Developer Express and Microsoft provide a new version of CodeRush licensed exclusively for C# developers working in Visual Studio. The new product is called CodeRush Xpress, and it includes a slew of useful features to boost your productivity under Visual Studio.
I wonder why any version of Windows has never had an undelete utility to recover files that you accidentally deleted. We all do that, or have done it at least once in our lifetimes (if you have not, you will!). It’s a more essential utility than some that Windows installs by default.
But no sweat as long as we have the freeware recovery software called Recuva! Here’s some information about this great utility straight from it’s developer’s web site:
Recuva (pronounced “recover”) is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses!
I have used Recuva on Vista x64 where some other file recovery utilities fail (even though they say they are Vista compatible), and had great results. I had accidentally deleted some of my family pictures, and Recuva recovered them for me in a snap.
The latest beta version of FxCop 1.36 was recently made available for download. This new version includes various features and fixes that include:
FxCop is an excellent free static code analysis tool from Microsoft that checks .NET managed code assemblies for conformance to Microsoft’s .NET Framework Design Guidelines.
SubSonic is an excellent open source DAL generation tool developed by Rob Conery that has been around for almost a year. In most cases SubSonic can just be added to your project, pointed to a databse, and you magically and immediately gain access to a rich and strongly typed object model that can be used to query and persist data to and from your relational data source.
SubSonic also has a cool feature called the REST handler that essentially allows one to use HTTP protocol as an interface to data stored in a back-end relational database. It is URI based and returns data back in XML format. This data can then be used by decoupled client applications as they see fit. If you have never looked at SubSonic, you owe it to yourself to checkout this very cool tool.
Recently Microsoft unveiled their plans to release similar features codenamed Astoria and Jasper with .NET framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. The CTP of Astoria and Jasper are available for download from Microsoft.
Jasper is described by Microsoft as:
Project Jasper is geared towards iterative and agile development. You can
start interacting with the data in your database without having to create
mapping files or define classes. You can build user interfaces by naming
controls according to your model without worrying about binding code. Project
Jasper is also extensible, allowing you to provide your own business logic and
class model. Since Project Jasper is built on top of the ADO.NET Entity
Framework, it supports rich queries and complex mapping.
Pablo Castro, the mastermind behind Astoria describes it as:
The goal of Microsoft Codename Astoria is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within a corporate network and across the internet. The data service is reachable over HTTP, and URIs are used to identify the various pieces of information available through the service. Interactions with the data service happens in terms of HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, and the data exchanged in those interactions is represented in simple formats such as XML and JSON.
The Astoria web site also includes sample online services that showcases how this new technology can be used. It also allows anyone with a Passport account to design and host their own experimental data services .
