In my last post, titled "10 Tools Which I Left After Using VSTS 2008",  I have included a list of 10 tools which I am not using currently, as I have the corresponding features available in Visual Studio Team System 2008. However, on the other hand, I am still using few tools even I have VSTS 2008!

Here are 10 of among them..

1. Code Smith: An excellent template based code generator.

2. Crystal FTP: Excellent FTP client tool.

3. Total Validator: One of the most powerful tool that I ever seen, which includes very nice feature to validate web standards. 

4. Diff Marge: A tool that enables us to investigate and/or synchronize the difference between two files or folders.

5. Design Pattern Automation Toolkit: An excellent open source tool, by which we can automate and generate source code with respect to established design patterns.

6. Office Visio 2007: Although Visual Studio has support for diagramming, however Office Visio 2007 is still # 1 choice for me, with respect to analyzing, modeling, designing the application system on which I am working on. It contains a wide range of support of notation, including UML, Enterprise Application, Prototyping. 

7. Copy Source As HTML: Bloogers like me, always needs to copy own source code from Visual Studio IDE, to be posted. This tool serves me this purpose.

8. Spell Checker: Its really a nice thing, if my code don't have any spell mistakes, which can occur frequently. Wonderful tool to help developers!

9. SysInternalSuite: A nice system spy tool for developers and system admin. It contains lots of useful tools, to investigate the system with respect to the current execution of your application.

10. Employee Info Starter Kit: An excellent ASP.NET starter kit, which includes most of the web and coding best practices. Helps web developers to reduce start-up preparation time for web application.

I have started using Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2008, recently. Previously I worked with Visual Studio 2005. As a matter of fact I had to use lots of external tools to perform and speedup my development process. However, while working with VSTS 2008, it's very exciting for me that, I found replacements for most of the external tools there.

Here are 10 tools which I left after using VSTS 2008:

1. Database Schema Compare

External tool: Redgate SQL Compare

VSTS 2008 tool: Menu -> Data -> Schema Compare

2. Database Data Compare

External tool: Redgate SQL Data Compare

VSTS 2008 tool: Menu -> Data -> Data Compare

3. Database Data Generator

External tool: Data Gen 0.9

VSTS 2008 tool (power tool): Add -> New Item -> Data Generation Wizard

4. Unit Testing

External tool: Test Driven.NET

VSTS 2008 tool: Menu -> Test -> New Test

5. Web Testing

External tool: Badboy

VSTS 2008 tool: Menu -> Test -> New Test

6. Load Testing

External tool: Neoload

VSTS 2008 tool: Menu -> Test -> New Test

7. Code Profiling

External tool: Redgate ANTS Profiler

VSTS 2008 tool: Menu -> Analyze -> Launch Performance Wizard

8. Code Analysis

External tool: Fxcop

VSTS 2008 tool: Menu -> Analyze -> Run Code Analysis

9. Code Matrics

External tool: nDepend

VSTS 2008 tool: Menu -> Analyze -> Calculate Code Matrics

10. Java Script Debugging

External tool: Code Project Java Script Debugging Tool

VSTS 2008 tool: see Scott Gu's post on it.

One of the people I've known in the SEO industry for a long time is Jill Whalen. I respect her ability and "tude" and thoroughly enjoyed our sometimes spirited discussions while we were both Super Mods at IHY forums. Jill recently gave a seminar at SES Toronto and listed some do's and don'ts. We don't agree on some techniques... but ... we both have very strong ideas about what works and is important.

This article titled Google's Paid Click Business Slipping - ComScore has got to be one of the biggest yawners yet and another indication of a jittery stock market. As to the source.... In 14 years I've yet to see data from comscore that I'm not skeptical of the numbers and the way the data is gathered and possibly skewed by the polled audience or source/process.

8 Theories For Adsense Fluctuations and Adsense Earnings Down by Jason Lee Miller of WebPro News should give Search engine marketers lots to think about. A number of the recent changes to AdWords have had me to some degree stumped. Quality Score which should have reduced costs increased them. Huh? I thought the QS was supposed to take "Made for AdSense" arbitrageurs out of the game.

My first inclination if I were a MSFT stock holder would be to sell confident that some time in the next year Mr. Softy will be 20% cheaper. The combination of Yahoo! and M$ search technology is not likely because they look to be on different platforms/OS. It is more likely you'll see one or the other rolled out on both sites to start with and then a new one developed for integration into a single site.

A blog post about the effectiveness of press releases in the age of Social Media Networking and tagging sites. Social Media/Tagging and Social Networking sites are redefining "community" in ways that are still being worked through by online marketers. One of the major differences between the "Social" sites and old School "communities" are the audiences that use them.

Software giant Microsoft introduced this technology to open a new track in web. Along with several similar features like Flash, Silverlight includes more powerful infrastructure. Silverlight 1.0, the first version has been released in last September, with multiple browser and operating system capability. Code named as "Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E)" Silverlight enables web application developers to include several rich user experience feature like animation, vector graphics

Today an interesting article on Mobile and Local Search peaked my imagination partially because it was further data on Mobile Search verifying the beliefs expressed in my 2008 Search Predictions from yesterdays post.

I have read quite a few articles making predictions about the SEM industry for 2008. There has been a lot of discussion about the Google purchase of DoubleClick as you will see by my predictions below I'm not a big believer that Google can do any better than anyone that has preceded it in the display advertising biz.