This is a guest post written by John Daniel-Trask from Mindscape.

Mindscape have released a major upgrade to their LightSpeed domain modelling / ORM tool. Version 2.0 includes a visual model designer integrated into Visual Studio, LINQ support, and the ability to access multiple databases concurrently. LightSpeed is a small, fast domain modeling tool which uses convention over configuration to perform object-relational mapping without the need for complex mapping files.

In the past it’s been necessary to code LightSpeed models explicitly in C# or Visual Basic, but the new Visual Studio-hosted designer enables a more data-centric approach: developers can drag tables from Server Explorer and LightSpeed automatically creates the models for them. Developers can also add validations and tune performance parameters such as caching and lazy/eager loading through the designer. The designer also supports a “round-tripping” approach whereby changes to the database can be applied incrementally to the…

Here are two interesting tools I found while working on our Silveredo 2 theme.

Install Multiple Internet Explorer Versions

This one is quite helpful and a must if you are working and building themes. Usually you want your theme to be compatible with FF2/3 and IE7 which we all know has its issues…

I bet there are many people who want their site to be compatible with Internet Explorer 6 too, having IE6 and IE7 working together on your windows is a problem, as it turns out, you CAN have all the Internet Explorer versions working along side each other, all you have to do is to download the multiple IE version installer and install any version you need.

We all know the propertyGrid control, which provides a user interface for browsing the properties of an object. What about having a WPF propertyGrid? Well, yesterday I  noticed that there is a work in progress on an open source WPF property grid. Tomer Shamam announced in his blog Essential WPF that he accepted Microsoft Israel OPEN UP challenge (open source contest) and created a new project - WPF property grid. As he stated, it is currently only a Proof of concept and the interface and its usage may change in next releases. I think that its worth tracking…

During the past couple of weeks we noticed that whenever we tweak our theme or change something in one of our posts, it causes some pages to become XHTML invalid. We came to think that you never know where it is going to hit you, so we sat down and created a small application which helps you keep all your pages XHTML valid. We checked it on our sitemap, and seems we have some HTML work to do :).

This application is written in WPF and is based on the .Net Framework 3.5.

It will allow you to validate you entire sitemap in one click. The validation is done through the W3C validation SOAP service, so you can trust it :).

XPath is a language for addressing parts of an XML document, for those who are not familiar with this language - here are the W3C specifications and here is the W3schools tutorial. Now that we know XPath, lets get to the point of that post which is - Visual XPath.

This is a free graphical XPath [...]

Recently, I ran into a great free Microsoft tool which is called - Resource Refactoring Tool. This tool provides developers an easy way to extract hard coded strings from the code to resource files.
Resource files (.resx files) consists of XML entries, which specify objects and string inside XML tags. Those files can be opened with [...]