October's Toolbox Column Online

Published 13 October 08 10:28 AM | Scott Mitchell

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

SQL Data Generator - Quickly generate unbounded amounts of real-world test data for your database with a few points and clicks of the mouse.
Blogs of Note - Dare Obasanjo - Dare is a Program Manager at Microsoft and writes about social networks and the transport and data exchange standards common used in such sites. Dare is also the creator of RssBandit, a popular (and free) desktop-based RSS reader.
Displaying Color-Coded Syntax in a Web Page - There are a bevy of tools that you can use to format source code into lively markup on a web page. I look at three:

Quick Highlighter, a web-based tool where you enter code into a textbox and the page generates corresponding HTML and CSS.
CopySourceAsHtml, a Visual Studio Add-In that lets you select code (or markup) from Visual Studio and right-click and copy the source code to HTML and CSS markup for display.
squishySyntaxHighlighter (which appears to be offline right now), which is a .NET component for programmatically converting a string of Visual Basic or C# code into display markup.

For The Bookshelf section I reviewed ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook, by Bill Hamilton. An excerpt from the review follows:

When I write or maintain ADO.NET code, I like to keep a copy of Bill Hamilton's book ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook (O'Reilly, 2008) within arm's reach. ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook offers more than 200 recipes for common ADO.NET problems—everything from where to store database connection strings to how to execute a SQL statement asynchronously. When I get stuck trying to recall how to perform a certain action, I reach for this book, flip to the Table of Contents, find the recipe, and am off and running. Each recipe starts with a problem statement, such as: "You want to access an output parameter returned by a stored procedure." Next is the solution, and then the discussion. This problem/solution/discussion format results in self-contained recipes that are easy to understand.

Enjoy! - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc947918.aspx

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