About eight year ago I would have considered myself a generalist. I wrote VB6 code for windows forms front ends or VBScript code in ASP web applications. I knew enough about relational databases to create tables and store the data I needed (most likely not the most efficient way, but it got the job done). Many of the projects I was on I was the designer, developer and project manager. Since then, and especially in the last three years, I’ve seen my skills become smaller and smaller compared to the overall breadth of technical advances in Microsoft Development tools and technologies.
I have been working with SQL Management Studio for some time now (and that probably sends chills up the spines of the Database developers that know me). I’ve been using it more and more recently as I’m querying the database where we keep all of our log messages from the application. I’ve found that I’m changing my query connection quite a bit and disconnecting query windows. Currently this is only available via the context menu in the query window, off the Query > Connections menu or on the toolbar.
On the current project I’m wrapping up we used the Visual Studio Team Test (VSTS) framework and Rhino Mocks to do our unit testing. Mike Levy brought the idea of Rhino Mocks on board the project with him and it was the first I had been exposed to it. I’ve been pretty impressed with it and I know we’ve just scratched the surface of what it can be used for. We are moving our project to test now and it does so with over 1,000 unit tests from the UI (testing presenters since we used the MVP pattern with CAB), mid-tier and even database (we used Visual Studio Team Suite for Database Professionals which included unit tests for databases).