Spikeh'd

I've been doing a lot of work with SSIS recently, and learning a lot on the way. One of my tasks over the last week was to convert each row of a result set in to XML and post it to a web service. The web service only accepted one row at a time, and generating XML in SSIS is not the most intuitive of tasks, so I wrote a script component to do the conversion work. Anyone who's tried anything more advanced than a "Hello World" example in a script component will be able to tell you that you cannot use breakpoints in them - making it quite difficult to debug even the simplest of code. For a developer such as myself, it's like having an arm removed in a horrific train accident. I had a bit of a task ahead of me - I had to create an XML document with tags containing attributes and values, attributes and child elements, child elements and values, attributes, child elements and values, then self-closing tags with some of the above... whilst not exactly a daunting task, i...

The development world has been coming up with ways to improve productivity for years. However since Visual Studio 2010 was released, with its fully extensible model, things have seriously changed. Most tools have been modified to extend VS2010's already pretty awesome IDE. With just a few extensions, you can fill in almost all of the gaps the Visual Studio team have left in the VS experience. I'm not a massive fan of NuGet; I use it, but not for production sites. It's good for quickly implementing a library in a test project, but I just don't like the "bloat" you end up with. I like to know what every single file does and why its there. The same goes for WebMatrix; although handy, I much prefer to manually create projects... I somehow feel like it makes it easier in the long run, even if it takes you a while to set them up in the first place. I recently purchased ReSharper (after trying trials a number of times over the years and not getting along with it)...