I was so happy to see this site was finally up. One of the best book to come out in recent memory is ‘Windows Developer Power Tools’ by the always excellent James Avery and Jim Holmes.
ANY .NET developer will find at least 5 tools they can put to immediate and usually astoundingly good result. I have cranked out Excel sheets without Excel on the server, Used a great URL Rewriter (instead of my older custom written one), used a free web-based HTML editor (for other writers on THEIR edit site), and was turned on to two of the coolest Regular Expression toools I now know of (although I also love RegEx Buddy). Not to mention about 10-15 more… Many think they already ‘know all the freeware’ out there. Trust me, do don’t.
Also, since I mentioned Regular Expressions, I now beieve this is one of the most overlooked, yet most important areas a mature .NET developer should master.
I recently wrote a series of custom C# SQL Server 2005 objects (SPs, functions, triggers) which tie together the excellent SQL Server Full-Text Indexing with the C# 2.0/3.0 Regex enging to process thousands of long articles for auto-URL additions from a master list of countless and complex matches (including the WORD1 +X word2) query which works! Try that is SQL Server alone… Sure you can do a near match and sort on the rank, but you still are not there.
This is ‘case sensitive’ as well.. Anyway I am writing an article on this as well as a future post.
NICE WORK!
Damon
