Well, if I’m wondering about that every now and then, I’m sure some of the more loyal readers of my blog must be wondering the same thing, given the sparse nature of blog updates in recent months. The answer is, since I’ve started working for Developer Express, I’ve been doing that many different things that it’s just hard to keep track of them, and I haven’t found myself with the free time needed to continually update my blog. But I see that this is a Bad Thing and I’ll try to do something abo …

I’m not going to say too much about it, that would only be misinterpreted as advertising — read the public information yourself here.

I think this is going to be a fantastic product to create business applications (and probably others) with. Only if you’re not (yet?) a Developer Express .NET subscriber, you’re out of luck for now…

Cider (MSDN TV demo here) is the visual designer for the Windows Presentation Foundation (used to be Avalon), part of WinFX, and it was just released for the first time as part of the WinFX December 2005 CTP. It works just fine in VS 2005 RTM, which is how I tried it. My impressions are:

• It has a lot of bugs. They are everywhere, but that’s to be expected.
• It can nevertheless do some serious work for you if you want to create XAML — certainly much faster than writing the XML yourself.
• I …

In case you haven’t heard, WinFS is the new relational file system for Windows. Read the blurb on the official page, I’m not going to repeat that here. Now, is that a good thing? Reading the SDK docs for the current beta 1 refresh, one might think the authors are mainly promoting the use of more relational database technology (and spreading false information such as that the SQL keyword used to select relationally linked data is UNION), but obviously WinFS is a lot more than that, with its soph …

GAT (the Guidance Automation Toolkit) is an interesting package that allows you to easily create VS extensions, wizards, template engines and similar things, without going through all the hassle that the Visual Studio SDK (used to be VSIP) still involves. The new Dec 2005 CTP runs on VS 2005 RTM, which makes the whole thing much more useful. They have also updated the templating engine, so it’s now the same as in the current DSL tools CTP. …

For you Germans among my readers, it might be interesting to know that the last and the current edition of the dot.net magazin have articles written by me — a workshop article about the rubberband project in the 12/05 edition and a test of Developer Express XtraPivotGrid in the 01/02/06 edition. There’s also something upcoming about Developer Express Refactor!, but I’m not sure in which issue it will appear. …

Weird title, cool thing. Just a quick pointer to a toolkit that had so far escaped my attention: the Guidance Automation Toolkit and Extensions In a nutshell, it allows you create wizards for VS very easily, that can perform complex tasks related to code generation. Input can be queried from the user, selections can be made from existing project items or XML files, and all this information can be used in the process of code generation. This can happen when new projects are created, or context s …

Via Zhong Zheng, here’s something really useful: a developer toolbar for Internet Explorer. I’ve seen some half-baked approaches to this before, but nothing came close to the tools Firefox has to offer. Some things, like the CSS view into the DOM, are still missing, but you should definitely get this if you ever have to check web layouts in IE. …