Print | posted on Friday, August 24, 2007 1:19 AM
Right, so I really am not turning my blog into a pimp vehicle for my friends stuff....
But (!)...
If you haven't seen this yet - you absolutely must check it out.
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2007/08/21/6095.aspx
AC is a real super smart cookie - he's not just a smart developer - he *knows* how to articulate problems, tradeoffs, compromises and he knows how to use his keyboard for maximum effect.
If you know me, or have worked with/for me you know I don't tolerate lame developers, but when I come across a decent one I will make that very clear. After 15 years in the business I haven't met that many. AC is one of the best. Why? Because he "gets" the developer mindset and he understands productivity. He never over-engineers solutions using wrapped wrappers and his code doesn't suck.
SharePoint development (as I've previously ranted about and no doubt will continue to) is in a lot of ways a royal PITA. Repetitive, silly, unnecessary tasks which have a HIGH PROBABILTY OF HUMAN ERROR. The platform rocks, the tooling sucks.
So AC has put together some awesome widgets which leverage tools from DevExpress which make building SharePoint Features easier, quicker and most importantly less error prone.
The only "downside" is you need the DevExpress tools - but if you are a serious codehead you will *love* their stuff so that's not a downside to my mind. It's cheap anyway - especially if you pay for it in real money as opposed to USD :)
In addition, AC has put together some stunningly good support material in the form of blog posts and screencasts that you can use to check it out before you install it etc. This is how it should be done - MSDN folk take note. Folks who post screenshot install walkthru blog posts take note.
If you use this stuff you will a) save a whole bucket load of time, b) make less mistakes and c) be less frustrated with feature development.
You have never seen GUID "wow" until you've used AC's stuff. Go watch over on his site. Go install these tools and supercharge your feature development.
Oh, and it's all (AC's stuff) free - just as it should be - that's a proper community for you.