Some time ago, Packt Publishing sent me a copy of Hacking Vim: A Cookbook to get the Most out of the Latest Vim Editor by Kim Shulz to review. I read through it pretty quickly and I must say I thought it was a good book for the most part. The book is definitely focused at a very niche audience as there...

[I'm way overdue talking about this one... ] A couple weeks ago I was contacted by a company (SoftTree) because they have a product which is a competitor to the Redgate's SQL Prompt and RoundedPolygons SQLAssist (see this post by me). Basically It does everything that both tools do, intellisense...

When Atlas split and became a CTP and a beta, I was one of the naysayers. I couldn’t believe what had been done; we had essentially been given the UpdatePanel. I was so upset that I decided that it was time to move out and look at other Ajax toolkits. So for last 6 months or so, I sojourned in...

Last week I decided its time to get a new phone. I’ve always had just a “phone”. You couldn’t do anything more with it than dial numbers and talk to people (although my last phone, the Motorola V300 did have a camera). This time I went all out. I didn’t get just a phone...

A few weeks ago I attended the beta version of Dunn Consulting’s BizTalk Boot Camp . I wanted to write a review on the course and to let others know about it because BizTalk is quickly gaining in popularity and is likely something you will have to deal with in the next few years. The course was taught...

I’ve been meaning to write a little bit about Red Gate’s SQL tools. I have been playing with them (in particular SQL Compare and SQL Packager… although I have also played with SQL Data Compare). I have to say that like everyone else on CodeBetter who has worked with them… these...

Ok, this is really old news (March 20th), but I can’t believe that no one has blogged about it. I originally learned about this via the Daily Grind. I guess everyone went out tried the beta said “Wow… that’s buggy, and left.” Unlike me that is, you see this is a piece of...

Well, at least the ones I've tried. Let's take a quick jump back down memory lane... something that Frans Bouma said to me way back here ( http://codebetter.com/blogs/jay.kimble/archive/2005/06/01/63937.aspx#63954 ) struck a chord. I don't know ORMs that well, and despite my misgivings over Dynamic SQL...

After playing with CodeSmith for awhile, I’ve decided its one tool I’m going to come to rely on in the future. I’ve already built half a dozen templates of my own in the last few days, and have found countless others out on the internet. So far, and I haven’t gotten super deep into it yet, but custom...

I've always been a fairly manual kinda guy, not using a lot of code generators, and using them conservatively when I do use them. With the release of CodeSmith 3.0, which I like quite a bit so far, I think I'm about to take a big plunge into generating a lot of code from now on using code gen tools....