WinDbg is a great tool once you can get passed some of its archaic syntax. For advanced debugging, I know of no other way to dig deep and solve the problems. For hard core memory or threading issues, WinDbg is a must have. So, that being said, a colleague of mine gave me this listing of common WinDbg commands, which he grabbed from somewhere out there and added to. I then added more to it as I read Debuggin Microsoft.NET 2.0 Applications by John Robbins. So I am putting it out here for further reference.

Mark's WinDbg Common commands.doc (75.00 kb)

Ok, I'm about a decade behind the times on this one, but for the longest time I've been reading my RSS feeds in Outlook. It isn't horrible, but the download approach is not really ideal for the feeds that I read, some of which have 200+ posts a day. I recently started using Google's reader and love it. They have a very slick AJAX scrolling region that loads on demand as you scroll the list. Live search had a similar idea when it first came out, but they backed off of it for some reason. It's really nice to be able to scroll through a long list and not have to worry about clicking next page. I really hope that feature catches on for other sites as well.

I just read about a useful .NET tool that I had not previously heard of. It is called the Fusion Log Viewer (or Asembly Binding Log Viewer). It ships with the Framework SDK as fuslogvw.exe and will display the assembly loading details for a .NET program. Between probing elements, GAC, satellite assemblies  and dependent assemblies, this tool could come in handy if you are having issues in this area.

Windows Error Reporting is a 'free' service from Microsoft that integrates into your product and allows end-users to report detailed error information to Microsoft. Microsoft then passes this information on to the vendor (you) in the form of mini-dumps and error reports that can then be debugged inside of Visual Studio and/or WinDbg. This seems like an invaluable service to an ISV that runs their products on Windows. For WinForm applications, there is a dialog that appears that allows the user to click 'Send Error Report'. I would hope there is also a way to automate the error reporting as there could be no user interface to the product (e.g., Windows Services).

The kicker to WER is that you need to have a digital certificate which is not cheap. However, depending upon the breadth of your customer base, it may be well worth it.

Microsoft has a shareware starter kit that appears to provide quite a few useful tools to help a new author get started and it is free of charge. Here is a run down of some of the features:

• Buy Now Web Service
• Activate Now Web Service
• Product Registration Web Service
• Product Feedback Web Service
• Exception Handling Web Service
• Multi-Threaded Splash Screen
• Configure Your Token
• Upgrade Version Web Service
• Log File Web Service
• Custom Developer Portal

Levelator is a free tool that will level the audio in MP3 files so that they are all in balance. Sounds like a good idea. I haven't used this but may look into it if I ever get back to organizing my music library.

Read a little review on a free tool called Defraggler that allows you to defrag a hard drive or just individual files. Could be handy.

I ran across a website that gives you the formats for all of the various connection strings that you may need to make when hooking up a data source within VS. Every time that I have to type in one of these I have to look up the format for it, so this site should help consolidate all of my searching: ConnectionStrings.com

To see the CLR versions currently in use on a machine you can run CLRVer -all. This will show the version being used by each process that is running.