Interesting (to me) new tool releases

Votive for WiX

WiX now has a Visual Studio .NET Add-in. Continuing with the candle theme, it's called "Votive" and is available here.

"Votive is a Visual Studio 2003 extension. It allows you to create "WiX projects" that act like any other project in a VS solution. The WiX toolset is integrated in this install, so all you should need is this MSI an no other downloads from Source Forge. Unless, of course, you want to integrate the toolset into a build lab. In that case, I recommend just downloading the binaries .zip file.

Votive is mostly stable (shouldn't crash VS2003) but still lacks many features. Feel free to play with it, but don't be surprised if it doesn't behave the way you like. File bugs or Feature Requests on votive, and we'll see where it leads."

NAnt RC2

NAnt 0.85 just released RC2 here, as did NAntContrib here. If you're using earlier builds of NAnt get RC2 and run it through it's paces.

TraceTool 4

The Swiss-Army knife of trace viewing. I think this could be very cool, but I haven't had time to look into it yet. Article is here.

"A C#, Delphi and Java trace framework and a complete trace viewer (Tail, outputDebugString, eventlog) with support for Log4J, Log4Net and Microsoft Enterprise Instrumentation Framework (EIF)."