YAGRAC

I've been wanting to learn how to develop for the Android platform, and I recently took some time to start a project to do just that. YAGRAC is Yet Another GoodReads Android Client. I've made the source code open source, so feel free to take a look or download the client and let me know what you think.

GoodReads is a social book reading service that I am a huge fan of. You can keep track of books that you have read, want to read, or are currently reading. Your friends can follow your list of books to see what you are up to. It is great for finding like-minded readers and discovering new books to enjoy. The GoodReads site is great, but when I'm away from my desk the mobile site leaves me wishing for more. GoodReads does not have an official app for iPhone or Android, so I though, why not make one myself! So far I have implemented the ability to read updates from friends, browse books on my own shelves or someone else's shelves, search for books, and review my list of social contacts (friends, followers, and following).

This project has proven to be a very good and effective learning opportunity. As I encounter interesting bits I will be sure to share them here.

Helpful Development Tools

I use Visual Studio 2008 for my daily development. I've found these tools useful in assisting me. If you are a fellow developer, you might find them useful too.

TortoiseSVN
Source Code Control client for Subversion servers. Integrates into the windows shell, providing handy shortcuts for checkouts, updates, and commits.

VisualSVN
SVN client plug-in for Visual Studio. Allows you to perform SVN commands from within the IDE.

GhostDoc
Plug-in for Visual Studio that can automatically generate XML documentation comments. This is really handy. If your naming conventions are pretty good, it takes a pretty good guess at the appropriate comment. You just have to tweak it after it fills in the majority of the boilerplate.

ReSharper
This is a help in so many ways. If you use NUnit for unit testing, it provides unit testing integration. It performs a much broader set of syntax checking for you than the default IDE does. Ever wonder how many of those using statements are really necessary? This will tell you. It also hunts down opportunities to simplify your code, and to eliminate potential bugs. Worth the license price, but if you don't want to pay it you can always use the "beta".

Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools
Even though I develop on a Vista x64 platform, I've installed this set of tools for one reason: tail.exe The tail program included with this service pack works just like the UNIX tail command. It shows the last few lines of a file. This is very useful if you want to monitor a text log, or some other file that is being updated by an application.

KB957912 - Update for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Debugging and Breakpoints
One of the most frustrating parts of debugging a multi-threaded app in Visual Studio 2008 is that the debugger will sometimes revert back to run mode. This happens whenever an exception is thrown in any thread, even if it is caught. This update for visual studio 2008 service pack 1 corrects that issue. This is a must have patch for anyone doing multi-threaded coding.

Those are the main tools I've found useful. If there are any tools you feel like you can't live without, I'd love to hear about them in the comments.