My Toolbox column in the June 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine is now avaiable online. The June issue examines three products:
- GhostDoc - a free Visual Studio Add-On that helps automate the repetitive task of adding XML comments.
- Authorize.NET - one of many payment gateways that you can use to start accepting online payments.
- ReSharper - enhance your Visual Studio develop-time experience with this productivity tool, which offers extended refactoring support, customizable code formatting, built-in unit testing, tools for quickly exploring the types, classes, and files in a project, and so forth.
This month's issue reviewed Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server (Seventh Edition), by William R. Vaughn. Here is an excerpt from the review:
When I first started programming data-driven Visual Basic applications back in the late 1990s, a coworker encouraged me to pick up a copy of William R. Vaughn’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to Visual Basic and SQL Server, a tome whose heft and thickness earned it the nickname "the doorstop." Throughout the 90s, Vaughn published six editions of his popular Guide. After a nine-year hiatus he has released the seventh edition, written with Peter Blackburn, and renamed Hitchhiker’s Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server (Addison-Wesley, 2007). Like the previous editions, the seventh provides detailed and thorough discussions on important topics, from installation of SQL Server™ 2005 to T-SQL basics to creating and working with data through a .NET application.
As always, if you have any suggestions for products or books to review for the Toolbox column, please send them into toolsmm@microsoft.com.