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The Daily Grind 757

By Mike Gunderloy
Friday, November 18, 2005

Off to peer at the ultrasound again today.

Software

Conchango Scrum plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: Beta 1 Released - Another agile methodology gets shoehorned into Microsoft's framework. It strikes me as a bit baffling that people are willing to spend VSTS licening fees to run agile methodologies, but I'll bet it ends up being popular anyhow.
ProduKey 1.03 - Retrieves the product ID and CD Key of Windows, Office, and SQL Server installations on your computer - or all computers on your LAN. Freeware.
Koders desktop IDE plug-ins - Beta plug-ins to search the Koders source code archive directly from Eclipse, VS.NET 2003, VS2005, or Firefox.
Shell Extensions for .NET Assemblies, Version 1.4.1993 - Heath Stewart has updated this tool now that the .NET 2.0 RTM is out.
Extensibility Intellisense files now available - Useful stuff if you're writing add-ons or other extensions for Visual Studio.
FlashVNC Released - Alpha release of a VNC client written as a SWF file. Strange, but potentially useful. (via Digg)

Inside Microsoft's Xbox 360 - Instructions for disassembling your new Xbox 360. Of course, the sort of hardware protection Microsoft is using to keep people out of the box is precisely analogous to code obfuscation. Nothing short of casting the actual Xbox into a solid cube of stainless steel (and probably not even that) will keep the determined hackers out, but they can raise the bar considerably for the casually curious teenager.

VS2005 has launched. Now what? - My advice to those just looking at VS2005 for the first time.
MSTDD - Uncle Bob savages Microsoft's redefinition of TDD.

Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.