I upgraded my copy of WinSCP "(WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client and FTP client for Windows. Legacy SCP protocol is also supported. Its main function is safe copying of files between a local and a remote computer.") last night and during the installation, I was offered Xobni to install, too. It looked cool, so I installed it. I upgraded at home and was offered WeFi. I liked that so I installed it, too.

By now, I was intrigued. I checked up on OpenCandy, the company that does the offers, and found that there is a network of companies that allow additional products to be pushed out during the installation of their products. It looks to me as if all of the products are pretty cool, but here are my favorites:

• MemeoConnect
• PrimoPDF
• TechSmith
• ZumoDrive

I recently came across Jing being used at ScreenCast for recording onscreen demos. It's free so I'm going to give it a try.

I've also had recommendations for Camtasia. I may try the demo for that, too.

• ANTLR

  ANTLR, ANother Tool for Language Recognition, is a language tool that provides a framework for constructing recognizers, interpreters, compilers, and translators from grammatical descriptions containing actions in a variety of target languages. ANTLR provides excellent support for tree construction, tree walking, translation, error recovery, and error reporting.

  PDF book on Antlr is reported to be worthwhile.

• Oslo

  "Oslo" is the code name for Microsoft's platform for model-driven applications. The goal of "Oslo" is to provide a 10x productivity gain by making model-driven applications mainstream with domain-specific models, a new language, and tools.

Capistrano

Simply put, Capistrano is a tool for automating tasks on one or more remote servers. It executes commands in parallel on all targeted machines, and provides a mechanism for rolling back changes across multiple machines. It is ideal for anyone doing any kind of system administration, either professionally or incidentally.

LinqToLucene

Lucene is an Information Retrieval System used for full-text searching and scoring results commonly referred to as a search engine (similar to google-type-searching). LINQ is Microsoft's extensible Language Integrated Query platform that provides querying directly in a managed CLR. LINQ comes out of the box with LINQ to Objects, LINQ to DataSets, LINQ to XML, LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities. The goal of LINQ to Lucene is to provide developers with the ability to enjoy full-text searching using a fast-proven search-engine within the .Net managed CLR.

LINQ & Lambda, Part 4: Lucene.Net

Extended coding example using Lucene.NET.

SnagIt

Take a "snapshot" of anything on your PC screen. Send it, store it, turn it into a detailed graphic, find it later. SnagIt makes it easy.

SWIG is an important software tool for integrating external libraries into applications. Previously mentioned here.

SWIG is a software development tool that connects programs written in C and C++ with a variety of high-level programming languages. SWIG is used with different types of languages including common scripting languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl and Ruby. The list of supported languages also includes non-scripting languages such as C#, Common Lisp (CLISP, Allegro CL, CFFI, UFFI), Java, Lua, Modula-3, OCAML, Octave and R. Also several interpreted and compiled Scheme implementations (Guile, MzScheme, Chicken) are supported. SWIG is most commonly used to create high-level interpreted or compiled programming environments, user interfaces, and as a tool for testing and prototyping C/C++ software. SWIG can also export its parse tree in the form of XML and Lisp s-expressions. SWIG may be freely used, distributed, and modified for commercial and non-commercial use.

Microsoft Source Analysis for C#

Source Analysis, also known as StyleCop, analyzes C# source code to enforce a set of best practice style and consistency rules. It can be run from inside of Visual Studio or integrated into an MSBuild project

[Download]

Microsoft FxCop 1.36

FxCop is a code analysis tool that checks .NET managed code assemblies for conformance to the Microsoft .NET Framework Design Guidelines. It uses MSIL parsing, and callgraph analysis to inspect assemblies for more than 200 defects in the following areas:

• Library design
• Globalization
• Naming conventions
• Performance
• Interoperability and portability
• Security
• Usage

[Download]

CHESS tester for multithreaded code

CHESS is a tool for systematically testing multithreaded code. Given a concurrent test, CHESS systematically drives the test along all possible thread interleavings. It uses model-checking techniques to explore effectively the enormously large state space of interleavings and provides quantified coverage guarantees. CHESS can check for assertions, deadlocks, livelocks, and data races. On finding an error, CHESS can reproduce the thread interleaving that exposed an error. CHESS is research tool developed by Microsoft Research.