If you are a web developer, I recommend that you drop everything right now and go install Nikhil Kothari's Web Development Helper.  It is a fabulous tool for writing and debugging ASP.NET applications.  It helps with in the following areas:

• Tracing
• ViewState
• Caching (ASP.NET and HTTP)
• Restarting AppDomains
• Logging HTTP(S) Traffic (Including XMLHttpRequest)
• DOM
• JavaScript

...and I just realized that Scott Guthrie has also blogged about the Web Development Helper.  For more info, see his post.

For more developer resources (web and otherwise), see my Developers Tools List.

I've about had it with this dialog:


WHY does it take so long for this dialog to come up?  Does it have to scan the entire GAC first?  Maybe so, but that's no excuse for the eternity that I get no response from visual studio after selecting "Add Reference".  I can think of two solutions to this problem off the top of my head:

1. Select the projects tab by default - surely it doesn't take multiple seconds to scan the solution for other projects
2. Threading - You gave us the BackgroundWorker class in 2005 - please use it.

You would think that a little more time would have been put into a dialog that is so commonly used in development.  At least it's resizable in 2005.  Maybe in Visual Studio Orcas it will open in less than 10 seconds.

If you're still on an Atlas CTP and you're wanting to move to the latest ASP.NET Ajax Beta, you've got some work to do.  Here is the ASP.NET Ajax upgrade checklist you will need to follow in order to run under the new beta.  If you've done much with the JavaScript extensions (Ajax control extenders, etc.), you've got even more work ahead.  This whitepaper describes in detail the differences between the Atlas CTPs and the ASP.NET Ajax betas/RTM (don't worry - it's only 54 printed pages <g> ).

The power of the middle-click just increased.  Using Taskbar Shuffle, you can now close windows from the taskbar by middle-clicking their tab, but that's not the main draw to Taskbar Shuffle.  This utility is all about making the taskbar behave like you want it to.  You can set the taskbar to group tabs together without collapsing them (my favorite setting), but once the tab is created you can drag taskbar items to the exact order of you liking.  For other taskbar tips, check out control-clicking and file-dragging.

I'm currently working on some tricky CSS coding and have the need to test multiple browser versions.  Of course, Firefox is no problem: very little has changed in CSS rendering from version to version.  Internet Explorer is a bit more tricky.  I've been running the v7 betas for months now and I really didn't want to uninstall v7 for a few quick CSS tests.  v7 fixes a lot of the rendering problems that previous version had, and I needed to verify that my page looked reasonable at least in IE 6 if not 5.5 and 5.01.  I was considering setting up multiple VPCs to test, but then I ran across an installer called Multiple IE.  This handy utility works as advertised - it allows you to have multiple versions of IE installed concurrently.  I have had some problems with versions 4.01 - 5.5 crashing on me, but that's not a problem for quick rendering tests.  All in all, I'm quite happy with the setup.  Alternatively, if you are still running IE 6 and would like to give IE 7 a spin without a full install, give IE Standalone a whirl.  A word of caution, Scott Hanselman - among others - has had some bad luck running running a similar setup.  I have yet to run into problems, but I'll be sure to post an update if the tide turns.