Here is an excellent video "Writing Agile Software", worth watching on Channel 9 about Agile development methodology with David J. Anderson at Microsoft. 

David J. Anderson who is an author of the book "Agile management for software engineering" and writes the Agile Management blog is describing his experiences working with Microsoft teams and using Agile development practice.

Would you like to learn how to use Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate modeling tools in software development process? On Channel 9 you can take a look at complete video series recorded by Clint Edmonson.

The series are demonstrating the use of UML with Visual Studio 2010 to visualize and plan your project.

Enjoy watching!

I have been working and using MS-SQL Server Management Studio for several years now to build, analyze, compare and redesign databases in MS-SQL. The functionality that I always thought it would be useful to get is a quick way to search and locate SQL queries or database objects by their name or content. I have seen search methods implemented in third-party vendors tools but in MS-SQL Server Management Studio the only way I could find the object was to look in the details of the object in the database.

Last year, I came across Red Gate Software free Search plug-in that can be downloaded and installed for MS-SQL Server Management Studio 2005/2008. To this day SQL Search tool saved me a lot of time and effort and it is on my must have list of development tools! Thanks to Red Gate for this wonderful plug-in! :)

If you don't have it yet you can get for free it at: http://www.red-gate.com/

If you have been working with SQL Server 2008, you probably noticed that a new feature that comes with the product is Intellisence for writing queries.

However if you wish to use it when you are connected on a database that is in SQL 2005, it will not work as expected. Thanks to my colleagues I found out that there is also SQL Assistant sofware which integrates Intellisence in many IDE tools for MS SQL, MS Access, MySQL, Oracle and so on.

If you often write queries in databases I hardly recommend this product!

More about SQL Assistant you can find at:

http://www.softtreetech.com/isql.htm

Last year November, I found a useful tool that I still use to this day for organizing, sharing and at a later time even understanding code, libraries or projects. 

Since the technical documentation is the last thing we developers are willing to write, this tool comes in handy to auto-generate Windows-like documentation directly from the code of your project.

Sandcastle project is at the moment a free tool to install and use but it requires a few prerequisites installed on your machine. NET. Framework 2.0 and HTML Help Workshop. The way I got rid of the requirements is that I installed Visual Studio 2008 SDK from Microsoft's website. After installing, SandCastle generates help files through the command line. I have also downloaded the SandCastle Builder (GUI) that provides you the Windows type of interface to help you build Help 1.x (.chm) and help 2.x (HxS) files or even a website.

Tip and trick: before building help files don't forget to enable a checkmark in your Visual Studio project "XML documentation file:" Found under -> Properties -> Build -> Output menu.

Run your installed Sandcastle builder GUI, choose a project and build your type of a help file!

More on how to build help files with Sandcastle you can find at: http://www.sandcastledocs.com/

Happy help building!

Lately, I needed to move over all my files from my non working FreeBSD server with UFS file system to my Windows NTFS file system.

In general, Windows OS does not read UFS file systems and when my FreeBSD Server was normaly working I used Samba for sharing files. After I moved my hard disk to another PC I was in a need to find some software that will mount me on my UFS file system. 

When browsing online for sometime I spotted software "UFS Explorer from SysDev Labaratories" that does exactly what I wanted. The software can be used for reading and copying files between different file systems. 

This was it! I installed it and in worked perfectly to restore all my data from UFS file system.

Yesterday, I updated the BlogEngine.NET from 1.3x to 1.5 because I haven’t updated it for about 2 years. I was quite impressed how fast and straightforward the upgrade had been, compared to other online web tools I use.

All my respects to the BlogEgine.NET team for the simplicity. Keep up the good work!

Spotlight is a third party application for Real-time performance view of your SQL Server environment. Application on SQL Server Enterprise detects and diagnoses performance issues across your SQL Server environment by providing an overview of enterprise performance at a glance. It might be useful for detecting bottlenecking however the application is not free to use.