New Microsoft Tools to help your developers

Free tools from Microsoft. Get 'em while you can.

July 3rd, 2007 at 10:00am — Comments: (0) — By: Jonathan Danylko — Tags: Tools

Microsoft released some tasty vittles for developers in the last couple of days that I seemed to have missed.

First up for you lan-ers is Microsoft's updated Network Monitor 3.1. This version includes:

• Wireless (802.11) capturing and monitor mode on Vista – With supported hardware, (Native WIFI), you can now trace wireless management packets. You can scan all channels or a subset of the ones your wireless NIC supports. You can also focus in on one specific channel. We now show the wireless metadata for normal wireless frames. This is really cool for t-shooting wireless problems. See signal strength and transfer speed as you walk around your house!
• RAS tracing support on Vista – Now you can trace your RAS connections so you can see the traffic inside your VPN tunnel. Previously this was only available with XP.
• Right click add to filter – Now there's an easier way to discover how to create filters. Right click in the frame details data element or a column field in the frame summary and select add to filter. What could be easier!
• Microsoft Update enabled – Now you will be prompted when new updates exist. NM3.1 will occasionally check for a new version and notify you when one is available.
• New look filter toolbar – We've changed the UI related to apply and remove filters. You can now apply a filter without having to UN-apply it first.
• New reassembly engine – Our reassembly engine has been improved to handle a larger variety of protocol reassembly schemes.
• New public parsers – These include ip1394, ipcp, ipv6cp, madcap, pppoE, soap, ssdp, winsrpl, as well as improvements in the previously shipped parsers.
• Numerous Bug Fixes – We've taken your reported problems on the connect site and fixed many of the confirmed bugs.
• Faster Parser Loading – We've significantly improved the time it takes to load the parsers. Now rebuilding takes a fraction of the time it used to.

If you are interested in downloading it, check out the Network Monitor Blog at technet.

Next (my favorite) is the .NET 3.5 Framework Community Technology Preview (June 2007). According to the web site, 3.5 is scheduled to be released by the end of 2007 with a number of additional features added.

Lastly, if you are interested in any SQL Server 2005 utilities, you came to the right place. The SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer (July 2007) provides the same functionality as the IIS Best Practices Analyzer, but runs through a list of Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 recommendations and practices to see if there are any open issues regarding your database.

I hope this whetted your appetite for new developer tools.

As I hear more, I'll post more.