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Useful Resources

A quick round up of some useful resources I have come across.

Calendar

DDay.iCal - an iCalendar class library written in C# and based on the RFC 2445 standard. It parses files in the iCalendar format and provides an object-oriented interface to iCalendar components: Event, Todo, TimeZone, Journal, FreeBusy, and Alarm.

Homepage: www.ddaysoftware.com/Pages/Projects/DDay.iCal/

 

Web Development Tools

Firebug - I have been using Firebug for years it really is undoubtedly the best tool for debugging websites in your browser.

  • Inspect and edit HTML and CSS on the fly
  • Visualize CSS layout
  • Monitor network activity
  • Log and debug JavaScript

If you don't use Firebug go install it now. You need to use Firefox, there is a lite version that works with other browsers but it doesn't compare to the original version for Firefox.

Homepage: www.getfirebug.com
License: Open Source 

Microsoft Ajax Minifier - A free tool for windows that you can use to minify your JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheet files.

Homepage: http://www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary/AjaxMinDocumentation.ashx

JSCompress - An online JavaScript compression tool that compresses your JavaScript files using either JSMin and Packer algorithms. Compressed javascript files are ideal for production environments since they typically reduce the size of the file by 30-90%.

Homepage: www.jscompress.com
 

JavaScript Libraries

jQuery - a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

  • Lightweight footprint
  • CSS3 Compliant
  • Cross-browser
jQuery community site
jQuery section in the Juna Blog

Logging API

log4net - a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. log4net is a port of the excellent log4j framework to the .NET runtime. We have kept the framework similar in spirit to the original log4j while taking advantage of new features in the .NET runtime
  • Support for multiple frameworks
  • Output to multiple logging targets
  • Hierarchical logging architecture
  • XML Configuration
  • Dynamic Configuration
  • Logging Context
  • Proven architecture
  • Modular and extensible design
  • High performance with flexibility

Homepage: logging.apache.org/log4net/

 

PDF Libraries

iTextSharp - a port of the iText, a free Java-Pdf library that enables dynamic generation of PDF documents.

Homepage: itextsharp.sourceforge.net

 

Persistence

NHibernate - is great tool to improve your productivity. NHibernate is a port of Hibernate Core for Java to the .NET Framework. It handles persisting plain .NET objects to and from an underlying relational database. Given an XML description of your entities and relationships, NHibernate automatically generates SQL for loading and storing the objects. Optionally, you can describe your mapping metadata with attributes in your source code.

  • Variety of mappings for collections and dependent objects
  • No code generation or required in your build procedure
  • The query options - NHibernate addresses both sides of the problem; not only how to get objects into the database, but also how to get them out again
  • Custom SQL - specify the exact SQL that NHibernate should use to persist your objects. 
  • Stored procedures are supported on Microsoft SQL Server.
  • Support for long-lived persistence contexts, detach/reattach of objects, and takes care of optimistic locking automatically
  • Open source - NHibernate is licensed under the LGPL (Lesser GNU Public License)
NHibernate community site
NHibernate section in the Juna Blog

 

Search Engines

Lucene.Net - a source code, class-per-class, API-per-API and algorithmic port of the Java Lucene search engine to the C# and .NET platform utilizing Microsoft .NET Framework.

Homepage: incubator.apache.org
License: Apache Software License

Luke - a handy development and diagnostic tool, which accesses already existing Lucene indexes and allows you to display and modify their content.

  • Browse by document number, or by term
  • View documents / copy to clipboard
  • Retrieve a ranked list of most frequent terms
  • Execute a search, and browse the results
  • Analyze search results
  • Selectively delete documents from the index
  • Reconstruct the original document fields, edit them and re-insert to the index
  • Optimize indexes

Homepage: www.getopt.org/luke/

 

Visual Studio Add-ons

.NET Reflector - enables you to easily view, navigate, and search through, the class hierarchies of .NET assemblies, even if you don't have the code for them. With it, you can decompile and analyze .NET assemblies in C#, Visual Basic, and IL.

Homepage: www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/

GhostDoc - is a free add-in for Visual Studio that automatically generates XML documentation comments for C#. Either by using existing documentation inherited from base classes or implemented interfaces, or by deducing comments from name and type of e.g. methods, properties or parameters. GhostDoc is designed to be used with C# code, VB.Net support is experimental.

Homepage: http://www.roland-weigelt.de/ghostdoc/
License : Can be used free of charge for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

Resharper - is a productivity tool for .NET developers. ReSharper provides solution-wide error highlighting on the fly, instant solutions for found errors, over 30 advanced code refactorings, unit testing tools, navigation and search features, single-click code formatting and cleanup, automatic code generation and templates, and more productivity features for C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, XML, and XAML.

Homepage: www.jetbrains.com/resharper/
License: Commercial

 

Web Applications

Redmine - a flexible project management web application written using Ruby on Rails framework.

  • Multiple projects support
  • Flexible role based access control
  • Flexible issue tracking system
  • Gantt chart and calendar
  • News, documents & files management
  • Feeds & email notifications
  • Per project wiki
  • Per project forums
  • Time tracking
  • Custom fields for issues, time-entries, projects and users
  • SCM integration (SVN, CVS, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and Darcs)
  • Issue creation via email
  • Multiple LDAP authentication support
  • User self-registration support
  • Multilanguage support
  • Multiple databases support

Homepage: www.redmine.org
License: GNU General Public License v2 (GPL)

  

Web Based Tools

Web Sniffer - a useful tool that retrieves a page from your website and allows you to analyze the HTTP headers. Very useful for checking if your website is using gzip compression etc...

Homepage: www.web-sniffer.net

MxToolbox  - a great tool for looking up DNS records and checking your mail servers.

Homepage: http://mxtoolbox.com