I received an MSDN Universal Subscription as part of the Microsoft Regional Director’s program soon after leaving Microsoft last May. Honestly, I’m a little overwhelmed. I’ve got two huge books of CDs and DVDs with more software than I even know what to do with. But what a fantastic resource! I wish I had this at Microsoft, it’s so convenient vs. having to do everything over the network.
My most used DVD? … and I haven’t even looked at all of them yet: SQL Server. I’m constantly setting up VPC’s to test new functionality in Community Server — such as Passport integration which I’m working on now. My Passport experience will be a separate blog rant saved for later.
Speaking of developer tools, I attended a user group presentation here in Dallas on CodeSmith a couple of nights ago. Talk about cool tools! It’s unlike other code generators that I’ve seen. Instead it is template driven and even better, the templates look like ASP.NET code! Since it’s template driven, it literally generates your code the same way you would have written it because you wrote the template! If you find yourself doing repetitive code, check this tool out. We’re (Telligent) definitely going to be making use of this tool – it’s going to save us a ton of development time and I’ll blog more later about how we’re using it.
