Devscovery and Cool Tools from Travis Illig

What a week!  Devscovery Redmond was the best one yet!  It seems only rocket scientists came to the conference because I’ve never been asked so many thought provoking and just plain hard questions at a developer gathering.  I sure hope I gave everyone who attended my talks their money’s worth because I was learning a ton from everyone there.  Many thanks to everyone who came and made me think!

For those that came to my .NET Tools talk, we got a special treat from Travis Illig where he showed us his amazing CR_Documentor.  CR_Documentor is an AddIn to Visual Studio that lets you see your XML Doc Comments in a tool window in all their real time HTML glory.  Travis showed me his tool before the talk and I loved it.  In fact, I asked him if he’d be a guest presenter in the talk to show it off.  Travis did a great presentation.  I love tools like CR_Documentor.  They do one thing and do it extremely well.  After using on the flight home last night, I can’t believe how useful it is.  Just install it.

Travis also has done another excellent add in, Solvent, that’s now installed on my machines.  It adds a couple of much needed options like recursive expand/contract to the Solution Explorer context menu.  Also added to the Solution Explorer menu and hugely useful, Open Containing Folder (i.e., an Explorer window) and Command Prompt Here.  In fact, just go to Travis’ software page as he’s posted other cool stuff as well.  I’ve installed his Junction Shell Extension as well.  For the next Devscovery, I’ll just do a whole presentation on “Cool Tools from Travis Illig!”