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]

Today, while sitting in a discussion about the new Microsoft MVC Framework at the Microsoft MVP summit, I got an email (reading on my phone) from Kevin Karasinski, a developer at Sandcastle Interactive.

The subject line of the email was my blog password !

Kevin sure knows how to get a guys attention :)

Kevin, good guy that he is, was taking the time to let me know about a newly discovered (and already fixed) security defect in BlogEngine.net, which is the blogging engine that I use here at JoeOn.net. 

Thanks Kevin, you gave me a freakin' heart attack !!!!

Needless to say, my blog has been patched to remove the defect.

Kevin pointed me to Danny Douglass' blog entry HERE.

And [ HERE ] is the official BlogEngine.net patch announcement.

Kudos to Danny, and the BlogeEngine.net guys for fixing this so quickly.

And thanks to Kevin for taking the time to let me know, though maybe next time you can just call my cell phone :)

$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

I love CMS applications!

I've played with more than a hundred free and commercial CMSs written in VB, C#, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, you name it !

It's taken me a while to put Graffiti through it's paces, but I did so last weekend.

Here is a quick list of my first impressions.

PROS

• Install is a SNAP.
• The BlogML import facility imported my hundreds of posts flawlessly.
• The administrative user interface is intuitive.
• It's FAST
• The FREE version is not crippled (just limited authors and a couple advanced features off.)
• Widgets are EASY !

CONS

• Some of the downloadable themes I found were not "seamless" (community provided code varies in quality.)
• I missed the ability to create a completely standalone .aspx page that inherits nothing but the theme, (Plan to try this manually.) 

All in all, this has been one of the best "first impression" experiences I've had with a 3rd part ASP.NET application.

Since the free version is REAL and doesn't even require registration to download and install, CLICK HERE and give it a try !

Please joind me for these 2 webcasts this Thursday and Friday. VWG is a cool FREE set of tools to accelerate your ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight Web Development. Guy Peled, CTO of Visual WebGui is joining me and he will build applications live during the webcats.

Click below to register - attendance is FREE !

Live From Redmond: Visual WebGui: An Enterprise AJAX application in 20 minutes.

It is all about simplicity: Simplicity in programming next generation complex AJAX application that makes the productivity difference.   In this Webcast we will demystify Visual WebGui. We will build a fully blown application in less than 20 minutes, and strip off the covers, showing you how you can cut your development cycle by as much as 90% .   Visual WebGui is open source, so you can dive into the code. Throughout the webcast we will demonstrate that while VWG enables rapid application development (RAD) , the developer is free to create custom controls, wrap third party controls , invoke HTML resources and interop with standard ASP.NET applications like DNN and others, all in a matter of minutes.

3/27/2008 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)| Duration:60 Minutes

Live From Redmond: Visual WebGui: Silverlight for line-of-business application.

In this webcast we will "light up", in minutes, the fully blown line-of-business application that we built in our previous webcast adding the rich look and feel of Silverlight as well as its enhanced performance. You will see how we accomplish this by a "push of a button". We will demonstrate how to make WinForms controls available to your web application and  how you can style your UI by using fully enabled Expression Blend. The outcome is a very light footprint client, unaffected by application size and weight, and as a bonus, secured by design.  You will be shown how you  can, extend, invoke, interop and customize your application using Visual WebGui. 

3/28/2008 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)| Duration:60 Minutes

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About the Live From Redmond series. This series of Live Meeting presentations are designed specifically for the community by members of the Microsoft product teams. The presentations are all done by actual team members working on the specific technology, and are a great way to hear from and ask your questions directly to the product team.

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.]

Please joind me for these 2 webcasts this Thursday and Friday. VWG is a cool FREE set of tools to accelerate your ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight Web Development. Guy Peled, CTO of Visual WebGui is joining me and he will build applications live during the webcats.

Click below to register - attendance is FREE !

Live From Redmond: Visual WebGui: An Enterprise AJAX application in 20 minutes.

It is all about simplicity: Simplicity in programming next generation complex AJAX application that makes the productivity difference.   In this Webcast we will demystify Visual WebGui. We will build a fully blown application in less than 20 minutes, and strip off the covers, showing you how you can cut your development cycle by as much as 90% .   Visual WebGui is open source, so you can dive into the code. Throughout the webcast we will demonstrate that while VWG enables rapid application development (RAD) , the developer is free to create custom controls, wrap third party controls , invoke HTML resources and interop with standard ASP.NET applications like DNN and others, all in a matter of minutes.

3/27/2008 11:00 PM Pacific Time (US & Canada)- 3/13/2008 2:00 PM | Duration:60 Minutes

Live From Redmond: Visual WebGui: Silverlight for line-of-business application.

In this webcast we will "light up", in minutes, the fully blown line-of-business application that we built in our previous webcast adding the rich look and feel of Silverlight as well as its enhanced performance. You will see how we accomplish this by a "push of a button". We will demonstrate how to make WinForms controls available to your web application and  how you can style your UI by using fully enabled Expression Blend. The outcome is a very light footprint client, unaffected by application size and weight, and as a bonus, secured by design.  You will be shown how you  can, extend, invoke, interop and customize your application using Visual WebGui. 

3/28/2008 11:00 PM Pacific Time (US & Canada)- 3/14/2008 2:00 PM | Duration:60 Minutes

-----

About the Live From Redmond series. This series of Live Meeting presentations are designed specifically for the community by members of the Microsoft product teams. The presentations are all done by actual team members working on the specific technology, and are a great way to hear from and ask your questions directly to the product team.

Microsoft and Telligent go way back. Rob Howard (the owner of Telligent) wrote the original ASP.NET forums code way back wen he worked at Microsoft with Scott Guthrie.

 Telligent makes Community Server, and all of my Team's web properties (www.asp.net, www.iis.net, www.windowsclient.net, www.silverlight.net) are built on top of Community Server code base.

Telligent just released GraffitiCMS - there is a free version for non-commercial use and commercial use versions start at $399.

Check it out at : http://graffiticms.com/

SplendidCRM was written in C# using the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 2000.

Overview

SplendidCRM supports the following features:

• Account Relationships
• Contact Management
• Case Management
• Project Management
• Lead Tracking
• Bug Tracking
• Activities and Tasks
• Employee Directory

There is a free ASP.NET Open Source Version and a "Pro" version for ISVs, etc.

Check it out at http://www.splendidcrm.com/

The NEW 2.0 version is in Beta and will probably be released by the end of next month.