App-A-Day & SubSonic

App-A-Day

There are a few great apps in there and all come with source — the ones I checked out were in C# :)

Some of my favorites are:

• WPM Tray — display you word per minute count graph. Also a demonstration of how to hook global key-presses in C#
• Jedi IRC — a small IRC application as a Visual Studio plug-in — both interesting things to see done in C#
• Mouse Heat Map — get a display of where your mouse lives on your desktop! :D

I must confess these tiny fun apps have inspired a couple of my own that I’ll hopefully knock up and post at some point.

SubSonic — The Zero Code DAL

In other news SubSonic has come on a lot having addressed all the major issues apart from still being ActiveRecord based over DataMapper pattern. (If you haven’t seen it before check out the 20 minute screen-cast)

Rob, the brains behind SubSonic, has been interviewed over at the DotNetRocks podcast and I recommend giving this one a go — don’t let the first 5–10 minutes of warm-up and ads put you off.

He’s also put together a starter site solution you can pick-up from the same place which has some useful bits.

[)amien