Ask anyone who has heard me speak on Test-Driven or Agile development, and you'll hear that I'm a very big fan of the TestDriven.NET add-in for Visual Studio. Jamie Cansdale has done a great job making a great tool that Just Works. May you never Alt-Tab away from Visual Studio to run or view your unit tests again.
After numerous releases of 0.* versions, Jamie has cut the first 1.* version. You can download it from TestDriven.net.
Jamie has added a slightly lengthy survey which you must complete before downloading, but the add-in has saved me so much hassle over time that I had no problem supplying him with the details he's interested in.
It is best described on the website itself: “TestDriven.NET is a free, zero friction unit testing add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. The current release of TestDriven.NET supports multiple unit testing frameworks including NUnit, MbUnit, csUnit and MS Team System and is fully compatible with all versions of the .NET Framework.” If you haven't seen it in action, take a look at some screenshots and read the quickstart guide.
The fact that TestDriven.NET works with Visual Studio Team System is most welcome. Although unit testing is now fully integrated with Team System (Developer and Tester editions), having the “Run Tests” command available from additional contexts like the code editor is a great time saver.
If you create unit tests for your .NET systems (and of course you are, right?) you should download it now.
-Chris
P.S. No, I'm not on Jamie's payroll, but for the number of referrals I've given, I should get a percentage of the royalties. What's that you say? It's FREE? ;)
This weekend I downloaded the free Microsoft Photo Story 3 and gave it a spin.
Fire it up and you get a wizard-based guide through creating a video from your pictures. Once you become familiar with the wizard, you could quite literally have an acceptable video composed in under a minute. Of course, I decided to play with it for a couple of hours - it was great fun!
First, the wizard will help you import your pictures and you can order them appropriately. It even includes features to auto-correct red eye and color/contrast imbalances. You can add text captions to photos and define effects such as transitions, panning and zooming. The visual effects are very easy to compose and quite nice in execution. The team has mentioned they have patented technology which helps automatically determine the “most interesting“ part of each photo. The zooming effects that are created by default for each picture are generally quite good, though you can of course customize them as you wish.
You may play any music you wish along with the pictures by pointing to MP3s. Photo Story also includes a very nice music generation system where you specify the type/genre of music, then choose the mood, instruments, “intensity” and tempo. You can easily assign music start/stop points at certain pictures (and PhotoStory will automatically add introductions and closing flourishes to the music at the boundaries.) You then also annotate the video by recording from your PC's microphone (and optionally adjust the volume so the music is softer while you speak.)
When you're done, it helps you generate the appropriate type of output for your needs (e.g. emailing, storing on PC to replay later, burning to DVD, etc.) It helps you scale the size and quality of the video as appropriate for the distribution target.
Did I mention this is free? Very hard to argue with that price. This is a fantastic way for novices like myself to throw together watchable (well, at least I think so) videos in a very short amount of time.
Paul Thurrott has a more detailed review.
Channel 9 has some Photo Story content. Start by watching the demonstration by the team, then you can also view an interview with the team.
-Chris
UPDATE (12/1/2004): From comments, people have been asking how to adjust the quality of the resulting video from the defaults. I have not tried this, but it seems you can go into your Photo Story installation directory, find the “Profiles/{your locale code}/“ directory and edit the appropriate export profile (.prx) file(s). The most likely place is the vbrquality attribute of the streamconfig node. (e.g. Change it from “95” or “98” to “100” .) Here is an example of the .prx file.