Chad says:

“You are important to me! You spend your money and time on VS, and you expect VS to help you make more money and time. You will be using Whidbey to make your living, paying for braces and college and retirement, buying coffee and beer and cigarettes, contributing to political and social causes, paying income taxes and mortgage interest, ordering pizza and books and flowers.”

Chad wants you to send him your picture and some info so that he can show his VS team that their customers are real folks. I sent him mine; I may be an MS employee, but I’ve been using Visual Studio non-stop since it was called QuickC and I care what those guys do with my development environment of choice!

After posting a few sets of free Windows Forms controls, now I’m a magnet for the “but you forgot my favorite free controls site” emails, which I feel compelled to share with you. This time, it’s the vbAccelerator site, which is a mix of VB6 and .NET controls, code and tools. The .NET stuff is here. Enjoy.

Adam Nathan has taken the information from his extremely popular P/Invoke Wiki site and built an add-in to pull and drop P/Invoke signatures directly into VS.NET. Whoa, indeed.

It turns out that the add-in model for Reflector 4.0 is so powerful that it enabled Denis Bauer to build an add-in that leverages the built-in R4 disassembler to disassembly an entire assembly into source code files. Very handy for curling up on a sunny afternoon with a chunk of source from your favorite assembly, a cigar and a single malt Scotch.

And the hits, they keep on coming...

Roy points out some Windows Forms controls that Mike pointed out to him and now I’m pointing out to you: NetXP, which includes all kinds of fun controls and components for use for free for personal and freeware use. It's amazing the number of high-quality free .NET controls exist. Wahoo!

Here. Whoever put this site together had the right idea. I was hoping to work my magic to get MS to publish a giant interop DB, but instead of waiting, Adam Nathan (of .NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide fame) put up a wiki to collect all of the P/Invoke signatures that the community already knows about. Yeah, baby! This could finally be a wiki I can get behind! (Sorry, Ward, but I've just never found a wiki that makes me want to hang out there...)

Here.

In his June ’03 Bugslayer column, John Robbins made a sideways comment when discussing Son of Strike (SOS), a debugging extension from Microsoft for doing all kinds of low-level, mixed native and managed code debugging.

What Jon said was this: “Interestingly, starting with Visual Studio® .NET 2003, you can load SOS when doing mixed-mode debugging.” And then he didn’t say how to load SOS into VS.NET, even after spending the rest of the article telling us how cool SOS was.

Luckily, Mike Stanton, an SDE on the CLR team, has created a set of instructions for loading SOS into VS.NET. Actually, he posted those instructions in December of last year, but it wasn’t ’til today that they were accurate because it wasn’t ’til today that I tried them and couldn’t get them to work. Now they are and I can and I have all kinds of low-level goodness to explore with Son of Strike.