Archive for September, 2008

Launchy – enso replacement

A while back I posted about enso, although at the time I was excited about it now after using it for a few months I find it just to buggy to use (crashes every few commands) so its just not usable.

To the enso team, please please continue development of this & fix the bugs (I submitted countless bug reports so hopefully you have all the info you need).

Back to the point, I have found a successor to enso & its Launchy. At first I missed some of the cool features such as the “learn” command & media control commands but after a while I began to prefer it.

Launchy has some plug-ins that are very helpful & to get around the custom commands you just create a folder & put shortcuts in it & tell launchy to look at it (add directory to catalog).

As for the media control I found WACommand (winamp command line tool) which is great & does exactly what I wanted. Just add the wacommand.exe to a path indexed by Launchy & use “wacommand <tab> /play” to play track etc. I went a step further & added “play”, “stop”, “pause”, etc shortcut commands to wacommand & now I can just type those into Launchy & boom, instant replacement to enso’s media controller. Obviously if you dont use winamp then you will have to take a different approach (or switch to winamp (recommended)).

Fluent NHibernate – Sweet!

For those NHibernate fans out there check this out, this could be a great time saver.

http://blog.jagregory.com/2008/08/08/introducing-fluent-nhibernate/

I found this link on Jeremy Millers blog: http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/archive/2008/08/08/introducing-fluent-nhibernate.aspx

Thanks for the info.

More cool free things to check out from VS Gallery

Ok, kept browsing & found lots more cool things to check out (most free)…

Class Builder Wizard

Class Builder Wizard is a Microsoft Visual Studio wizard that generates data object classes and a full data layer implementation for database objects (MS SQL Server and others). It can also be used to quickly create custom classes (not necessarily based on a database object) by defining the structure of the class “manually.”

TTxGen

TTxGen is a generic single file generator based on the text templating engine.

Persistor.NET

Persistor.NET®  is a library that provides transparent persistence for pure object-oriented development.

It is made for Software Developers who want to see persistence as a component, embedded in their applications – invisible to the end user.

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I could go on but thats enough for now.

Diamond Binding (whats this)

Was browsing the VS Gallery site & Found something that peeked my interest, gonna check this out & post back.

Link: http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionID=c805fad6-52ed-46d1-8a2e-17f3c38de07b

 Diamond Binding Logo

Introducing Diamond Binding, a Simple, Powerful, Reliable and Effective data access layer solution fully integrated with the Visual Studio / SQL Server environment and following the intuitive Active Record model.

Diamond Binding is designed to reduce the effort and risk in implementing enterprise data applications. It provides a rich API and a powerful definition generator which, with a few clicks, transforms your database into a full featured business object model, following the powerful Active Record pattern. The binding features allow a developer to use simple, type-safe, and intuitive code to manipulate and query business objects. These features are provided by a highly performant and reliable runtime engine.

Diamond Binding comes in several editions, including a free edition for non-commercial use.

The detailed API provides unprecedented agility in design and usage; you will not be constrained by your data layer. Type-safe development prevents common mistakes, and the comprehensive query API reduces need for SQL experts. The incredible amount of functionality provided by Diamond Binding would be extremely difficult and time-consuming to implement in-house.

Diamond Binding is designed by experienced software architects and project managers to integrate with your development pipeline, increasing productivity and reducing risk. As well as encouraging industry best-practices your project will enjoy a significantly reduced time-to-market, better performance and higher reliability.

We will bring increased developer productivity, increased reliability, and increased performance to your application. We allow you to focus on adding value and features, not reinventing the wheel.

Diamond Binding is more powerful and flexible than primitive code templates. It is more reliable and maintainable than a traditional stored procedure tier. It its simple to use, and is the most effective solution for your data layer.

Choose Four, and take “write and maintain data layer” out the project plan.

 

NOTE: text above from the Visual Studio gallery, just put here for quick reference.

Dev Tools I Cant Live Without (Updated)

An updated list of dev tools that I use regulary (and some that I dont)

Other Good Resources:

Blog:Kirk Jackson’s Page of Words (Lots of Cool Visual Studio Tips and Tricks

PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008

Also found a good hall of stuff over at Sysinternals : Sysinternals Suite