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Martin Salias, Southworks   Martin Salias (Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a Developer and Architect at Southworks, providing services for Microsoft Corp and other corporate customers in the Americas and Europe. He has more than 25 years in the software industry working with several different platforms and languages. He is a member of the Agile Alliance and a Microsoft MVP (C#).

DevExpress updates its DXperience suites

DXperience v2008 vol 1 is available and provides more visual components and IDE tools for Visual Studio .NET. The latest release adds a Rich Text Editor, a TreeView-Grid Hybrid, and a Spelling Checker for ASP.NET 2.0, and a new set of visual styles for its suite of web controls.

Of course, there are many enhancements in existing controls, too, like XtraCharts, ASPxGridView and Editors Suite, XtraGrid and XtraEditors. Several of these components now support LINQ data sources.

Full information at:
http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/DXperience/WhatsNew2008v1/index.xml

Access your TFS from Outlook

TeamExpand recently released TxLocker, a Microsoft Outlook add-on that provides access to Team Foundation Server. The product allows you to link tasks, bug reports, and work items in TFS to your e-mails and meetings.

The add-on provides this functionality that otherwise might require additional licenses of Microsoft Team Explorer, and it is a great front-end for developers working on other platforms than Visual Studio, covering a set of TFS activities beyond source control.

This product adds to TX Chrono, a timesheet application, and other services provided by TeamExpand, a company specialized in providing Team System and Life-Cycle Management services.

More information on:
http://teamexpand.com/product/tx-looker

EntLib 4.0 March 2008 CTP and Unity 1.0

This latest release of EntLib adds support for the .NET Framework 3.5, and added an attribute to all the assemblies so you can use them in a partial trust environment without recompiling the full solution.

Other enhancements are present in the Caching, Logging, Validation, and Exception Handling application blocks. However, Unity, the Dependency Injection Container application block (see below) is not integrated yet, and it is planned to go along in the next drop.

...and this is due to Unity 1.0 been just released. The DI container provides simplified object creation, especially for hierarchical object structures and dependencies; abstraction of requirements, allowing to specify dependencies at run time or in configuration; deferred component configuration to the container; and service location capability, allowing clients to store or cache the container.

Enterprise Library:
http://www.codeplex.com/entlib

Unity:
http://www.codeplex.com/unity

Open Source implementation of Power Shell

Pash, a clash of "PoSH" (as PowerShell is known) and "bash" (the most popular Unix shell) is an open source implementation the rich shell environment based on .NET.

The Pash shell runs in Linux, Mac, Windows and Windows Mobile. The non-Windows versions run over Mono, and the Windows Mobile requires a recompilation for the compact Framework.

The project is completely built on top of .NET 2.0, and it currently has half of the public PowerShell classes implemented.

Full information at:
http://igorshare.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/pash-cross-platform-powershell-is-out-in-the-wild-announcement/