Sandcastle - July 2006 Community Technology Preview

Sandcastle is the name of the tools used internally by Microsoft to create documentation help files from managed class libraries.

First Technical Steps to managing your own business

Here's some useful info about getting your web presence up and running. I took advantage of this advice to resurrect my "Business and Consulting" website - www.gardiner.net.au, using ZoneEdit.

It had gone offline quite for a while after the previous free hosting through work concluded.

I'm now pointing it to an area on my ISP-provided web hosting, and I've also got some nice email address forwarding happening too (which I didn't have before).

ClustrMaps - Hit counter map shows locations of all visitors to my blog

I've added a link to ClustrMaps on my blog, to see if there really are any people who read my blog!

I heard about this from Rob Caron, and the fact that there are no dots on Adelaide makes me wonder a) am I the only one in Adelaide reading his blog or b) have they got Adelaide somewhere in the middle of Australia!

Get organised with Solution Folders

This is a nice tip that I've already used to organise our Online Assessment solution. Now Alexis doesn't need to worry about those funny "deploy" projects - she can just find the web projects easily.

VB 2005 Exception Helper

A Visual Studio 2005 add-in written by Bill McCarthy that adds appropriate exception handlers to the selected code.

This add-in depends on the latest version (2.0.1) of the DevExpress DX Core library. If you had already installed the free Refactor! add-in, then you'll need to update it so that it is compatible. The links to the latest version are in this post. I think the site has "referrer" detection, so make sure you're already browsing the devexpress site before you try and download.

Threat Analysis & Modeling v2.0

The final release of version 2.0 is now out

Expression June 2006 CTPs

• Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer June 2006 CTP - "used to create engaging, rich user interfaces for desktop and Web applications"
• Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer June 2006 CTP - "best of vector-based and pixel-based capabilities, letting you explore new creative and cutting-edge possibilities"