I often see my fellow comp. sci. students writing their (relatively) simple Java code in applications like Emacs, Nano or Eclipse. I'm not fond of either application. I much prefer Visual Studios text handling, solution overview, output windows and so forth. What most people don't know is that you can actually extend Visual Studio to a great extent. One way to extend Visual Studio is to write plugins using .NET, but there's a way that is much simpler (albeit also more limited). I will now show how you can make Visual Studio compile and run your Java applications all within...

I will be attending JAOO this year, I'm looking forward to a packed calendar in excitement: It's a tough decision, choosing which sessions to fit into the available slots. There are several slots where I'd love to watch multiple sessions. I look forward to meeting a lot of people, colleagues and friends. Conferences are superb for developing ones network. I like the multitude of technologies and areas that are covered at JAOO, Java, JavaScript, .NET, virtualization, architecture and so forth. I'd love to see some more DBA related sessions though (especially MSSQL 2008).