Here is a nouget of goodness that everyone who does Visual Studio development should be aware of. If you decide you want the testing suite available with Visual Studio professional or the other slick little tools that come only with a paid version of the tool, you can purchase an upgrade version due to the very lenient upgrade policy. According to the VS 2008 purchasing options the upgrade is available to those using: "Any other developer tool (including free developer tools, such as Visual Studio Express Editions or Eclipse)"

The different in purchase price from Retail version to Upgrade version is somewhere around $300. 

If you are considering migrating away from Visual Web Developer to a fully licensed and operational verision then buy the upgrade. Notepad could even be considered your "development environment" if you use it for development (although that is a very loose idea of a development environment).

If you are a .Net programmer and you have not checked out the Microsoft ASP.Net 3.5 platform you are really handicapping yourself as a programmer. There are so many enhancements to the 3.5 platform that make programming in .Net something to enjoy more than you ever have in the past. Any .Net programmer should be subscribing to Scott Guthrie's blog as he explains some of the best kept secrets in the .Net world.

One of the newest additions to the 3.5 framework that makes my life as a ASP.Net developer enjoyable is the LINQ (language integrated query). LINQ allows you to write a simple query to pull data from the database, xml file, or other LINQ source. The query is based on a dbml file that models the datasource showing relations between the different tables you may have. You can then specify an object of one table and get it's children from another table using LINQ notation. LINQ does all the inner join statements necessary to pull that data back out for you. This is a great tutorial on LINQ to SQL.

My second favorite nugget of goodness with the 3.5 framework is the ability to extend CLR datatypes without having to sub-class the type. If you create your own static class you can just use the "this" keyword in the declaration of an object extend the methods applied to that object. Scott Guthrie again teaches us how to use that in his article here.

As I review this post I have realized that instead of reading this you should be reading Scott Guthrie's blog. So go! Read it! He has written some very cool stuff that will help you become a better ASP.Net developer.

OpenSouce is taking the world by storm. In case you have been land-locked and have never heard of OpenSource before it is software development by the masses. People create applications and then allow the source code for their app to be visible to anyone. They have the right to take that code and modify it to make it better and use it for whatever they want. The idea is that people will share new revisions to make the world a better place.

For web programmers there are many OpenSource programs out there. You can find just about anything you would like to create on the web in an OpenSource application. Most of these apps are written in PHP which will run well on a windows server if you install Apache and MySQL. But what about the world of ASP.Net developers? Where are the OpenSource solutions for them?

A quick Google on "OpenSource ASP.Net " helps you find some excellent ASP.Net OpenSource products. Unfortunately the list is only about 1/100th the size of OpenSource project involving PHP, Apache, and MySQL. There have been other ASP.Net developers who have started as OpenSource projects and then decided to remove their products from OpenSource and start selling them. It is an unfortunate turn of events.

So where does this lead us? What does the future hold for ASP.Net OpenSource development?  I hope to see a bright future where .Net developers are offering their products in OpenSource to make this a better place to program and have better solutions at our fingertips.