Development Central

Several interesting items:

• Iowa Code Camp is coming up in November; they currently have a call for speakers. I hope to be able to attend!
• Red Gate Software posted a free PDF of the C# 3.0 Pocket Reference! How cool is that? We use their SQL Prompt at work for IntelliSense in SQL Server Management Studio; it’s amazing. They also posted the .NET Reflector FAQ; especially note the section on .NET 3.5 decompilation support.
• I’m finding the LINQ Pocket Reference very handy, along with its companion tool LINQPad. The latter is useful for all sorts of quick spikes, not just testing LINQ.
• Check the installed .NET version with the .NET Version Detector.
• CodeSmith reports on the Visual Studio Silent Death Bug. I’ve encountered the bug in VS after installing the most recent version of CodeSmith, but have not tried the fix yet.
• Remember that you can use C# 3.0 extension methods to add behavior to interfaces! This tip is from Bill Wagner’s excellent book More Effective C#.
• Ever wondered How to Share Data Between Stored Procedures in T-SQL? I didn’t know about the INSERT-EXEC trick.
• Learn about using XPath on XML columns in SQL Server 2005.