First, thank you to everyone who attended my talk at the JAXDUG meeting last night. I was quite surprised at the turnout with a last minute change in venue (what's up with that Merrill Lynch security? Damn.. that's some tight stuff!).

Second, I'd like to apologize for not getting to spend as much time on the development tools like I had planned. I noticed the virtualization part of the talk was longer than expected, but I decided to wrap up the virtualization best practices piece and then we'd just run late and those not interested in dev tools could leave. Unfortunately Merrill Lynch security wouldn't let us run over and I wasn't aware of this until 15 minutes to 8p so there went that plan.

However, all it not lost! Earlier today I did a screencast of the free & not-so-free development tools, the same talk I was planning to do last night. All the products I planned to demo last night (and in addition, my c:\utils folder) are in the screencast. Not sure why the first few seconds don't show anything, but you aren't missing anything except the title slide from last night's talk... the screen will come back within a few seconds. You can get the slide deck & screencast here:

http://www.andrewconnell.com/blogcontent/speaking/20060712.JAXDUG.VirtualizationAndDeveloperTools.zip
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blogcontent/speaking/20060712.JAXDUG.VirtualizationAndDeveloperTools.Screencast.exe
(45 min, 56MB self-extracting RAR)

During the talk I made references to numerous URL's... all of which are listed below.

Virtualization

• HOWTO: Use Virtual PC's Differencing Disks to your Advantage (from my blog)
• HOWTO: Squeeze Every Last Drop of Performance Out of Your Virtual PCs (from my blog)
• Someone asked if Virtual PC 2004 was free or not... by the time I sync'd up my aggregator, I saw a bunch of people reposting the news. Yes, VirtualPC 2004 is now free and you can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6D58729D-DFA8-40BF-AFAF-20BCB7F01CD1&displaylang=en

Developer Tools

• DAEMON Tools - CD/DVD emulation
• FoxIt Reader - better/faster PDF reader then Adobe's Reader
• WinMerge
• SQL2005 Service Manager
• Unleash It
• GhostDoc
• SlickRun
• Console 1.5
• NotePad++
• Snippet Compiler
• Lutz Roeder's Reflector
• The Regulator
• Nikhil Kothari's Web Development Helper
• TechSmith's SnagIt - screenshot utility
• TechSmith's Camtasia- screencasting studio
• Red Gate ANTS Profiler- .NET profiling tool (performance & memory)
• CodeSmith - Template based text/code generation
• DevExpress' Visual Studio .NET Productivity Extensions
  • DXCore
  • CodeRush
  • Refactor! Pro
  • Training videos- awesome screencasts for all three products above

Because we didn't get to the demos, I didn't get to put my $.02 in for the DevExpress productivity tools. I added a post on my blog in December 2005 which explains the three different pieces of the productivity tools here: http://andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2005/12/16/2493.aspx. I'm fully aware that tools you pay for are a certain show stopper for some developers... but before you discard these, make sure you understand what the DXCore really is... because you can do some really cool stuff with it.

One last thing... here's a little Office 2007 XML file format pimp: My presentation last night as a 2003 PPT file is 1.68MB in size... however, as a PPTX (2007 XML format) it's a mere 96k!

Technorati : jaxdug, virtualization