This time James Avery covers the best Visual Studio add-ins available today that you can download for free.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/12/VisualStudioAddins

Here Juval Lowy discusses the benefits you’ll get when you implement transactions in your non-database applications.

Microsoft has announced that the Visual Studio Express Editions will be free for one year. Note that SQL Server 2005 Express Edition is also a free download. The free pricing for SQL Server Express is not limited to the same one-year promotional period as Visual Studio Express Editions.

Download Express Editions

Gulli makes a couple of small utilities, one for tweaking VS.Net 2003 for web items support in non-web-projects la AspNetWithoutWebProjects2, and one for converting web projects out of their misery, removing any Visual SourceSafe bindings at the same time.

Download Gulli’s utilities

The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar provides several features for exploring and understanding Web pages.

These features enable you to:

• Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
• Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of
  techniques.
• Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
• View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values,and access keys.
• Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
• Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS Web feed links.
• Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
• Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
• Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
• Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
• Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align objects on your pages.

The Developer Toolbar can be pinned to the Internet Explorer browser window or floated separately.
Download Developer Toolbar