Yesterday at the VB study group we had two BRAND NEW presenters! Yay!
Jake (last name omitted to protect the innocent) showed us his favorite tool, Visual Assist X, from www.wholetomato.com (free trial download). Visual Assist X is much like an enhanced version of Intellisense - it tries to auto-complete practically every word you type. I can easily see how this will speed your coding. More than that, it allows acronyms, custom color coding, spellchecking, macros, and more.
John Crawford showed us his side project - www.GASports.com - a news and scheduling site for high school sports statewide. The problems John faced were surprising complex. First of all, he has about 8000 to 10,000 coaches across the state inputting data. These are high school coaches, so he wanted to make the data entry phase as simple as possible. This requires some client side data validation using JavaScript. John will be the first to admit that he's not an expert in JS and he doesn't really want to be. Secondly, the computers used by various high school coaches across Georgia are anything but standard, so he needed to support IE, Netscape, and if possible other 3rd party browsers. So he went looking for some free or commercial tools to meet his needs. We saw four of the controls he is using to control his site. First up was a menuing control. The current implementation is data driven and too large. The new solution (from www.skmMenu.com) is an XML driven drop down menu control. Very clever. Components 2 and 3 were date and time pickers. The current controls are from www.excentrics.net and are very flexible and customizable. The final control is a combo box. Combo boxes don't exist on web forms, just dropdown lists. But John's needs included the ability for coaches to add new schools as required (when the southern-most schools play teams from Florida) so he needed a Combo box. He grabbed the control from www.prog-studios.com and is happy with it's performance in IE. The problem is that the combo box he's currently using doesn't support Netscape.
Following these two guys up was yours truly. I presented Coder to Developer by Mike Gunderloy. Much like a survey course in what is required to be a professional software developer, Coder to Developer is written to introduce the reader to all the things a developer's job includes outside of just writing code. This includes things like Source Code Control, Code Generation, Unit Testing, IP licensing and contracts, etc. I wrote up a short little slide show (using my trademark green background) which will be posted on the VB group's website.
After the meeting, four of us went to Chili's where we had some food and talked about sports, cars troubles, and work in general.
-- Matt Ranlett