Now that I have your attention I'd like to talk about a pretty good article I just read in the new issue of MSDN Magazine. It's called Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now and it's written by James Avery. I'm a regular reader of James' .Avery blog. He's the guy that does the ".NET Nightly" thing, where he spits out quick links to various tools and articles that interest him at the time. A few other bloggers that I read do this too. Sam Gentile does his own "New and Notable" thing and Mike Gunderloy has his Daily Grind.
His latest article does have a few annoying points, though. In three places (maybe more) he seems to believe that .NET invented something when it actually didn't.
First, when talking about a cool regular expression tool called Regulator he says, and I quote, "There is renewed interest in regular expressions because of the excellent support for them in .NET Framework." Say what? RE's have been around for a long time and you either need them or you don't. If you do, there were and are still plenty of good libraries out there. In the C++ world, we've always had Boost RegEx. Perhaps he's talking about the Visual Basic programmer's perspective? I'm not sure how VB programmers coped with regular expressions in the past. Yeh, perhaps he's talking about them.
Second, he introduces us to a cool reflection tool called Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector. However, he goes and says, "The .NET Framework introduced the world to the concept of reflection which can be used to examine any .NET-based code, whether it is a single class or an entire assembly." Are you joking? Java has had the Reflection API for years. They were the innovators there.
James also talks about the .NET build tool called NAnt and the .NET based unit testing tool called NUnit and doesn't even mention the original Java-based projects these bad boys were based off, namely Ant and JUnit respectively. Quite expectedly, he does mention Microsoft's upcoming MSBuild technology (which competes on a feature basis with NAnt) which will ship with Visual Studio .NET 2005.
In any case, the tools he talks about are very cool indeed.
