August .Net Lunch Notes

Here are some notes I took from today’s .Net Lunch:

Theme: VS2010 Add-Ins and Extensions.

We started by talking about Add-Ins, Extensions, the difference between the two, the Extension Manager, the and Visual Studio Gallery,

We then demonstrated a few of our favorite extensions. I started by talking about the Productivity Power Tools.
Lance and Steve then followed up with the PowerCommands.  Those are both free and from Microsoft.  Also mentioned were GhostDoc, SandCastle (not technically an extension), and SpellChecker.

Steve has a whole list of extensions loaded, but mentioned he’s fairly stable.  I recently uninstalled JustCode after experiencing performance degradation.  An update is out now, so I may give it another shot.  One of the things that’s hard to do is keep track of which functionality is offered by which extension, and the often-overlapping functionality of multiple extensions.

Of course no mention of Extensions would be complete without mentioning our favorites, Resharper and Coderush.  Along the way we mentioned quite a few other little things in

After the Extensions discussion, we talked about optional parameters in C# 4.0, and whether WebMethods can have them.  Then we discussed how we can tell, in code, whether the method was called as a WebMethod or just normally from the class.

Here’s a link to Sara Ford’s webinar, 101 VS Tips and Tricks (Rematch):  required watching for all VS devs.

Congratulations to Randy Harrison for winning the 5-user license of Telerik TeamPulse, a $1245 value, and to Lance Larsen for winning complimentary lunch from Safebridge Solutions!

Our next .Net Lunch will be on Oct. 13th @ 11:45.  Put it in your calendars.

Now…what’d I miss?

Eric