There's an awesome tool called LINQPad by Joseph Albahari -- completely free, download here.  ("LINQPad is not an open-source product and the source code is protected by standard copyright laws.  Nonetheless, you are free to disassemble the executable to satisfy your curiosity..." says the author.)  It's billed as the Query Analyzer for Linq to Sql.  It does wonders for giving you a quick chance to mock up some Linq to Sql.  It is an awesome product for getting you into Linq, but it seems to fall short of it's full potential. What it does really well: - Get you to...

Scott Guthrie described an awesome Linq to Sql Query Visualizer here.  His context is Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2.  Since then, it's gotten (almost) baked into Visual Studio 2008 RTM.  The functionality is the same, installing it is slightly different. What is it: During debugging, show the actual sql that will get executed from your linq query, and allow you to execute the query and see the results -- all within a debugger visualizer. How to get it: 1. Navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Samples\1033  (Modify to suite if you installed Visual Studio 2008 to a different directory.) 2. unzip CSharpSamples.zip 3. Navigate inside the...

In ASP.NET AJAX, you create a namespace by calling Type.registerNamespace('My.Namespace.Of.Choice'); The necessary object dictionaries are built, names resolved, everything is groovy.  But what if you can't use that for what ever reason... I'm working in a project that can't use the ASP.NET AJAX Client Libraries for reasons that are irrelevant.  I want to create a namespace, so my objects don't collide with others.  The answer turned out to be uber-simple: var MyNamespace = MyNamespace ? MyNamespace : {}; ( idea spurred from an irrelevant post at http://www.lixo.org/archives/2007/09/14/javascript-put-everything-in-a-namespace/ ) Now, I need to do that for each level: var My = My ? My : {}; var My.Namespace...

Much has been written on the fact that Visual Studio 2008 can build .net 2.0 applications, and that they can be installed side-by-side on the same machine.  This is phenomenal as it allows organizations to upgrade developer tools without forcing clients to also upgrade .net framework versions.  Very nice. However, what isn't as fully documented is using Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005 together on a development team.  For example, Sally Slickster is an early adopter, downloaded the VS 2008 iso from MSDN 8 minutes after Scott Guthrie posted the RTM news.  She'd like to use it for all development...

A very specific rule for using source control is to avoid putting temporary files, user files, or compiled content into the repository.  These files change far too frequently and offer little value to the versioning and historical process.  More than anything, they'll just make the repository excessively large and make everyone update their checked out copies more.  However, keeping temporary files out of SVN using TortoiseSVN isn't a perfect science. TortoiseSVN will suck in everything in the folder, including hidden files and folders.  Windows hides the Thumbs.db file -- a cache of image thumbnails in the folder.  To see this file,...