The photo is from the Premier League web site Ten Seasons Awards section.

It is such a great illustration of the empathy (if not outright identification) of the sports fan with the athlete, all the more evident in English soccer because of the unique proximity of the stands to the fields.

I think I recognize Fowler, Owen and Heskey for Liverpool. After some search, i think the keeper is Massimo Taibi in his brief, who had a troubled cameo as Manchester United goalie.

How ironic would it be if he ended up in the photo of the decade …

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<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1409903,00.html">great article</a>, more like an interview with him where he actually explains how he is able to do the things that he does.

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There has been a lot of talk about how expensive our favorite IDE, VS.NET is right now. Charles assured in one of the replies to the post that the issue is being discussed internally and will be addressed soon. Cool ! Actually, i don’t know what stand to take on this issue. Is your productivity important or the one time benefit of buying VS.NET professional edition ? It really is very confusing …

Anyway, as our quest for a free .NET IDE continues, here’s one to quench that ! Check out Eclipse for .NET ! Infact, i think i picked up this link from one of the replies, but not sure though… Eclipse as most of you would have heard is an awesome product which was developed by IBM and then later opensourced. I have heard quite a lot from fellow Java devs that the IDE is powerful compared to IntelliJ‘s IDE. Well i’m not the judge in either case but i definitely think that the plugin will help all those cribbing for a good IDE with C# support.

Again, #develop as many of you already know, is a very flexible IDE completely written in C# which is opensource and freely available. There is rarely something extra needed apart from #develop and ASP.NET Webmatrix for developing WinForm and WebForm code in .NET. What more do you want ?

And apart from all that, for the most hardcore developer who doesn’t care for IDE features, there is one really cool app to write code in C#. Ofcourse it will not work at all for enterprise level apps but for smaller projects, definitely useful. Check out Textpad. FYI, its got syntax highlighting functionality for C# too .. Download the file here.

Code on …

I guess, this is a pretty decent list of free IDEs to work on .NET right now. I might have missed a lot of other ones here but these are the ones that stand out quite prominently, i should say 🙂

Update : Just found out that the Notepad2 free utility provided at Flo’s freeware site also supports syntax highlighting for C# ! And the best part is that the whole thing is customizable, just like Textpad’s syntax highlight feature 🙂 Cool.