I'm sure most Visual Studio users have heard of Carlos, he's the man behind MZTools, one of the most useful Visual Studio AddIns around.  I've been working with it since the vb6 days and have converted most of my colleagues to using it as well.

If your into Visual Studio extensibility then this blog is worth a read - as are his regular forum posts, I've certainly learnt a lot from him in the small amount of work I've done in this area.

The blogs available here as html and the rss is here

I've been investigating NUnit recently and was getting frustrated by the amount of repetitive code you had to write for each item you wanted to test, so I wrapped it all up into some helper project and item templates.  Then went a bit further and created a few code snippets to help as well.

I thought I'd make it available to you lot as I'm sure its something everyone sits down and has to write all the time.

The templates/snippets are all for VB.net but I'm sure you could adapt them for C# if you so wished, there seems to be a lot more demonstrations for C# out there anyway so I thought I'd try and even the balance.

You can download the vsi package containing them from my Visual Studio 2005 Tools downloads area.

I've been after a usb drive caddy for some time, wanting something I could use as an on the go backup for my laptop, bulk file shifter and just general big bit of space to chuck stuff.

Went for the Thecus Yes Nano N1050 which does all the above plus gives you this nifty on the go feature where I can plug in a little battery pack to give it some juice (4xAA's), connect my camera lead to it, press a button and it copies all the files from my camera to a new incremental folder.

I got it from Scan who had it on a bundle special along with a 100GB Samsung drive last week.  I didn't have any spare 2.5" laptop drives so thought I'd go the whole hog.

Power requirements are very low, I've plugged it into my Asus laptop, numerous pc's, my Infrant ReadyNas box and no complaints from any of them.  It comes with a lead to provide power from a second usb port if required but I think that'll remain in my bag.

The only small gotcha is that for the "on the go" copy function to work your drive must be formatted to FAT32 (I assume the controller board only talks to this format).  WindowsXP by default will not format large drives (above 32GB) to this so I found a great little utility called Fat32Format from Ridgecrop which does it for ya, and very quickly at that!

As part of moving away from my old domain I've now completed the move of the file downloads area.

You can get access to the new one by clicking on the downloads link in the navigation bar, or directly by http://www.codechimp.org/filepal

At the moment all of my existing freely available applications are listed, thats;

Desktop Utilities (PaperMatic, FolderLauncher, ThumbGen)
VB/Visual Studio add-ins (Cyclomatic Complexity, Visual Studio 2005 Visualizer Project Template)
Source libraries (Query String Attributes Class)

The new downloads area will be supporting PayPal payments for a few new items coming up, but my intention is to still give a lot of stuff away for free, or trial versions.

The FilePal application is something I've developed myself using vb/asp.net 2.  It has a fully web based admin interface and stores its data in xml files.  Obviously at the moment I'm still testing it but if anyones interested in using the application themselves let me know and I might wrap it up into a purchasable product.

Just upgraded my home network.  I had a very nice, albeit noisy 3com 10/100 rackmount 12 port switch ticking along nicely but I'd been hankering for a gigabit switch for a while now.

Dell ran a promotion recently on their network gear and I managed to pick up a PowerConnect 2716 16 port gigabit switch for under a 100 quid. 

It's not for big business certainly, but it's rack mountable, unmanaged/web managed, supports 10/100/1000 auto switch on all ports and supports jumbo frames.  Best of all, no fans!  It just slotted in as a replacement for my 3com and I enabled jumbo frames on it, my pc and my Infrant ReadyNas and got a bit of a performance boost from it.  It's not 10 times faster like the numbers suggest.. but it was a 100 quid well spent.