1.) XAML Power toys - XAML Power Toys is a Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Multi-AppDomain Add-In that empowers WPF & Silverlight developers while working in the XAML editor.  Its Line of Business form generation tools, Grid tools,  DataGrid and ListView generation really shorten the XAML page layout time.  http://karlshifflett.wordpress.com/xaml-power-toys/ 2.) Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET Framework 3.5 Released! - Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET Framework 3.5 are now publicly available. Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Language Pack Microsoft Chart Controls Add-on for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET Samples Documentation 3.) WPF Toolkit – Oct 2008 Release - http://www.codeplex.com/wpf/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=15598 4.) Permanent Link- Keep Your Office 2007 Documents Readily Available the Easy Way   5.) CodeRush Xpress for C# - Developer Express and Microsoft are proud to announce 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 fresh selection of hand-picked features taken from CodeRush and Refactor! Pro.

Today I received an update to my Sonos system. Great things abound [More]

My experience with the relatively new Telerik reporting solution has been very positive.  In order to create a report you simply need a 3 dll’s within your solution and a data source.  The data source can be ANY ADO.NET data source as well as business objects, XML, Web Services etc.  As the data source can be any ADO.NET source the reporting solution works against SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, Access, OLE DB etc. I have been a big fan of SQL Reporting Services for quite a while (moving to SQL RS many years ago as I ran from Crystal Reports).  Unlike SQL RS it is a very fast install on local development workstation and nothing on the server is required.  The product is licensed by developer making utilization by the enterprise not dependent on the number of users.  This really works out well in the Internet type environment.  I found the the designer (within Visual Studio) to be very fast and easier to use that SQL RS.  The drag and drop features and the visual clues are clearly superior than other reporting solutions I have used. Telerik Reporting supports the most commonly used output formats out-of-the-box: PDF, Excel, RTF, CSV, MHTML, BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and metafile (EMF). The Telerik product certainly makes it easy to find the data source, connect within Visual Studio and drag and drop the fields onto the design surface. More information can be found online at Telerik Reporting

This is a free (please donate) SQL Server Management Studio add-on that is small, easy to install and is packed with some great features. Query Execution History – every sql statement that you run is automatically logged and available at a later time Search Database Data – search through all non-binary columns in every table of the database for a search term. Uppercase/Lowercase Keywords Run one Script on multiple databases Copy execution plan bitmaps to clipboard Generate Insert statements for a single table, the whole database or current resultsets Create, Read, Update and Delete stored procedure generation plus more! Check it out SSMS Tools Pack