From the must-read-blog of Chris Sells comes word about an add-in for Visual Studio .NET 2003 that allows you to insert P/Invoke signatures by right-clicking in your source code. If that isn’t cool enough, you can also contribute P/Invoke signatures and types to www.pinvoke.net, the interop wiki (great use of web services). The add-in also highlights possible alternative managed APIs that may help avoid a P/Invoke call altogether. Props to Adam Nathan for creating this useful tool.

Oh yeah…I forgot to post this yesterday, but Lutz Roeder recently released a new version of his excellent Reflector for .NET tool. Go get it.

For those MSDN Universal (update: ALL) subscribers who aren’t at Tech·Ed 2004 in San Diego, you can now download the Visual Studio 2005 Community Technology Preview May 2004 from MSDN Subscriber Downloads. The 32-bit edition weighs in at 2.53GB, while the 64-bit edition (yes, that’s right…the 64-bit edition) is a hefty 3.32GB of pure goodness. Both are provided as DVD ISO images. If you don’t have a DVD burner, you can use a tool like Undisker to open and extract the files directly.

This technology preview contains our just-announced Visual Studio 2005 Team System. It’s an exciting set of technologies that I’ll post about later. Start your downloads now!

Update: Andy Boyd (Microsoft) informs me that all MSDN Subscription levels can now download the bits.

Alex Papadimoulis has created a plug-in for Visual Studio .NET called Smart Paster. From his description:

I don't know about you guys (and gals), but I often find myself pasting large string literals (SQL queries or dialogs) into code. It started to become quite a hassle to fire up EditPlus, paste, replace line breaks with quote characters, copy, and paste it into Visual Studio. So, I put together an add-in to help with this task and called it Smart Paster.

Download it here.

Update: Alex informs me that version 1.1 is now available.

Excellent! Thanks to Rob Caron for letting us know how to fix the external help system in the latest Visual Studio .NET Community Technology Preview. And I thought it was just my machine…