All Blogs

Today I received the following e-mail from Toby Richards, General Manager of Community & Online Support at Microsoft:

About three weeks ago, Red Gate announced that it will start charging $35 for Reflector version 7, when it comes out in early March. At the same time, they announced that the current free version will stop functioning shortly after that. Reflector has a "time bomb" built-in that requires you to periodically update your copy of Reflector to the latest version. They'll now use this time-bomb to kill the existing version, forcing you to upgrade to the latest - and paid for - version after May 30, 2011.

For the third time in a row, Microsoft has decided to reward me with the MVP - Most Valuable Professional - award, again in the ASP / ASP.NET category.

I am an active contributor to the Wrox P2P forums, where I support readers of my books and other programmers that go there with programming related questions. I try to answer as many questions as I can but I only have a limited amount of time. This means I'll give preference to questions that are the easiest to answer. This is not related to the technical difficulty of the problem discussed, but to the quality of the question. Obviously, if you post a clear and concise question, you increase your chances of getting a useful and quick reply as it takes less time to understand the question and come up with an answer. Unfortunately, I see more and more people posting vague questions, and posting them in the wrong category. To avoid typing the same response over and over again asking for clarification, I decided to write a short blog post with a few tips for proper questions in these forums where I can refer to when unclear questions come up. If you get sent to this page, it's not that people don't want to help you; it's that they can't help you because the question is unclear or posted in an inappropriate location. Follow these tips and you'll improve the chances of getting the answer you're waiting for.

I still have a number of copies of my latest book Beginning ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB waiting on my desk for someone to read them. Want to win a copy?

Ever since it was announced, Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010 was high on my list of books to read. I've been using Visual Studio, and team Foundation Server since the first releases of the products, but really needed to dig a little deeper in some of the core concepts. Because the Visual Studio 2010 release is quite large with lots of new features, especially in terms of ALM and TFS, I was on the lookout for a book that showed me what's new, and how to use it. It turned out that this book, by Mickey Gousset and others, is an excellent guide to many of the new features in Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010.

Don't you just hate it? You read an interesting programming related article on the web that comes with source code. You downloaded the source so you can look at it later. When you open the file later, you've long forgotten where you got the file, or which concept it was supposed to demonstrate. Worse, the download contains a gazillion files, making it pretty impossible to find the stuff you're looking for yourself. Rather than two or three files demonstrating the topics originally discussed in the article you read, you're faced with a gazillion ReSharper cache files, useless .suo and .user files, obj folder and more. Take, for example, this article "Using Dynamic Views In ASP.NET MVC 2" (note: I am not picking on the author here personally; it's just an example I ran into recently that shows most of the problems I face with code downloads; it's easy to come up with many other examples). The relevant code is only 18 lines long (7 in the View and another 11 in a controller class), yet when you unpack the zip file you get 79 files. Granted, some are needed to run the example as an MVC site, but with a bit of clean up, the number of files can easily be reduced to 27 plus 1 by following these simple tips.

Over the past couple of weeks I've been reviewing a number of Sketch and Mockup Tools. You can find the complete series here:

• Balsamiq Mockups
• Axure RP Pro
• Microsoft Visio with the 'GUUUI Sketchy GUI Shapes'
• Pencil
• Microsoft Expression Blend 4 + SketchFlow

For now I won't be reviewing any other tools as I haven't worked with them (extensively) enough to say something useful about them. Thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions for additional tools to review.

To close off the series, I'll briefly recap the five tools and give my opinion of the one(s) I liked best.