many interesting new doors in terms of how we can tailor the user experience to the customers needs and how we can display content based on any number of state context.

This sometimes means fetching and manipulating HTML or XML in our server side code and sending it to the browser as execution time via an AJAX request.

Earlier today I was “sprucing up” a demo on implementing the “Partial Page Update Pattern” in preparation for a talk on AJAX Patterns that I’m giving at AJAX World next week in New York.

I always try to minimize my demo application dependencies and isolate the concept that I’m talking about as much as possible and I wanted to return some markup to my web page and dynamically update the DOM, but I didn’t want to add a file or database dependency so I decided to just store HTML in a VB string.

I wanted more than trivial markup and HTML is time consuming to convert to a programming friendly string, what with all those quotes and all.

I decided to write a little quickie utility to do string conversion of cut-and-paste HTML when a little searching produced a free utility to do just what I wanted.

It’s great for testing, demos, or if you have a manual cut-and-paste editing process. (But don’t REALLY store HTML in your source code !)

Try it out.

[Just Click Here to get your copy - it's free.]

From the HushHushMedia.com web site….

RIAnimation = Rich Interactive Animation

Give your ASP.NET projects new life with RIAnimation. We have taken powerful JavaScript libraries (Prototype, JQuery and Interface) and developed a simple ASP.NET control for applying RIAnimations (Rich Interactive Animations) to any ASP.NET control. With RIAnimation, adding sophisticated interaction to your existing web apps is as easy as dropping our control on the form and setting three properties!

[Click here for more info]

 HTML make you queasy ?

I’ve been playing with Visual WebGui, which is, from my humble perspective, Windows Forms for Web Applications. The development experience is exactly Windows Forms.

Download it yourself, it’s free and Open Source.

http://www.visualwebgui.com/

I’m toying with using it as the interface to a large web based media aggregator. Send me your experiences with Visual WebGui!

Add “Connect With Me” Buttons to your blog, web site, or email signature.

Click HERE to get started.

DotNetSlackers has just released Ajax Data Controls (ADC) as open source. The project is hosted at codeplex and there are several live examples which can be seen at the samples link below. 

The ADC contains an AjaxGridView, AjaxDataList, AjaxRepeater and we are going to add more controls very soon as well.

To get a feel for them, check out the samples page. Very cool stuff by “TheSlackers” !

Do you find great samples on CodeProject.com ?

This cool utility for VS 2005 lets you browse Code Project directly in Visual Studio 2005. When you click on a link that would normally download a zip file, it asks you instead if you’d like to open the sample up using the Code Project Browser. If you say yes, the add-in will download the file, unzip it to a base “My documents\My Code Project Samples” directory, then load it directly. It also provides a sidebar where you can view, reload and delete all of the projects you’ve downloaded. Finally, it allows you to keep Code Project favorites, just like any respectable web browser would.

http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/cpbrowser.asp

Codswallop » The Freelancer’s Toolset: 100 Web Apps for Everything You Will Possibly NeedCool web appls collection, check it out.

I’m a SlickEdit Fan ……

The team over at SlickEdit have started a blog  and begun posting some interesting stuff.

The blog is located here:  http://blog.slickedit.com/

Here is a sampling of some of the initial posts.

*  VSIP: Detecting code window switches in VS 2005

*  do { … } while (false);

*  How to Write an Effective Design Document

*  What is a Power Programmer?

*  Is Your Editor Working Hard Enough?

*  Key Binding, Command, Menu: The Golden Triangle

That’s not a type !!  Some time ago I received a few emails asking me about Obout control suites so I emailed the folks at Obout.

Now, I’m a control junkie and I think building stuff you can acquire for a commercial / production application is a bit foolish.

Anyway, I installed the Obout controls.

Very Cool. Fast,Easy, Not Very Expensive……

They are only semi-friendly with Microsoft AJAX, though that’s not unusual at this point, and come with their own Ajax functionality.

Check them out yourself.

I came across the tool which looks quite interesting.

There is a fully functional trial (with NO time limit) that handles up to 4 users.

Get it here.

http://www.visual-guard.com/

Let me know what you think.

Along with my previous post I sould some cool FREE stuff for Visual Studio from the Editor Gurus at SlickEdit.

I use SlickEdit and it’s a HECK of a good Editor ! 

SlickEdit – SlickEdit® Gadgets for Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005.