December's Toolbox Column Online

Published 15 November 07 01:41 PM | Scott Mitchell

My Toolbox column in the December 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine is avaiable online. The December issue examines three products:

DotNetLiveHelp - a Web- and Desktop-based application that adds 'live chat' functionality to your website, allowing visitors to 'speak' one-on-one with a customer service rep.
Instant VB / Instant C# - tools for converting code from VB to C#, or vice-a-versa. Includes tools for coverting entire projects from one language to another and includes an assortment of conversion options.
UltraMon - Windows has long supported multiple monitor configurations, but the Windows Desktop has not evolved to handle multi-monitor solutions. UltraMon is a lightweight window management tool designed specifically to enhance the user experience when using multiple monitors.

This month's issue reviewed Eric and Elisabeth Freeman's Head First Design Patterns. Here is an excerpt from the review:

At any bookstore, you'll find rows of books on design patterns. Design patterns are general, high-level solutions used by software architects to solve common software design problems. The problem is that most books on design patterns stodgily enumerate key patterns, dryly explaining when and how each is to be used.

A notable exception is Head First Design Patterns by Eric and Elisabeth Freeman (O'Reilly, 2004), which covers all of the essential design patterns in an entertaining manner. It dispenses with pages of boring text and replaces it with humor-filled lists, questions and answer sections, a variety of diagrams, and heavily annotated code snippets. Gone too are the canonical examples. Instead of using employee or product-related examples, Head First Design Patterns illustrates how and when to use a particular design patterns through silly applications involving pizza, ducks, chocolate, and gumball machines.

After writing this issue of Toolbox I took a three month hiatus, in part to reduce my commitments during my summer of travel. During this time the column was authored by James Avery. So the January-March 2008 issues will be written by James, and I'm picking the column back up starting with the April 2008 issue.

As always, if you have any suggestions for products or books to review for the Toolbox column, please send them into toolsmm@microsoft.com.