I'm working with varied technology stacks these days and figured it was a good time to throw a few questions and tool suggestions out to the community.  First, the tools list.

IDEs & respective plugins/addons

• Visual Studio 2008
  • ReSharper 4.5
  • Visual SVN
  • Subversion/Tortoise
• Flex Builder 3
• Flash CS4

Some of the Main Bits I'm Using These Days

• Silverlight 3 SDK
• Silverlight 3 Toolkit
• .NET Facebook Toolkit (including for MVC, Facebook Developer Toolkit Starter & more)
• ActionScript Facebook API, Wiki for ActionScript & Facebook,
• Adobe AIR
• Adobe Flash

That is about it.  I am amazed, looking at this list, how minimal it has become even with the increase in technology stacks I've been working with.

I've been working on some ActionScript code for work related projects, and was really hoping that I could get a Flex Builder 3 and Flash CS4 License purchased for ongoing use.  The Adobe tools & frameworks are really pretty sweet.  So with ongoing efforts continuing with the Adobe Tools/Codez the decision was made to purchase the tools.  I'm stoked, and looking forward to more ActionScript work and getting to figure out this framework stack.

I've started ramping hard core of Adobe's suite of products.  There are numerous reasons why, but I won't bore anyone or myself.  The cool thing is the technologies that Adobe has created.  I started to write up a description but I found this video which describes the differences between Flash & Flex Development Environments, and the difference between Flash and AIR.

This player, unto itself is rather awesome, I really dig it.

The second thing I?ve started reading through is the Inside RIA Entries.  This is a valuable knowledge base from actual bloggers and users of these Adobe toolsets.

As I'm going through all of this material I'll post more of the information I'm accumulating.

On a side note from the market perspective, Microsoft really needs to bulk up against the competition, Adobe has some amazing products that really are years ahead of the competition for developing well thought out and usable user interfaces and designs in general.

So yeah, absolutely pointless title except I'm gettin' me some of that.

In other news, I've reloaded my main workstation.  This workstation is my spiffy 1.5+ year old Dell Inspiron 1720.  It is a fairly decent laptop for a workstation, with 1920x1200 resolution it gives me almost what one has with dual monitor support!

The Tools & Architecture Frameworks Listing

Every few months I end up with a different set of frameworks and applications that I use for development.  Being a developer one has to change frequently and stay updated with the latest and greatest, or risk losing value as a developer and fading into mediocrity.  I don't dig that prospect so I tend to stay close to bleeding edge, without the blood (aka lotsa bugs).

Architectural Pieces - Major 5

1. entlib - For many of the internal pieces, I'm ramping up on and already using several of the entlib libraries (redundant use of library, eh).
2. Silverlight 2 - For many of my web efforts, I'll be pushing through some Silverlight Apps for the UI part of my architectural standard.
3. .NET 3.5 SP1 - Of course, for the framework that binds it all together, it's gonna be .NET 3.5 SP1.
4. The Cloud / Azure - I'll be working diligently to get some initial cloud & Azure work done to prototype how and where I can place applications into the cloud for various reasons.  I'm actually hoping to avoid local database use in the future with use of SSDS (SQL Server Data Services) or SDS.
5. SQL Server 2008 - 08' features rock!  Nuff' said.

Architectural Pieces - Minor 4

1. Spring.NET - The architectural elements put together to make up this framework is awesome.  I dig the pieces and would prospectively use this if there is reason not to use entlib pieces (i.e. performance, existing code base, etc)
2. Adobe Air App - I'm thinking of doing development against Air instead of Silverlight 2 in numerous places, primarily because it deploys EVERY FREAKING WHERE!!!  Adobe Air is truly amazing, and I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more publicity.  It smokes Java for smoothness, Silverlight for compatibility and gloss, and overall looks pretty easy to develop for.
3. Java Struts - If need be, there could be future efforts I've seen coming down the pipe that will require Struts n such.  It could be an interesting ride to jump sides and build out some Java App with Struts.  I'd however, rather not, as there is no real reason to use this.
4. RoR or Ruby on Rails - I'm not explaining this.  If you haven't heard or checked out the phenom that Ruby on Rails is, you're doing yourself a disservice, just go check it out.  It IS worth your time if you build more than one application per year.  :)

Tools / IDEs / Other Things - The 4

1. Subversion - Just because I have it, it is insanely simple, takes almost no time to use and maintain.  Simply, It aint broke, and I'm not fixing it.
2. Tortoise & Visual SVN - Total cost is $49 bucks.  It is worth every penny.  Integrates Tortoise into Visual Studio in a more flawless integration than Team Foundation Services source integration from Microsoft itself!
3. ReSharper - Again, if you don't use it, you probably should.  It's one of the greatest tools on the market.  Personal is $199, company license is like $349 or something.  It's worth it, it is more than worth it.  If you aren't using it you're probably spending too much money on overall development and NOT writing code the way it should be.  I can't rave about the awesomeness of this product enough.
4. Visual Studio.NET 2008 - Ya gotta have VS is you really want to get hard core with the .NET.  VS.NET Express is available for free.  VS.NET Professional is about $900 or more, but if you check out Microsoft's Biz deals you can get it for free. Also if you are a student you can get it for practically nothing, or for free.  So no real excuse not to use this.  If you work for a company that has in excess of $1 million per year, they better buy you a copy.  If they don't, and they're making you use notepad or something to write code in for .NET, you should quit, because rest assured that company will strangle itself from being so cheap and you'll be out of work anyway.

So that's my list, any questions feel free to contact me or drop a comment.