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Product Reviews coming soon…

I’ve been out of the mix lately with an avalanche of health issues… the latest of which is a pinched sciatic nerve. Never the less I will be putting up some reviews of some of the coolest applications, tools, and visual studio add-ins and here is a partial

Altova’s XMLSpy 2009 Released

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WebGuide - Streaming TV, Remote Scheduling and Media Sharing for Windows Vista and Media Center

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Altova Xmlspy – the de facto XML tool of choice

When it comes time to work with XML the first company that comes to mind is Altova . The Missionkit suite is to XML what Visual Studio is to C#. At the core of this suite: the hands down (imho) best XML IDE Altova’s XMLSpy. I’ve been planning this blog

Instapaper

A very useful web 2.0 application/service that allows you to mark pages you’ve surfed past to read at a later time. This way from your mobile device or as your browser’s home page you can read the detailed content of the original page right

Customizing the Command Prompt

Having a meaningful command prompt can be incredibly helpful when working on several machines, remote computers, and using different credentials. So I use the following command prompt on all of my machines... this allows me to easily know who and how I connected to a remote share when I'm using the command line interface (cli).

QuizoApps: QTTabBar

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a tool junky. That being said I've decided that I'm going to try to list the new or updated tools that I use often. The first tool is freeware, which is my favorite price, and is called QTTabBar and it adds useful tabs

Direct Access: for the productive slacker in all of us.

This gem of a utility from Nagarsoft is one of the few tools out there that can be used by any type of worker... I'm coder and we have several command line driven scripts for automation and build and Direct Access has been nothing short of wonderful.

UltraMon: Updating to Windows Vista requires more than just drivers to be updated.

I am a tool junky. I use tools, like shell extensions in Windows and addins in Visual Studio so extensively that I depend on them as much as I depend on Windows itself. It's been a long time now since I adopted the multiple monitor as a minimum requirement

Configuring Visual Studio® Team Foundation Server to install/run on a multi-homed server

Cohosting other web sites on the same server as the application tier of Visual Studio® Team Foundation Server (TFS) is a common request and while it is not our typical scenario it is fairly easy to configure with IIS 6. Once you configure the IIS settings you will be able to install other web applications on the same IIS server and using the same TCP port (e.g. port 80). This is accomplished by configuring the host headers in IIS so that IIS will point Team Explorer and sharepoint requests to the correct web site.

My new favorite component company!

Sky Software just keeps creating all of the shell enhancements that you could want.. all at a reasonable price and taking the complexities out of Shell programming from .NET. Their latest component suite, which just entered Beta, and is expected to release

Exciting new shell components from Sky Software.

The latest version of Sky Software’s Shell MegaPack.Net is a suite of components that gives you easy and efficient access to the windows shell by exposing the following controls: FolderView , FileView , ShComboBox , ShellObjects . Keeps the existing functionality

Tools, Components, and Addins... Oh My!

I decided that I would compile a list of the tools that I use in Visual Studio, specifically those that I feel that I cannot code without. I will be adding to this list over time and if you feel that I missed some please don't hesitate to let me know.