“Announcing Entity Framework Code-First (CTP5 release)” and other links…
Scott Guthrie: “EF Code First enables you to use ‘POCO’—Plain Old CLR Objects—to represent entities within a database. This means that you do not need to derive model classes from a base class, nor implement any interfaces or data persistence attributes on them. This enables the model classes to be kept clean, easily testable, and ‘persistence ignorant’.”
“EF Feature CTP5 Released!”
ADO.NET team: “CTP5 includes some significant internal refactoring in preparation for some features we intend to support in the future, we are still in the process of stabilizing the quality after this refactoring. We decided to release before we finished this stabilization to get CTP5 in your hands as soon as possible and give ample time to incorporate feedback before we RTM.”
### “PowerToys for the Class Designer and Distributed System Designer”
CodePlex.com: “The Class Designer Enhancements add-in provides additional functionality for the Visual Studio Class Designer, such as HTML export and nested type creation commands. This download includes all necessary source code and a Visual Studio project template for creating your own add-ins for the Visual Studio designers. The Class Designer is a developer productivity tool available in Visual Studio Standard Edition and above, which allows developers to easily visualize, design, refactor, and document their code.”
“ELMAH: Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET (and MVC too!)”
Scott Hanselman: “ELMAH is one of those largely unknown and deeply awesome .NET Open Source projects that should be part of ASP.NET proper.”
### “That No SQL Thing—Document Databases”
Ayende Rahien: “A document database is schema free, that is, you don’t have to define your schema ahead of time and adhere to that. It also allow us to store arbitrarily complex data. If I want to store trees, or collections, or dictionaries, that is quite easy. In fact, it is so natural that you don’t really think about it.”
“Visual Studio Programmer Themes Gallery”
Scott Hanselman: “More and more I find myself ‘skinning and [theming]’ my Visual Studio development environment in order to stay frosty. It’s surprising how changing your theme (fonts, colors, etc.) can re-energize me when I'm having trouble with some problem or motivation.”
“Native php support in Visual Studio 2010?”
StackOverflow.com: “Check out CodeLobster php, it’s free and has a very similar look and feel to visual studio plus it has IntelliSense and debugging support.”
VS.Php for Visual Studio
“VS.Php is a Php integrated development environment based on Visual Studio. With VS.Php you can design, develop, debug and deploy Php applications within the Visual Studio IDE. VS.Php key features are around providing rich Php and Smarty editing capabilities as well as its ability to debug Php scripts locally as well as remotely.”