The Weekly Links 9

This is the 9th post in an ongoing series of weekly roundups of links useful to developers.

Tools

• SteakyBeak – Is an advanced logging module for web apps that will log each request to your web server and also provide a easy interface to view these requests. Base on the ever useful NLog logging framework.
• PowerGUI Visual Studio – Quest have released a version of the PowerGUI IDE for PowerShell that integrates into Visual Studio.  Other options to develop and execute PowerShell scripts in VS include the VS Command Shell, and PowerConsole.
• TOAD Extension for Visual Studio – Again from Quest, a extension to manage Oracle databases within VS in the same way as SQL Server databases.
• Enterprise Localization Toolkit – An oldie but a goodie.  A colleague in work (Thanks, Mike!) came across this framework from Microsoft for resource string management via a database.
• Posterous – the easiest way to blog.  Create a beautiful looking blog with the minimal effort.  I’m seriously considering switching to use it… Watch this space.

Information

• VS 2010 Productivity Improvements, Part III – Somasegar, the Vice President of Microsoft’s Developer Division, continues his series of posts looking at the new features available in Visual Studio 2010.  Check out the earlier posts – Part I and Part II.
• MSTest vs. NUnit with Visual Studio 2010 & TDD – The ‘Bare Bones Coder’ compares his experience using NUnit and MSTest in a TDD project.  A well written post, but I’m including it as much for the beautiful image s/he includes as for its content.  Also, the post reminded me of a StackOverflow question I asked (and answered) a while back on switching between the two different testing frameworks.
• On Pair Programming – Andrea (AKA roundCrisis) takes a look at pair programming, and points out where it can wrong.
• Clean Code and Clean TDD Cheat Sheets – Download a couple of cheat sheets to help you with your TDD and keeping your code clean of crud.
• Introducing IIS Express – Another local blogger, Andy Poots, highlights the release of IIS Express.
• HttpModule – developing outside the product box – Ciaran, writing on the PointyHeads blog, has an interesting post on two uses of  HtttpModules to solve SharePoint issues.
• Announcing www.pexforfun.com – A post highlighting the new website to introduce developers to the Pex, an automated White box testing framework for .NET.
• Developing Applications for SharePoint 2010 – Guidelines from the Microsoft Patterns and Practices team.
• TryParse vs Convert – A comparison of the two techniques as applied to parsing query strings.

Events

You can now check out developer events in Northern Ireland using my calendar.

There are no developer events in the coming week.