Well devLink 2006 was an amazing event and since I am fully recovered I wanted to jot some things here.  We had about 396 people on hand for the event.  The devLink Staff which is Tommy Norman, John Baker, Joe Chafatelli and Amy Boegh did a wonderful job keeping things on-track and running smoothly.  A great effort was put forth by our volunteers Jim Wilt, Robert Wilburn, Joe Senter, Jim Barry, Marty Lee, Ian Lee, and Chris Gundersen who all stepped up to help out with the conference.  Some of these people did not even volunteer before the event but saw a need the day of an helped out.  Special mention must be made of LeAnn Baker who did a tremendous job taking the lead on registration and getting people checked in, she did such a great job.  I personally appreciate all their efforts which made devLink a resounding success.  With all the positive feedback, we are sure ...

With devLink (www.devlink.net) just around the corner I have neglected my blog.  I thought I would make quick mention of a great tool that has been reborn on MSDN.  XML Notepad 2006 is a very sleek tool that has been rewritten in C# and leverages the .NET Framework to provide some excellent XML editing features.  I wish the XML Diff was a little more refined, but at least they have it and it works well.  I recommend you check it out if you are doing any work with XML files.  It is available on the MSDN XML Developer Center page of you can get it directly from here.

I know Sysinternals Process Explorer has been recommended in several blogs for quite some time. While most developers are familiar with this Task Manager replacement, few seem to leverage all it has to offer. Where I find it most useful is in the Process View (you have to double click the process to get there). Once there check out the .NET tab (.NET assemblies only) which provides some great information about what the process is doing. I personally like to monitor the .NET CLR Data information to help me better understand memory usage during runtime. If you have a memory leak in a .NET assembly this can be extremely helpful. I used it to monitor Garbage Collection and Generation Heap Size as I navigated one application and found clues which assisted me to eliminate a nasty leak. If you are not familiar with how the Garbage Collector operates this a good way to learn.  I also recommend you check out this