SlickEdit Releases two new Toolboxes, the Editing and Versioning Toolboxes

SlickEdit - SlickEdit® Tools for Microsoft® Visual Studio®

"SlickEdit Inc. Announces the Release and New Lineup of SlickEdit®

...

Whether used alone or together, these toolboxes provide developers with high performance, innovative features, and greater capabilities directly in the Visual Studio IDE.
• Comment Wrapping
• Icon Extractor
• Regex Evaluator
• Code Annotations
• Version Visualizations
• Backup History
• DIFFzilla®
• CVS/SVN Source Control

...

Pricing and Availability
SlickEdit Tools is available immediately. Pricing starts at $49 for each Toolbox license.
Also available from SlickEdit are SlickEdit 2007 and SlickEdit Core for Eclipse™.  For more information about SlickEdit and free trial downloads, please visit http://www.slickedit.com/.

..."

[Full discourse - SlickEdit provided me NFR license keys for both products]

Since I usually don't cover commercial products (besides Microsoft's  :/ ) why am I posting on this? Am I just a huge sellout seeing that gave we some swag and free license keys?

Na... Free stuff is free stuff. Freely given means freely used or freely discarded.

Plus If I didn't like the product, even through it was free, I still wouldn't blog about it (I try to follow the thought philosophy that "if you can't say something nice, then don't say anything at all"... with varying degrees of success.)

So since I'm blogging about this, I must have liked it?

Yep, sure did.

Diffzilla has came in handy just yesterday. And I've missed not having the Backup History feature from past versions in my VS2008 install (I've posted about the Backup History feature before, and I'm telling you this thing can save your bacon).

There were some features I thought were pretty darn cool in the Versioning Toolkit, the CVS/SVN support and Version Visualization. I don't CVS/SVN much so when I do it's always starting at the bottom of the learning curve. I thought it was cool to have a repository browser included in the toolkit. And the Version Visualization was just too cool.

The Version Visualization provides graphical visualization of the version history of a file (with support for TFS/CodePlex, SourceSafe, CVS, SVN). Meaning a source code window with shading to very clearly differentiate the code blocks from different versions. Like taking the the Annotations built into the TFS Team Explorer to a whole new level.

And like I've raved about previously, the SlickEdit team's custom service is simply top notch. These guys just rock.

The toolkits come in two pieces, letting you choose to get that what you need without paying for the other, which I think was a smart move. And at $49 per toolkit, it's in the reasonable price range.

All in all, these toolkits contain utilities that when you need them you really need them and you need them to just work. And so far both toolkits do just that...

 

Update #1 4/2/2008 @ 9:35AM PDT:
Updated the post title... They are Toolboxes not kits... doh.