Technical Avenues

Free Tools & Utilities from Microsoft Posted: 06 Jul 2007 03:19 AM CDT CLR Profiler for the .NET Framework 2.0 Analyze and improve the behavior of your managed applications with the CLR Profiler. This version of the CLR Profiler was built especially for the .NET Framework 2.0. FX COP Get the specifics of developing reusable libraries that integrate well with the common language runtime and the vision of Microsoft .NET. The Microsoft .NET Framework team shares the experience it gained in the process of developing these libraries, recommends good practices to follow, warns about potential pitfalls to avoid, and helps you successfully develop your own reusable libraries. Performance Console (PerfConsole) 1.0 PerfConsole is a simple performance investigation tool which tries to adopt a debugger-like experience to drilling into Visual Studio Performance Profiler–generated data. .NET Productivity Suite DevForce Express is a full featured framework that accelerates building complex, data intensive, .NET applications. Key features include VS2005 integration, RAD tools, advanced databinding, caching, security, and more. ILMerge ILMerge is a utility for merging multiple .NET assemblies into a single .NET assembly. It works on executables and dlls alike. It comes with several options for controlling the processing and format of the output, see the accompanying documentation for details. LibCheck LibCheck allows you to compare two versions of an assembly, and determine the differences. The tool reports the differences as a combination of 'removed' and 'added' APIs. The tool is limited to looking only at APIs (i.e, it can't check for behavioral changes), and only compares public differences, or changes which are deemed to be 'breaking'. The tool can be used to quickly determine what has changed between one version of your assembly and another, and can help ensure that you won't introduce any breaking changes to clients of your assembly. Instructions and intended use of the tool are described in the 'libcheck tool specification' document with the zip file. XML Tools on GotDotNet Download Microsoft XML tools and utilities that will help you develop XML applications, including Microsoft XML Diff and Patch, XSD Schema Validator, and Microsoft XSD Inference Utility 1.0. CLR Profiler The CLR Profiler is a tool that you can use to analyze and improve the behavior of your managed applications.

Windows Vista : Are you ready yet? Posted: 05 Jul 2007 10:57 PM CDT With every new version of Windows there is an painful investment period of transition, where we install it on our PCs and try to restore our PCs with all necessary settings and softwares. However id vista worth it? Check these problems that people are facing with Vista : 1)Some old drivers ( printers etc ) are not compatible with vista. So dont be surprised if some of your devices are not detected at all by Vista 2) Large number of your software applications ( specially open source ) may not be compatible. While some can be persuaded to work in compatibility mode, all too many of them just don't work. There will be a message quiet often "this program has stopped working" with no clue about why it's stopped working? 3) Vista is so slow. Atleast with comparison to XP it is. 4) Hardware and memory requirements of vista is too high. So if you were using XP with your present hardware nicely, it may not be the case with Vista So I suggest keep your options open with Vista :)