August's Toolbox Column Online

My Toolbox column in the August 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine is avaiable online. The July issue examines:

• FileHelpers - .NET includes XML serialization capabilities, which makes it easy to load an XML file into a collection of objects and to save object state back out to an XML file. If you need similar functionality for delimited or fixed-length text files (like CSV files), check out FileHelpers, an open-source .NET library created by Marcos Meli that provides such serialization capabilities.
• Blogs of Note - K. Scott Allen - a great blogger with in-depth and timely posts on ASP.NET, LINQ, ASP.NET MVC, and project management.
• YSlow for Firebug - Firebug is a free Firefox extension that is a must-have for all web developers. It captures many important metrics and allows developers to dynamically adjust the page's markup, CSS rules, and to debug JavaScript, all from the browser! YSlow for Firebug is an add-on to Firebug that provides a bevy of performance metrics and targeted guidelines on how to improve a page's response time.

For The Bookshelf section I reviewed Accelerated VB 2008, by Guy Fouche and Trey Nash. An excerpt from the review follows:

As a freelance developer and consultant, I work with clients who have existing apps but need help in adding new features. Some applications are written in C#, others in Visual Basic, so I need to have a mastery of both languages. Visual Basic is easy to pick up; its prose-like syntax and straightforward semantics have helped make it one of the most popular programming languages in the world. But there's a wide gulf between knowing Visual Basic and mastering it. To help bolster my Visual Basic skills, I picked up Accelerated VB 2008 (Apress, 2008) by Guy Fouché and Trey Nash. This book dispenses with the typical page-filling content found in most computer trade books and replaces it with distilled information and code examples that get right to the point. Because of this terse style, however, Accelerated VB 2008 is not for beginners who are interested in learning Visual Basic, but it's ideal for intermediate developers who are either looking to bolster their understanding of Visual Basic or who are in need of a good desk reference.

Enjoy! - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc721607.aspx

As always, if you have any suggestions for products or books to review for the Toolbox column, please send them to toolsmm@microsoft.com.