The Daily Grind 852 by Mike Gunderloy Monday, April 3, 2006

You know you worked too hard on the weekend when you're looking forward to a peaceful Monday off.

• MSBuild Community Tasks Project releases new version - If you're using MSBuild as your build engine, you need to check out this extensive (and free) set of extra goodies.
• Hypertext Studio - WYSIWYG editing tool that can build HTML Web sites, WinHelp, online help files, supports multiple authors, lots more features. Trial download is here, pricing from $49.99 depending on which edition you buy. (via ComponentBlog)
• Total Access Emailer - Preview of version 11.5 of this bulk email tool for Microsoft Access includes the ability to convert Access reports to HTML email, SSL support, and more.
• NTime - Performance unit testing tool - Similar to NUnit, this tool lets you mark up code with attributes specifying desired performance and then shows you in a GUI whether those goals are being met.
• iColorFolder 1.4.2 - Free tool to let you colorize individual folders in your Windows XP Explorer windows.
• ExtenDB - Clustering software for PostgreSQL databases. The 4 node edition is free, and they have commercial editions that take things up to 16 nodes and terabyte scalability.

• Format String 101 - Kathy Kam explains the basics for .NET developers. Why can't the .NET help have all this in one easy-to-find place? (via Jason Haley)
• A Sneak Peek at GhostDoc 2.0 - There's some spiffy AI coming in the next version of this C# documentation tool; it will actually analyze your code to help you find better names for things.
• Upcoming ASP.NET Releases in April - Things are hopping in ASP.NET land, and Scott Guthrie has the details.

• Best Software Writing - Volume II - Joel Spolsky is soliciting nominations for his next anthology.
• The Hexodoku Programming Challenge - Larry O'Brien proposes a generalized Sudoku with an XML scheme for representing puzzles and a prize for generating them.
• April 1, 2006 - Wikipedia saves me the bother of tracking all the oh-aren't-we-clever junk that appeared on the Web this weekend.

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