I was fortunate enough to attend a special event at Trifork at which the manager, Oleg Stepanov, of the Jetbrains team creating ReSharper gave a talk on ReSharper functionality. He basically demoed a bunch of R# features most of which are pretty well known to the Vertica team and myself but a couple of nuggets did present themselves and I figured if we don't know about them probably others don't as well.

Please note that all keyboard shortcuts mentioned in this post are based on the standard R# Visual Studio keyboard layout.

Smart Code Completion

On the light side I'll start with a feature I knew was in there but I never quite got why it was useful. The feature in question is smart code complete or as I like to thing about it Smart Intellisense. You find the feature in the ReSharper menu under Code > Complete Code > Smart (CTRL + ALT + SPACE). Smart Code Completion is basically smart intellisense, you could say that it puts the "intelli" in the intellisense :)

What it does is that when you activate the feature it suggests methods and properties based on the types in the local scope. So if you're in the process of assigning an int variable from somewhere it will only suggest methods based on matching return types, not just name as is the case with standard Visual Studio intellisense. Check out the screenshots below, the one to the right is standard Visual Studio intellisense (CTRL + SPACE), the left one is R# Smart Code Completion where the list is greatly reduced.

Complete Statement

Probably the most useful feature that I picked up at the meeting is Complete Statement. Complete Statement is available from the R# menu under Code > Complete Code > Complate Statement (CTRL + SHIFT + ENTER).

It bascially tries to complete the current statement that you writing so if for example you're writing a method signature you and you use the feature it will complete the method signature and move the cursor to the method body enabling you to write your code in a more fluent manner. It works in a number of situations so you really want to learn the shortcut and start experimenting with it.

Complete Statement for if-statement. First step inserts the missing parenthesis and the curlies. Second step moves the cursor to the body of the if-statement.

Complete Statement for method signature. Inserts the curlies and moves the cursor to the method body.

And for a string variable. Inserts the semi colon and moves the cursor to the next line.

Generate in Solution Explorer

You probably know about the Generate feature in Visual Studio which enables you to generate properties, constructors, etc.. What I didn't know about this feature is the fact that it's also availble in the Solution Explorer and basically enables you to create a class, interface, struct, or folder. Very handy indeed.

Generate is available from the R# menu Code > Generate (ALT + INS).

Camel Case Navigation

I love the code navigation features of R#. They let me find my way around a code base very simply. I've found this particularly useful in code bases I don't know very well because I usually have an idea of what another developer might choose to call something so I just go look for part of that type name. Anyway a twist on the navigation features is the fact that you can navigate via Camel Casing so if you have a type named OrderManagementService you could look for it by typing the entire thing but with Camel Casing you basically enter the upper case letters of OrderManagementService (OMS) and it will find that type for you. Very handy and my second favorite new feature of R# :)

BTW Navigate to Type is CTRL + T, Navigate to Any Symbol is CTRL + ALT + T, Navigate to File Member is ALT + <, and Navigate to File is CTRL + SHIFT+ T. Learn 'em, love 'em.

Coming Features

Oleg also told us a little bit about what we can expect to see in R# 4.5. The main "feature" of the 4.5 release is performance tuning and bringing down the memory footprint. They're look at speeding up R# by a factor 2 and bringing down the footprint by 100 mb. Certainly very welcome. They are sneaking in new features though and one of them is to include "Find unused code" in Solution Wide Code Analysis.

Download ReSharper 4.1

This summer I spent two weeks in southern England vacationing with my family; beautiful country side though not really known for its blazing high speed broadband connections. Chance would have that Opera Mobile 9.5 got released while I was there and naturally I faithfully downloaded it and checked it out. I did not have a chance to regret it.

Before we continue I have to put up the standard issue beta disclaimer for the browser: Opera Mobile 9.5 is not in final form. Be aware that it might bring your Windows Mobile phone to its knees, even destroy it completely also bear in mind that there's a slight chance that the beta status of the product will affect your ability to have children. Consider yourself warned! :)

Before we dive in you should know that Opera Mobile 9.5 will only work on Windows Mobile devices equipped with a touch screen. Why you ask? The reason is the fact that navigating web pages on Opera Mobile 9.5 is pretty much driven with the touch screen alone. While that is a bit of a let down for non-touch screen device it's also the main reason why you should care about Opera Mobile as a Windows Mobile user. What it means is that basically you can get an iPhone-like browsing experience on Windows Mobile. Simply put you don't have to use those annoying little scroll bars in Pocket IE to get around the page instead you swipe your finger across the screen which will produce a nice scroll complete with the rubber band effect found on the iPhone.

Auto full screen is a great feature. It does exactly what you'd expect it to do: When displaying a web page Opera will switch to full screen mode automatically and leave it there until you click the little transparent menu icon which will bring up the browser chrome and enable you to enter a new URL, view your favorites, or switch tabs.  

The tab feature is a particularly nice touch at least for me as I've often found myself needed to browse away from a particular page because I needed to look something else up. A very annoying problem that Opera Mobile does away with like that. Now there's a small caveat as only three tabs are support at any one time. At first I thought that it would be a major deal but as it turns out you really never need that many active tabs; at least I never hit the upper limit during my normal usage of the browser.

Add to this the fact that Opera Mobile will display web pages in their complete form like you're browsing from a PC and we're in business. Much like Safari on the iPhone Opera will display the web page in its entirety on the tiny screen and allow you to zoom in on areas of interest by double tapping the screen.

All is not well in Opera land though and the beta part of the product did rear its ugly head. While touch scrolling works fine most of the time I did find that it would screw up during page load. Trying to scroll on page while loading it would more often than not send the browser scrolling to the bottom of the unfinished page, warp speed and all. Also on the subject of weird behavior with loading pages I found that the auto full screen feature would mess up when trying to scrolling during page load and continually switch on and off until the page finished loading. The bug is very profound on a slow connection like GPRS but you hardly notice it browsing on a WLAN or using 3G.

It does seem like a couple of issues are related to trying to navigate pages while Opera is loading as I found it exceedingly difficult to tab the links. This wasn't helped any by the fact that no visual cues are provided which will give a clue whether or not the link you just clicked was indeed clicked properly. Again on slow connections this is more pronounced as the only cue you get that you actually clicked the link is when the destination page actually turns up. This also goes for button on web pages which don't produce any cues to the fact that they were actually clicked.

Opera Mobile does lack a little polish here and there which I discovered on my phone which is outfitted with a hardware keyboard that unfortunately Opera doesn't seem to be aware of as it helpfully kept popping up the software keyboard whenever I tapped a text field. Just a minor annoyance that I hope Opera will fix with the next release.

On a nice side note I became aware of the bug because Opera is a damned fast browser at loading content. Even on very slow connections text starts displaying very quickly and were it not for the scrolling bug you'd be reading web content in a matter of seconds on a GPRS connection. After a while I simply turned of the auto full screen mode while on GPRS so I could browse away to my hearts content. The feature is very good and I did turn it back on when I was able to connect via a faster connection.

What this boils down to is basically that the combination of touch scrolling and PC-like rendering of the web pages make for a usable web browsing experience on Windows Mobile where previously I'd say that it was lacking in a number of ways though better than what you'd find on comparable Symbian-based phones. During my vacation I found myself browsing the web more than I ever did. Even I returned home I found myself reaching for the phone where I previously would have gone and fired up the desktop to browse. Opera Mobile is that good missing polish aside.

If you own a touch screen Windows Mobile phone I highly recommend that you go and give Opera Mobile 9.5 a spin. You won't regret it.

Need I say more? Be one of the first to grab it from FTP.

In Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 I used the "Run As" command religiously for testing various stuff. Today I needed the same thing in Windows Vista, right clicked a program in the start menu and ... nothing. No Run As command. Confused I held down the shift key in the hopes that it would appear. Again nothing.

Turns out the only thing you get in Windows Vista is the "Run as Administrator". Oh you can have Vista prompt you for credentials every time you select Run as Admin by changing the local group policy but I really don't want to spend the time changing the configuration or the hassle of having to enter credentials every time I want to run something as admin. I'm lazy like that.

Sysinternals to the rescue with ShellRunAs. It adds a new menu item to the right click menu which allows you to enter a different set of credentials to run the application under. Nice! No hacking of group policy required.

Download ShellRunas

My favorite Visual Studio add-in just got revved to version 4.0. Full LINQ support included along with a number of other goodies. I may have to update my ReSharper review now :)

Although I got to say that an install screen looking like this would scare me just a little if I didn't know the product all ready. Busy, Busy, Busy!

Download ReSharper 4.0

Getting "Failed to load the supplementary package '0c6e6407-13fc-4878-869a-c8b4016c57fe'" every time you fire up Visual Studio will make for veeery long dev days I tell you that. Luckily I was able to find the Issue Details in Jetbrains' JIRA which told me the issue was resolved in version 3.0. Doh! Reinstalling everything in sight won't help either...

A thread on the Jetbrains forum however lead me to the solution. You simply go like this from the Visual Studio 2008 SDK command promt:

devenv /ResetSkipPkgs

We were going through a rocky patch there, ReSharper and I, but I'm happy to report that we're back together and all is well :)

Back in 2005 I wrote about the "magic" third connection available with Terminal Services with the -console switch and I've happily used it ever since. Everything was dandy until recently when suddenly it stopped working for me.

It turns out that with Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Microsoft deemed it necessary to rename the switch to -admin. Only for Windows Vista mind you and only for Service Pack 1.

So the command for getting at the console of a Terminal Services enabled machine is now

mstsc.exe -admin

Thanks Microsoft!

For a while now I've had a nice file server sitting under my desk at home for storing everything in a nice central location. One problem with the solution though is the complete lack of backup on that particular box. I really wanted to run Mozy on the box to get everything backed up off site in a simple and cost effective manner. One problem though: Mozy Personal doesn't support Windows Server which is running on my file server.

In my post Online Backup: Carbonite vs. Mozy I declare Mozy the winner due to a number factors like features, performance, and configurability. What I failed to mention though is the fact that you cannot use Mozy Personal for backing up a Windows Server box. For that you have to spring for a professional plan where you're charged by the gigabyte instead of a flat rate. For me that's not really an option as I've got a look of stuff to back up. For a couple of gigabytes it's probably fine.

Carbonite however allows you to back up a Windows Server box with the personal edition which means that it's a more cost effective solution for the home. Since I did the comparison Carbonite has added the number one feature I felt was missing from the solution: Version history. Mozy had this and Carbonite now does too. One thing hasn't changed though, Carbonite is still pretty slow to the tuned of 100k/s when you back up. Mozy will complete the initial backup approximately four times faster than Carbonite. Not a big deal once you're over the initial backup and into regular running mode with only updated files are transferred but getting over that initial hump does take a long while.

So to sum it up: With Carbonite allowing you to run the client on a server box it's a compelling offer for those of us running home servers wanting offsite backup. For everything else I'd still say that Mozy is superior. Alternatives like Amazon S3, JungleDisk (using S3), etc. are still way more expensive to use since they too charge by the gigabyte.

Mozy allows you to pay by the month allowing you to opt out immediately should you find a better solution. With Carbonite you're locking in for a minimum of a year. Where. Network performance with Mozy is a lot better than what you get with Carbonite, though that might just be me being located far away from the Mozy data center. The Mozy client still offers oodles more configuration options than what you find in the Carbonite ditto.

It's been a while since I updated my toolbox so I thought I'd do a little post about my most recent addition: Microsoft SharedView.

What is SharedView? As the name implies it's a way of sharing what you see on your computer with others remotely. I've had to muck around with LiveMeeting a lot lately and boy is that a piece of work in the sense of me not being able to get anything done within a reasonable amount of time. Setting up a shared desktop experience with that stuff is like swimming in molasses: A lot of effort and very little reward. You have to pay to use it too.

Contrast this experience with SharedView where you're up and running in a matter of a couple of minutes. Did I mention that's completely free to use? To test out SharedView I tried it out with a partner abroad. I hadn't mentioned anything about it before the meeting but we literally had the program up and running within two minutes sharing the presentation that I needed him to see. Cool stuff! The experience has that Apple-feel to it: I got the job done, nothing more, nothing less.

SharedView allows you to share a single program window or the entire desktop and you can hand over control of the window to any participant in your current session. Setting up a new session is a simple matter of you logging in with your Live ID and clicking "Start new session" which will provide you with a link you can send to the participants of the meeting. That's it.

I definitely see this little gem coming in handy with customer meetings where we need to do sprint demos but can't come on site to do so. With a new delivery going down each month having the entire dev team on site is somewhat of a drain on the customer.

Download Microsoft SharedView

My favorite news reader of all times, FeedDemon, is now free for anyone to download and use. What makes this guy stand out from the competition is not the simple and easy to use UI, it's not the fact that you get a nice Hot/Not list of feeds, not the fact that you can subscribe to any quirky feed on the planet.

No what really makes FeedDemon shine and what made me cough up $29,95 having tried the product only a couple of times is the synchronization features. Simply put FeedDemon has made me use RSS more than I did in the past because I don't have to worry about reading my feed in multiple locations. Now to be fair Google Reader does provide the same feature but I simply can't bring myself to read my feeds in a web interface. With lots of information rolling by I need a nice work flow to process everything; while Google has done everything possible to make this happen in their web interface it's simply no match for a well designed desktop application.

To put it short, download FeedDemon, synchronize and be happy. Even if you don't read feeds in multiple locations you'll still have off site backup for your feeds ;)

I've often wondered how life as an add-in developer for Visual Studio is like. On one hand you have the power to create tools and utilities which will benefit you greatly in your everyday life and you get the added benefit of geek-cred if you do your job really well.

On the other hand though we've got Microsoft who for any given release of a product can annihilate your entire market simple as that. In the same stroke they create markets simply by making stupid mistakes so it's really a double edge sword when you're working in semi-competition with Microsoft.

I think the newly released version of Visual Studio 2008, ah 2005 I hardly knew you, is a shining example of that however small the example is.

TestDriven.NET an add-in which has proven very useful to me, particularly for a single function: Run Test in Local Scope. Basically it allows me to execute the test I'm currently in with a shortcut and you know that I'm all about the shortcut driven development :)

Visual Studio 2008 introduces unit testing features in the professional version for the first time ever and with it a nice addition which does exactly what I've used TestDriven.NET for in the past: Run Test in Local Scope. It's even bound to the same shortcut that I chose myself when I configured TestDriven.NET the very first time. Just go CTRL + R + T and your test will execute. W

With a single stroke of genius Microsoft has taken away my need to install a third party add-in in Visual Studio 2008 by providing me with exactly what I need out of the box. Of course the feature only works with MSTest which will be a problem for all you xUnit users out there but we've run with MSTest for a while now making it a perfect fit.

Oh yeah - Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 this week :)

Did you know that you can bring your Firefox settings with you to other machines or reuse them if you reinstall your machine? I went digging because I was sick and tired of configuring Firefox time and again whenever I reinstalled Windows. It became even worse when I started using more and more plugins.

Luckily it turns out that Firefox has very nice facilities for backing up your settings and even bringing them to other machines. These facilities are not however readily available, in other words you need to know where to look.

Firefox has the notion of profiles. A profile stores everything you add or change in Firefox: Extensions, settings, URL history, everything. To back up your profile in Windows XP you need to go to:

c:\Documents and Settings\<Your Login>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<arbitrary numbers>.profile

For Windows Vista you'll find the profile in:

c:\Users\<Your Login>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<arbitrary numbers>.profile

Everything is in there, copy it to a safe location. Personally I store my Firefox profile on a separate drive along with my documents and various other stuff. When you need to activate your profile in Firefox you need to run Firefox with the -ProfileManager parameter:

Firefox.exe -ProfileManager

That will bring up the profile manager on which you click Create Profile where you can specify a path for your new profile.

With this done you now have your profile ready to go and you can preserve it from one install to the next or bring it to a new computer. Combine this with FolderShare and you're effectively syncing your Firefox across multi computer automatically.

It turns out that I was lying when I proclaimed my upgrade to DasBlog 2.0 a success as I had a small bug. Apparently you need to change a config value in web.config which pertains to how ASP.NET 2.0 handles cookies otherwise you cannot use the Remember Me functionality when you login to view config, referral stats, etc.. It even says so in a friendly comment in web.config but of course you need to look for it :)

Uncomment <httpCookies httpOnlyCookies="false"/> in web.config and you're good to go. Remember this only applies if you're running it under ASP.NET 2.0 which is always the case with DasBlog 2.0 but not so with 1.x.

dasBlog-2-Download-Now" src="http://www.publicvoid.dk/content/binary/WindowsLiveWriter/UpgradedtoDasBlog2.1_9EC4/dasBlog-2-Download-Now_3.png" width="500" align="right" border="0"> dasBlog 2.0 was released little over a month ago and I've been wanting to update to it for a while; yesterday I finally got around to doing it. If you're in the same situation and need to update an existing dasBlog install here are the steps to do for a 1.9 to 2.x update:

• Copy bin directory
• Copy root directory files, aspx, ascx, everything found in the root directory of dasBlog
• Copy web.config
• Copy DatePicker and ftb (this is just in case)

When you're done updating the code remember to reconfigure your IIS AppPool to run ASP.NET 2.0 as dasBlog 2.x is now a framework 2.0 application. Please note that if you have other framework 1.1 apps running in the same AppPool you'll need a separate AppPool for 2.0 as a single AppPool will, not surprisingly, run one framework version only.

With the updated version a couple of new feature are available on this blog: Paging on the main page, i.e. you can now move backwards through posts. Scroll to the bottom of the main page if you want to see how it works.

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Paging in the categories, instead of just displaying everything only five posts are displayed when you looking at a particular category.

dasBlog-2-Category-Paging" src="http://www.publicvoid.dk/content/binary/WindowsLiveWriter/UpgradedtoDasBlog2.1_9EC4/dasBlog-2-Category-Paging_3.gif" width="377" border="0">

If you're running your own blog on dasBlog a nice little addition is found in the admin module. It's now very easy to switch back and forth between dates when you're viewing you referral stats. Very handy.

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Let me take you back to a time before Windows Vista, before a DOS-free Windows OS even. Let me take you back to 2001 with Windows XP just ready for release. Back in 2001 I wrote a review of Windows XP for a Danish online site which I found the other day while digging through my documents folder.

With Windows Vista released and basically a very different landscape from what was the case in 2001 I thought it would be fun for you to see what I had to say about Windows XP back then. The original article was done in Danish so I've translated it for you here. If Danish is not an issue for you, you can check out the original article as well.

It was fun for me to read my reactions from back then. Some of the stuff just wasn't researched all that well on my part but I got other stuff right. My comments about Messenger are particularly funny to me because I'm an avid user of the program today; I do blame the integrated version of Windows Messenger for this though as I quite liked my ICQ experience back then. Also if you look closely on one of the screenshots you'll see evidence of my foray into Java. Like my Linux experience it's not something I speak too loudly about today :)

Finally a lot of the doom and gloom I wrote about never came to pass. Microsoft really transformed themselves between then and now. Product activation never turned out to be a problem and of course neither did Error Reporting. I do believe that Windows XP is one of the best releases of Windows ever, I like my Vista but we're looking at some of the same little things today that we saw back then too. Little bugs, unexplained Explorer crashes, stuff that's ironed out of Windows XP by now.

Windows XP: From DOS to Windows

Introduction

A long time has passed since the world was given the first version of Windows as we know it today. Many people describe the step from Windows 9x to XP as comparable to the step we took forward with the release of Windows 95 which replaced DOS. I have to admit that I don't see the release of Windows XP as quite that big a deal. Having used Windows XP for a while I just don't buy that the step from a command prompt to a graphical user interface should be comparable to the step from one graphical user interface to a slightly updated, easier to use version of the same interface :)

Windows XP ships in two versions: Home and Professional where Home is the cheap trimmed down version. The pro version pretty much matches the functionality which we know and love from Windows 2000 Professional; the pro version is the version to get if you're serious about your computing experience.

Installation

I won't comment too much on the installation process besides mentioning that it's very easy to deal with. Windows XP even recognizes a lot of RAID controllers which are becoming increasingly mainstream as they come integrated on many motherboards these days. A general observation about the new OS is that a lot of drivers come integration into the OS. I was able to get Windows XP up and running with all my hardware configured without adding a single driver to system. A very impressive feat.

The installation is reminiscent of the one found in Windows 2000 and Windows Me; it's basically a hybrid of the two.

Having completed the installation you notice how quickly the system boots. As a Windows 2000 user I'm used to turning on the computer and waiting at least a couple of minutes before the system is up and running; even with 2000 running you have to wait additional time for the various startup programs to launch. Windows XP boots at half the time and seems more zippy than Windows 2000.

The New Stuff

What constitutes this seemingly "great" leap forward for Windows XP? This is what I'm going to find out in this section by visiting some of the new features found in Windows XP.

Look and Feel

The most obvious new thing about Windows XP is the user interface which has had a huge overhaul. From being gray, boring, and all business it's gone to exciting, colorful, and playground-y. It really is an interface you just want to explore and click your way through. As we all know a picture says more than a thousand words so take a peek at the screen shot of the new desktop I've included. Notice the gorgeous, modern feel of the desktop.

What lies at the heart of this user interface are skins. You can go out to the Internet and download new skins for Windows XP which change the look and feel of the OS. You only get a single skin out of the box but you do have the opportunity to go back to the classic look of Windows 2000 if you want to.

Besides the very prominent new user interface there are a couple of nice little features which gives the OS a feeling of completeness to it - when it works, more about that later.

The control panel has gotten an overhaul as well and as a result we've gotten a different approach to managing the computer. Microsoft decided to go with a more task-based approach which to my mind works well for newbies but starts to break down for people who know what they're looking for. Luckily it's possible to revert back to the original view of the control panel just as was the case with the desktop. Very nice!

Windows Explorer is another area of Windows which has gotten a face lift which means that the tips you get at the right side of the screen are actually useful. The area is now used to display relevant operations for the selected object, help, and much more. New users especially will find the new interface appealing because of the readily available help. For experienced users this can be turned off as well. Notice the highlighted blue area on the screenshot of Windows Explorer: It shows a selection of drive. It's little things like that which makes Windows XP feel so complete.

All these skins and flashy features come with a price of course. The price is a performance hit. The animated menus, the shadows on icons, etc. costs. It becomes even more apparent should you move to a old machine which doesn't complete live up the recommended Windows XP specs. Luckily Microsoft did foresee this scenario and included options to turn off the flashy stuff conserving system resources for the important stuff like getting your work done. You get a nice granular option list from which you can turn off individual visual features.

Most people are familiar with Windows Update at this point. The service is integrated right into Windows XP making it very easy to get those updates installed. Windows XP will now automatically notify you if there are available updates which by itself is nothing new as you've been able to do this with an add-in for Windows 2000 from Microsoft. What's new is the fact that Windows itself will download and install the updates for you without any intervention from you at all. Again something new users of Windows will find particularly useful with more and more viruses and other nasty stuff floating around the Internet.

Speaking of the Internet Windows XP now comes with a built-in firewall which is turned on with a single mouse click. It's important to remember that the built-in firewall is no where near as powerful as a standalone solution like ZoneAlarm from ZoneLabs. You're still free to install a third party firewall if you want to. On a positive note the built-in firewall is better than no firewall at all but some people feel that it can provide a false sense of security. For me personally it's a nice addition because it helps protect the less savvy people thus giving the users a better online experience. I did try to install ZoneAlarm to see if it would run at all. The only problem I encountered was the fact that ZoneAlarm wouldn't start with Windows on every boot even though I configured it to do so. A small error - whether it was a problem with Windows blocking other firewall applications or just an incompatibility between the products I can't speak to. For Microsoft's sake I hope it's the latter as the former would cause quite the outcry.

In the security department I need to mention driver signing, a process which been around for a while. User were worried for a while that Windows XP would be unable to use drivers not signed by Microsoft. Luckily I can attest that this is not the case, Windows XP has no problems with installing unsigned drivers at all; XP simply made me aware of the fact that I was installing an unsigned driver and proceeded from there. Although the unsigned drivers are accepted by Windows XP a number of warnings appear which might confuse the user; only time will tell whether this will become an actual problem.

Worth mentioning is the fact that many drivers from Windows 2000 are directly compatible with Windows XP which will ease the transition somewhat though not completely. As with any new OS release drivers will be an issue so watch out for hardware compatibility with Windows XP before you buy.

A lot was done to ease the transition and I've not experience any major issues other than the ZoneAlarm not starting with every boot. Windows XP itself has a trick up its sleeve which should make the most stubborn programs run: Compatibility. Basically the compatibility feature will make a program believe that it's running under a different version of Windows than XP thus allowing it to run.

When errors do occur Windows XP will provide Microsoft with information about the error which they can use to create a better OS in the future or release fixes more quickly. A general tendency for Windows XP is to do opt-out of things which provide Microsoft information. Privacy concerns aside I believe that you should at least be given the option of opting out automatically instead of requiring you to go digging in preferences to turn it off if it bothers you.

The Bad

Error Reporting is very telling as to how Microsoft decided to implement features in Windows XP. Personally I'm not very keen on the "I know what's best for you" mentality which permeates Microsoft these days. A number of programs are installed out of the box and integrated right into Windows. The first example of this was Internet Explorer which came with Windows 98. Officially the explanation was that it created the platform for a lot of the new features in Windows 98 - many didn't buy this explanation and saw it as a way to compete unfairly with then top company in browsers: Netscape. We all know how that particular piece of history turned out.

Now it seems the time has come for Microsoft to attack the instant messaging market head on. Microsoft has had a presence in the IM market for a while but hasn't made any particular inroads into it. This is about to change with Windows XP as Windows Messenger comes bundled into the OS, Messenger of course is Microsoft's idea of what an IM client should be. I've never used Messenger myself but thought I'd give it a shot with it already installed and good to go. after a couple of the days the verdict was in: It has to go!

Luckily for me every program and feature installed in Windows is still controlled in the add/remove programs portion of the control panel so I go there and start looking for Windows Messenger. Interestingly enough Windows Messenger is nowhere to be found in add/remove programs, not even under the OS features where it belongs. Further digging reveals that you can't even prevent Messenger from starting with the OS. Fine I try to close Messenger but Microsoft apparently finds Messenger to be such a useful tool that it automatically starts with Outlook Express as well, an application I use all the time.

Maybe it's just me but I'm starting to see an uncanny parallel with the Netscape-saga emerge here. I need to set the story straight and mention that I did find a way to remove Messenger some days later but the "fix" involved editing a text file hidden in the Windows folder itself. A lot of people don't want to or are not capable of doing this which effectively means that Windows Messenger is here to stay. I'm no expert on good marketing behavior but I'm pretty sure that this is isn't it.

As previously mentioned a couple of bugs crept into the RTM version. One such bug is the System Tray. The Systray doesn't seem to remember the settings you set for it and the program which couldn't launch it every boot. I tried associating an external program with a file type but inside the program itself but that didn't work and Windows XP still had control of the file types in question. To remedy this I needed to right-click the file and select always open with. Not the most intuitive way to it if you ask me.

The last area of critique is probably the most notable one: Product activation. We all know the key principle from games like Quake and Half-Life where the game simple refuses to launch if you don't supply it the correct key. Now imagine a world where you're only able to do a thousand changes to your game config after that you'd need to call up idsoftware or Valve to a new key for your game. This is the reality we're facing with Windows XP. Microsoft added product activation in an attempt to stop piracy of Windows. Unfortunately it's the consumer who pays the price in the form of a less flexible OS.

Microsoft slacked their security a little bit by allowing you to do a thousand minor changes to your config before requiring a reactivation. What constitutes a minor change then? Well, Microsoft is very tightlipped about that fact leaving the customers hanging. That Microsoft released another version of Windows XP which doesn't require product activation is a different story. How Microsoft can believe that hackers, crackers, and pirate won't go ahead and use this version instead of the one protected by product activation is beyond me, but they must know something that I don't.

All in all you end up with a strange feeling having shelled out the big bucks for a Windows license. You don't really own the product and you can't really do with it what you want. All the while the pirates are having their way with the enterprise version of the products.

In Conclusion

When everything is said and done, all argument weighed, I still end up with a pretty good feeling. Of course some things could be done better or differently. That's the reality of created a standard product used by millions, you simply can't hit the mark for everyone.

Technically Windows XP is the long awaited combination of Windows gaming OS Windows 98 and the more business-minded Windows 2000 and Microsoft has pulled a product which will appeal to the masses.

You will pay a premium for a license if you want the latest and greatest from Microsoft but in return you'll get a nice environment for you work and gaming needs. There's no doubt in my mind that a couple of hundred bucks are better spent on Windows XP than a piece of hardware which will be obsolete in six months anyway. An OS simply stays around for much longer.

Windows XP is expected to hit the streets October 25th 2001.

To my delight the next beta of Windows Live Writer has been released. It's going to be the last beta before a final release too so go check it out. I switched from BlogJet to Windows Live Writer when the very first version was released and I haven't looked back since.

I was disappointed to find that the dictionary didn't work for me in beta 2 due to the fact that Live Writer reads the current locale of the computer and enables or disables the dictionary accordingly; of course the workaround did remedy this but it's still annoying to have to apply a third party app to every single Live Writer installation you do when you move from computer to computer as I do. Luckily beta 3 fixes this problem and no workaround is needed anymore. Yay!

Interestingly a new installer has been added to the product which I'm not too sure I like. Basically it's a Windows Live Installer which pimps the other Live products such as Messenger, Mail, etc.. Although I don't like it I do like the fact that it advertised Photo Gallery - a product I've been looking to get my hands on for some time. Photo Gallery doesn't really add anything on top of what you get in Windows Vista other than the fact that it runs on Windows XP as well. I had hoped that Flickr integration would be in there but that's sadly not the case. It does provide a Publishing feature but only Live Spaces is supported for pictures and Soapbox for videos. Bummer.

Other stuff includes:

• Insert videos using our new 'Insert Video' dialog
• Upload images to Picasaweb when publishing to your Blogger blog
• Publish XHTML-style markup
• Use Writer in 28 additional languages
• Print your posts
• Justify-align post text
• Better image handling (fewer blurry images)
• Resolved installation issues from last release
• Many other bug fixes and enhancements 

Download Windows Live Writer Beta 3

I don't tell this to everyone I meet so lets keep it between us, shall we? Many years ago I dabbled with Linux (I never inhaled though).... there I said it. It's not something I'm proud of but now it's out there and that's what's important :)

One of the goods things that came from my foray into Linux is the knowledge about a tool called grep. Now grep does a very interesting thing: It searches text files either by plain text or regular expressions and returns the text line whenever it finds a match. grep is basically SQL for your text files.

Allow me to paint you an all too familiar picture. You're tasked with finding out why an integration point has failed. Of course that piece of integration is done via CSV files making the files all but impossible to search. Now you have the option of either checking through each and every file (thousands) manually searching for the lines you want or run grep like so

grep.exe "text to search for" c:\MyLargeFile.txt > c:\FoundLines.txt

What I did there on the end is called piping; another technique I picked up from Linux where you basically pass the output of one command to another. Here I simply pass the returned text into another text file for later analysis.

The utility is extremely powerful, in fact the above example doesn't do it much justice. For example you can search entire directories of files returning interesting bits and pieces as you go along, you can match by regular expression as mentioned. Check out the documentation for more information.

grep is one of those niche tools which are useful from time to time only but when it is, man do you save you some time. Usually it's monkey time too, i.e. time a monkey could have spent doing exactly the same thing producing the same result :) So remember the next time you need to analyze text files for something, don't go writing a whole bunch of .NET code or even try to do it manually, whip out grep and be done with it.

Introduction

The following is a list of the plugins I use with Firefox every single day. My hope is to demonstrate the power of the plugin system in Firefox and how you can customize Firefox for a more productive browsing experience.

Tabmix Plus

The first plugin I ever installed and as such I found it proper to start out with this as it showed me the true potential of Firefox. Tabmix extends the existing tab options considerably by providing settings for almost every single scenario imaginable.

I use Tabmix to force links to open in new tabs instead of popping up new Firefox windows. The built in session manager (which the Firefox team implemented directly in Firefox) allows me to restore my previous browsing session automatically which is quite nice. Finally it allows me to change tab opening behavior so that new tabs pops up next to the active one and I've got it set up so that new tabs only get focus in specific scenarios which means that I'm able to go through a site and click interesting links without breaking my reading flow, when I'm done I can checkout the opened links at my leisure. There are tons of other possibilities with Tabmix Plus but those are the ones I use myself.

ColorfulTabs

Adds a unique color to every tab open making it even easier to navigate your various tabs. An option allows you to have the colors generated based on the URL which means that you get the same color for the same web site each time. Additionally it just brightens up the interface considerably.

(Settings Window)

Greasemonkey

With Greasemonkey you're able to modify or add existing web pages by using Javascript. As such it would seem like a highly specialized plugin only interesting to people able to write Javascript. However this is not the case as Greasemonkey enjoys an entire library of user created scripts at Userscripts.org. Greasemonkey is essentially a plugin system within the plugin system.

A good example of what's possible with Geasemonkey is the Gmail Super Clean script which allows you to turn the standard Gmail interface like below:

As you can see from the following screenshot I use Greasemonkey entirely for customizing Gmail but of course many scripts exist for other sites so be sure to check out Userscripts.org.

OpenDownload

Coming from IE one of the this I missed the most was the ability to click Run on downloads. Firefox forced me to select a temporary location for every single download which in theory is well and good but in practice I sometimes just download stuff for one times purposes, e.g. I want to test something out, in those cases having to select a location is annoying as hell. OpenDownload takes care of this by adding a Run button to the standard Firefox download dialog. By clicking the button Firefox downloads to a temporary folder and launches the download when done.

It's one of those plugins that saved you a couple of seconds each time you want to just run something. In the long run it adds up, not to speak of getting rid of the annoyance itself.

Fasterfox

Want to use that big fat pipe to the internets more efficiently? Fasterfox is a bunch of tweaks to Firefox which will allow you to do just that. Fasterfox works in two ways: Firstly It optimized various aspects of the network utilization such as multiple concurrent connections, caching, DNS cache, etc.. Secondly it prefetches links ala what Google has been doing for a while with Google Web Accelerator but with some limitations as to avoid "dangerous" behavior like logging you out from a site, emptying your shopping cart. The primary limitation is that Fasterfox will not prefetch dynamic pages such as ASPX, JSP which to my mind makes a lot of sense as I've never used prefetching due to the problems described earlier.

Gmail Notifier

As you saw when I introduced Greasemonkey I use Gmail and quite extensively too. In fact I'm at a tipping point where using Outlook for my private mail doesn't make too much sense any more. In essence I'm using Gmail for everything but my calendar so that's the one reason why Outlook is still sticking around. But that's a different story :)

The function of Gmail Notifier as you probably deduced by now is to notify about new mail in your Gmail account. It adds a little icon to the lower status bar of Firefox which indicates the number of unread mails in your account and a notification is displayed on the desktop when new mail is found. Clicking the icon will bring you to your Gmail page via a secure HTTP Connection. Simple, effective.

Google Toolbar

The Google Toolbar, who can live without it? The toolbar is the first thing I install whenever I do a fresh Firefox install. Yes Google spies on my through this thing, yes my entire life is run by Google services but I don't give a damn it's so nice :) The latest version of Google Toolbar integrates even better with Firefox by adding an option to replace the standard Firefox search box next to the address bar. Makes for a more compact UI. My favorite feature of the toolbar is that search words are added as clickable buttons which finds the search term on the page. Supremely useful.

IETab

For all the usefulness of Firefox you simply can't get around the fact that Internet Explorer has had and still have a huge percentage of the install base covered which means that some sites simply aren't going to play nice with Firefox. IETab alleviates this problem by allowing you to switch rendering engine on a single tab enabling the IE engine to run within Firefox. IETab allows you to configure sites that should always be rendered using the IE engine, Windows Update comes to mind though only a problem in Windows XP as Vista does away with the Windows Update page in favor of a client app. Also available from the Firefox UI is a button for switching between the rendering engines on the fly.

PlainOldFavorites

Keeping bookmarks in sync between browsers were a priority to me when I was initially trying out Firefox as I was still very much using IE. I didn't want to commit to the custom bookmark system Firefox introduces so instead of keeping the two in sync I went and found PlainOldFavorites which provides access to the standard Windows/IE favorites from within Firefox. It adds a new menu item to Firefox called Favorites just like we're used to in IE.

del.icio.us

With an increasing number of bookmarks I'm finding it harder to keep them relevant and up to date which is where del.icio.us comes into play. del.icio.us is a service for storing your bookmarks online much like what Google provides with their toolbar however del.icio.us was the original player in that particular space with more focus on the social aspects of bookmarking. For me personally it's just a matter of storing my bookmarks in a central place where I don't have to worry about backups. If you're interested in the social aspects of del.icio.us check out their about page.

Since I started using del.icio.us in Firefox I've noticed that I use bookmarks much more actively and I tend to tag (add) a lot more bookmarks to my collection. An unexpected side effect of del.icio.us is that I'm now able to see what similar pages other people tag within particular tags. Very useful that I can get additional bookmarks relevant to stuff I'm looking for which have already been prescreened by another person.

FireFTP

As a web developer I find myself in need of a FTP client from time to time. The fact that I don't need a client very often doesn't warrant a dedicated software for the FTP'ing file back and forth. FireFTP is a simple FTP client built right into Firefox which. An added benefit of having the FTP client inside Firefox is that it opens up in a separate tab which means you can have multiple connections open at the same time.

Web Developer

You cannot live without the Web Developer plugin if you're doing any kind of web development. As you can surmise from the name Web Developer helps you out when you're creating web pages. The focus of Web Developer is inspecting the HTML of your pages and understanding the structure of a page. It includes a number of validators for checking CSS, HTML, RSS, and a bunch of other stuff.

Firebug

in the same category as Web Developer we have Firebug which is priceless for developing AJAX enabled web applications and doing client side debugging. You can insert break points in JavaScript, step through code, and even modify code on the fly for an even more streamlined development experience.

Firebug introduces a browser for inspecting the HTML structure in a hierarchical fashion which in conjunction with Web Developer makes for a very powerful development environment; all in the browser.

A neat little feature is an small indicator icon added to the status bar which shows the "compile" status of the web pages; essentially telling you whether any bugs exist in your page.

Summary 

You can customize Firefox exactly to your liking as you can see from this list of the plugins I use everyday. The plugin system is easily the most powerful feature of Firefox; if you take the time to explore the potential. For me personally the plugins mean that I'm sticking with Firefox now that I've learned the potential. In many ways the plugins goes hand in hand with the reason why I'm using software like Resharper in my day to day development tasks: I want to get the most out of the time I spend behind the screen.

I hope that this list has inspired you to go look at the various plugins yourself and do leave a comment if you find useful plugins for yourself. You can find additional plugins at the Firefox Add-ons page; keep in mind that the Firefox team hasn't actually decided on what to call plugins so you'll see the terms plugin, add-on, and extension used interchangeably on both their web pages and in the actual browser. Honorable mention goes to Greasemonkey: the plugin system within the plugin system (it does get very meta at this point, right :)).

The restart now popup which Windows XP insists on popping up annoys me to no end. I've spent entire days clicking that sucker to avoid rebooting; every time I click it I die a little inside. I even resorted to hiding it by pulling it to the bottom of my desktop with only the topmost 2 pixels visible.

The dialog from hell in all its glory:

And here's how to extend the interval at which the dialog appears or disable it altogether.

Luckily Windows Vista does away with this annoying little critter and introduces the notion of postponing the restart for up to 4 hours. And there was much rejoicing. Yaaaay! (bonus points to the person who comes up with the movie from which the quote is taken). Seriously how's that for innovation?

As Apple so thoroughly has shown us it's the little things that count. This Windows Update dialog, however small a feature, is actually a pretty good metaphor for what Windows Vista is: Nice and polished with attention to details. Yes, I'm enjoying my Vista experience quite a bit although I'm still not quite sure when the WOW! actually starts. Microsoft does specify that the Wow starts "Now" but I'm still waiting for it :)

... Actually it's been out a couple of days but I wanted to take it out for a spin before posting about it.

Licensing

Users of the previous version need to be aware that this release is not a free upgrade from 2.x like we've been used to. Existing customers can upgrade their license for $199 while a brand spanking new version will set you back $349. It worth nothing that when you upgrade your existing license you actually get a completely new license for 3.0 something Microsoft should sit up and take notice of considering their annoying scheme of installing Windows Vista and then installing the "upgraded version" on top of that. It reminds me takes me back to upgrading Windows 2000 to Windows XP but that's a different story for another time :)

Additionally JetBrains has created a richer licensing model with separate versions for C#, VB, and a full version with support for both of them. Yes, you read that right, JetBrains now has VB support in ReSharper. More on that later.

JetBrains has really gotten their act together this time around and have released ReSharper 3.0 with Orcas support ahead of the final version of Orcas. I still member when Visual Studio 2005 was released and we had to wait for months and months until they got a ReSharper version out the door with support for that version.

Keyboard Scheme

When you first fire up Visual Studio with ReSharper 3.0 installed you will be greeted by my favorite new feature: The ReSharper Keyboard Scheme selector. Basically it allows you to select the keyboard scheme with which you are most comfortable like we've been doing in Visual Studio forever. It addresses one of the pain points I've had with ReSharper since version 1.0: The default shortcuts overrides the ones I'm used to in Visual Studio forcing me to remap keys or keep and exported file with my settings handy. When dealing with shortcuts I usually conform to the default layout of the keyboard just to avoid having to remap keys on every installation of Visual Studio I use. As of today I have 4 - 5 separate installations: One for the laptop, one for the desktop, one for a number of virtual machines... basically a lot of environments to keep in sync which is a pain when you're so dependant on the keyboard as I am.

Polish

The product has gotten a lot polish compared to the previous version. Just take look at the settings dialog which will also give you an idea of the scope of the product. Another testament to this fact is that when you install ReSharper you have the option to hide UI elements in Visual Studio which are redundant because ReSharper offers better functionality. Case in point the Refactor menu item on the Visual Studio toolbar which is removed in favor of the ReSharper menu item because that item encompasses so much more than Refactor. Of course this is configurable as you can see on the settings screenshot.

VB Support

JetBrains has spent a lot of time adding support for VB which is great for people doing work in VB. For myself it's a nice to have feature because we do have a couple of projects created in VB still and more importantly projects which mixes and matches VB and C#. I would have liked to I would have been more grateful for the feature two years ago but still it's nice to have the feature I'm used to available to me in both C# and VB. Additionally support for XML and XAML has been added to this version.

TODO Explorer

The TODO explorer (CTRL + ALT + D) is another new addition which actually makes our //TODO comments useful again. I've tried to use TODO comments in my code but I always forget to look them up. I'm sure that Visual Studio provides some sort of UI for viewing a list of TODOs but I can't for the life of me remember how to access it. The TODO Explorer in ReSharper makes it easy to get an overview of the TODOs in your code and ReSharper itself reformats TODO comments in a fashion that makes them stand out more, a nice visual cue that something needs to be done.

File Structure Window

I found the File Structure explorer (CTRL + ALT + F) by accident when I was trying out version 3.0 so I'm not sure whether it's a new feature to ReSharper 3.0 or if it's been there all along. It's new to me at least :) Basically it gives you an overview of the structure of the file you currently have open in Visual Studio. Very handy to make jumping to specific stuff in a file easier. Both the File Structure and TODO Explorer are naturally dockable like you would expect.

Background Compiling for C#

VB offers a feature called background compiling which is very useful because it provides feedback without compiling. When Vertica initially started out we were using VB because everybody came from an ASP 3.0/VBScript/VB6 background which made the choice to go with VB a nobrainer. When we switched to C# a couple of years later the feature I missed the most from VB was background compiling. In fact I was so used to the feature that C# and Visual Studio felt "wrong" somehow; I weren't able to put my finger on it until later when I dug a little and found the background compiling feature of VB. ReSharper offers much the same feature and improves upon the capabilities offered by Visual Studio itself by adding a nice overview of errors in the current file. Notice the right side of the screenshot where a yellow square and a couple of red and orange bars are shown. The square indicates the overall status of the file, the red color means that the file doesn't currently compile. The bars indicate where the errors and warnings are located in the file.

As a nice addition you can scroll through errors (SHIFT + ALT + PgDn / PgUp) and highlights (ALT + PgDn / PgUp) via keyboard shortcuts making it easy and efficient to fix errors.

Context Actions

ReSharper offers another interesting feature which is the context based action (CTRL + Enter). Basically it tells you what the allowed operations at any given point are. Very handy when you're learned the product and don't know all the shortcuts. ReSharper is very keyboard driven which makes it the perfect fit for most C# developers but this is one area where they bring some of the stuff I think VB developers are going to like.

Refactoring

In previous versions of ReSharper you would have to learn shortcuts for every refactoring which meant, for me anyway, that I took the time to learn the most useful ones and left all the other ones alone. Not anymore. As an extension to context based actions we have Refactor This (CTRL + SHIFT + R) which brings up a list of available refactorings based on the place your cursor is at in your code. What this allows for is a single entry point into refactorings allowing you to get familiar with the various possible refactorings and ultimately to use them more than you would otherwise.

Type Completion

Type Completion adds a new level of intellisense to Visual Studio. Basically I can type a partial type name bring up Smart Code Completion (SHIFT+ ALT + Space) which will search through all reference assemblies and suggest type names even without a using statement of the namespace the type is in. Pressing enter will add the using clause to the top of file as well as complete the type. I can't say too many good things about this feature; it simply boots my productivity because I don't have to hunt around for the right namespace.

Unit Testing

If you're into unit testing (and you should be :)) ReSharper has something to offer as well. You'll be able to execute your tests from within Visual Studio ala what TestDriven.NET provides and additionally you get an Unit Test Explorer which makes it easy to overview your test suite. Basically ReSharper allows for much of the same convenience as Team System does by integration xUnit frameworks into Visual Studio.

Bracket Completion

Everything provided by ReSharper is about better productivity. In this section I'll cover all the little things you'll love and get addicted to before you know it :)

Bracket completion basically puts in the closing bracket of a block. Type { and ReSharper adds the matching }. Same thing goes for parentheses. You only save a keystroke but think about all the times a day you actually need this feature. I can't live without this one for sure.

Smart Complete Code

Smart Complete Code (CTRL + ALT + Space) basically an evolved version of Intellisense which gives you more relevant completion than what Visual Studio provides. You can think of the feature as scoped intellisense, whatever is relevant for the scope you're currently in ReSharper suggest. Very handy.

Reformat Code

Reformat Code (CTRL + E + F) is an extension to what was introduced in Visual Studio 2005 where you can specify how your coding style is, i.e. how spacing works, line breaks, all that good stuff. ReSharper actually had this in versions before Visual Studio 2005 came out and 3.0 has even richer support for configuring your coding style. Additionally you can reformat the code of the currently open file and as two new options globally for the entire solution or silently so you don't have to choose which settings to reformat by every time.

Surround With

Imagine that you've written a block of code and you are reminded that you need to do a try-catch around that block of code. You laboriously move the cursor to the start of the block and type try followed by the brace. After you you move the cursor to the end of the block and do the catch maybe followed by a finally block. With ReSharper that operation would go something like highlight the code block press CTRL + E + U select surround with try-catch-block. Surround With is a feature that allows you to surround blocks of code with other code like the try-catch block, a region, an if-statement, and so forth. I use this feature extensively to surround block with regions for example.

Goto Usage

How many times have you wanted to know which pieces of code call the particular method you're currently looking at? I know that I daily want to see this and luckily ReSharper does provide exactly this feature (SHIFT + ALT + F12). If only a single usage is found the you're taken there otherwise a list of the usages is displayed.

Summary

With the job market being what it is today my opinion is that it's downright irresponsible to not use tools that boost the overall productivity of developers. Almost every single company is clamoring for developers instead of making the most of the developers already employed in the company. Visual Studio brings a lot of productivity to the table, nice designers, code snippets, background compiling, refactoring. Even innovations in the core framework are about productivity like LINQ, automatic properties, etc..

ReSharper takes many of these familiar tools to new levels and adds new functionality to the best development environment out there. I've been using ReSharper for years and have liked almost every version of the product with exception of 2.0 which was dog slow. I'm happy to report that all the code analysis going on behind the scenes don't slow down Visual Studio noticeably. ReSharper truly delivers on JetBrains' promise of "develop with pleasure".

The new Windows Live Writer is very good as I pointed out in a previous post but couldn't figure out where my spell check had gone off to. It turns out that if you run LIve Writer on a box with a non-English regional setting the spell check will be disabled with no way of activating it through the UI.

Luckily I found a workaround on Roy Osherove's blog; basically a small exe which launches Live Writer with spell checking enabled. A bit of a dirty workaround but it gets the job done until Microsoft release a version with this behavior fixed.

On a related note I still remember when Apple decided to do something along these lines with a release of iTunes which basically read the current locale of the system and launched iTunes in that particular language without any way of overriding the setting. Really annoying if you like me run an English version of Windows with a different locale. I just want my programs to speak English with Danish keyboard enabled and have all their features enabled damn it! :)

First we had a Mac guy saying positive things about Windows Vista and now ... the Mac browser Safari is being released for the Windows platform. It must be a cold day in hell indeed :) There's a news story on the unveiling at WWDC on Computerworld.

In all seriousness it's a nice move from Apple because we can now test our web applications in the Safari browser without actually going out a buying a Mac computer. We are looking at a public beta 3 of the product and as such it exhibits a number of problems but the overall experience is definitely there. In the 45 seconds I spent testing it I came across two glaring bugs: The H1 tag is not rendered when running with 120 DPI in Windows (screenshot below) and clicking the bookmarks button crashes the browser. I checked with a colleague and it works in his machine leading me to believe that the issue is related to my 120 DPI setting also.

Performance-wise I'm pretty impressed with Safari it renders pages very quickly, about the same as the latest beta of Firefox 3 called Gran Paradiso, and of course notably quicker than IE7 which is just dog slow on my current development box.

Developing web pages requires testing in multiple browser version. Unfortunately Microsoft doens't make it easy to have multiple version of Internet Explorer installed side by side. Luckily TredoSoft has just the thing: Multiple IE Installer.

My favorite blog posting tool Windows Live Writer has been given quite the upgrade both visually and feature-wise. I'm not too sure that I like the new UI but then again I'm a creature of habit so it'll probably grow on me. It's diffinitely got the Vista feel to it which doesn't blend too well with Windows XP which I'm still using at work. One feature I've been missing in the old version was the ability to add new categories; granted I don't do it every day but still it's nice not to have to go the actual website and update the post after posting.

I bet that the first thing you showed friends and colleagues right after you installed Windows Vista was Flip 3D (WIN + TAB) and I bet that you've used it precisely zero times after you showed it to everyone you know. I know that the case for me anyway. Like many Microsoft feature Flip 3D demoes well but doesn't work out so well in practical scenarios.

I've gone ahead and replaced the built-in Flip 3D feature with a small program called Switcher. Basically it emulates what the Mac users have with Exposé and makes WIN + TAB useful again.

Replace this:

with this:

The image says it all. Take a look at the full post Powerful/Free Download: Refactor! for ASP.NET 2.2 on Mark Millers blog. Thanks to my colleague Brian for passing this along. We have some tinkering to do in Visual Studio tomorrow morning I would think :)

Thomas Jespersen wrote a post about Carbonite and how much he likes the service which made me revisit the idea of online backup. I originally rejected the idea due to privacy, performance, and pricing concerns.

I can't claim that I have much to hide on my computer but I still don't like the idea of transmitting everything I've ever created digitally over the Internet to a service where I basically only have their word for them not being evil and not misusing my data.

Secondly I do have a lot of stuff to backup. I've been very careful with my data during the years and I'm proud to say that I've not lost anything of value or importance for more than five years. Of course the reason for that is an event which happened one day 5 * 365 - 1 days ago :) Luckily I didn't have a whole lot to lose but I learned my lesson. Additionally I'm now using the PC for so much more than just playing around. Specifically my wife would murder me if we ever lost a digital photo and of course I'd weep myself to sleep every night should I lose stuff related to work.

For a long period of time I've been using FolderShare to back my stuff up to multiple locations both on site and off site. FolderShare is a tool for synchronizing folders and therein lies both the power and a very real danger in that deleting, say every digital photo in one location, deletes everything in the other locations as well. Not the very best of backup strategies but it did do the trick for me for a while and for free too.

So back to Thomas Jespersen who reminded me of the online options for backing up. I had taken a look at Carbonite but rejected it as I said. His post however made me rethink that decision because losing everything is much worse than people gaining insight into my personal stuff. Also it's worth mentioning that the online backup services really aren't insecure in that they offer encryption of everything before the data is sent across the wire so one would need to purposely pursue getting access to the data which to me is highly unlikely.

Finally there's pricing which has been a major barrier for me. I'm not prepared to pay hundreds of dollars each year to back my stuff up remotely when I can buy hard drives in the amount of terabytes for that same amount of money and carry them off site. Sure the convenience factor isn't too high on the manual hard drive switch-a-roo thing but still worth considering.

Luckily two service providers do offer pricing which is justifiable and even affordable. Both Mozy and Carbonite offer an unlimited backup plan for $4.95 a month and with rebates you can go even lower if you go for a full year or two.  Also a major factor is the unlimited storage when compared to other backup provides who want major bucks for anything above 10 gigabytes.

So I've basically chosen Carbonite and Mozy for evaluation based on two factors: Price and storage space.

Features: Carbonite 0 / Mozy 1

Carbonite is a pretty bare bones product: you use Windows Explorer to set which folders to backup which is very handy. Each backed up folder gets a little blue dot to indicate that Carbonite is protecting it. From that point on Carbonite runs all by itself no need to think more about it.

With Mozy you will be dealing with multiple backup sets. Backupsets make a lot of sense in the initial backup where you have a lot of stuff you need to backup; some more important than other. I created a backupset for important stuff and lumped everything else into a different set and ran a manual backup of the first on to ensure that documents, photos, code, etc. was backed up before spending time backing up my iTunes library.

Backupsets can be configured by using the physical file structure or by rules. The rules feature is pretty neat because you could create a global backupset for everything related to say code and include projects, code files, solutions and so forth in the set and not worry where it is actually stored. Very appealing to my developer mind which likes generic solutions :) For me the feature is useful to exclude .p2p files which are created by FolderShare for synchronization. Carbonite has a similar feature but it requires you to navigate to the file, right-click and select exclude file type.

Mozy has a nice versioning feature which allows you to go back to a previous version, very nice for those of us used to source control :)

Ease of Use: Carbonite 1 / Mozy 0

Both providers offer a downloadable client which run on your computer unattended. For a  solution that just works Carbonite has the advantage as you don't really need to set anything up for it to work. The user interface is very simple which both a strength and a weakness.

Mozy on the other hand brings a lot of settings you can tweak which is nice for a person like me who like to tweak and tinker with the stuff. For the average person though I think Carbonite comes out ahead, you can't mess anything up because there's nowhere to get a the settings.

Configuration: Carbonite 0 / Mozy 1

As mentioned Mozy offers a lot of configuration options which is great though some of the options seem strange. For example they have put a slider in which you can move between two points: Faster Computer / Faster Backups. My guess is that the slider is for controlling the encoding process but it's not what I would call obvious and I certainly don't get the point of it in this day and age where most of us are equipped with dual core machines. Still nice to have the option I guess.

Mozy offers a lot more configurability in terms of what you're backing up. Mozy has the notion of backup sets which is basically a collection of stuff you want to backup. It's nice to be able to have stuff separated so you get the most important stuff backup up first in the initial backup. In the long run however it's not a very useful feature and Mozy seems to spend forever on populating the backup sets whenever you need to display the client interface.

Network Performance: Carbonite 0 / Mozy 1

This is the big one for me. I have a lot of stuff I need backed up and when I have unlimited storage available I want everything backed up damn it! On paper unlimited storage looks like a good deal but in reality it's very constrained by the network. My connection is a 20/20 mbit fiber optical connection so it shouldn't be a problem to backup everything. The service however limits this, the question is: how much does it limit it? For Carbonite I'm able to get about  1 mbit/sec when backing up which means that it takes forever for me to backup 10 GB.

With Mozy I get anywhere from 1 - 4 mbit, mostly 4 so I have to go with Mozy on this one. Basically the 4x speed increase means the world in difference and I can actually use the service like I want to. One strange thing I've found is that Mozy will actually stop using the network when it encodes (encrypts) data which is unfortunate when the service is network constricted.

Support

With a product like Carbonite which caters to inexperienced computer users ease of use is essential and when all else fails support needs to be in place to help out the user. I tried contacting Carbonite support in regards to the low speeds I experienced and got only a reference to their FAQ back after days of waiting. In spite of providing them with a very detailed description of my setup, connection speeds, etc. they felt that providing me with their FAQ was the best course of action. Of course I'd already read their FAQ and concluded that the problem wasn't on my end of the line. Disappointing to say the least. No followups to ensure that the problem was fixing happened either.

Issues

While testing Carbonite I came across a weird issue with iTunes where my iTunes Library files was corrupted twice after installing Carbonite. I've never experienced this kind of problem with iTunes before not even running on the Windows Vista betas. I can't say for sure that there is a problem with Carbonite and iTunes; all I can say is that since uninstalling Carbonite I have not experienced the problem again.

Summary: Carbonite 1 / Mozy 3

For the average computer user finding out whether his or her computer would run a particular application has been somewhat of a hassle it not downright impossible. Game distributors have traditionally added minimum and recommended requirement on the box of the game or application but what average computer user actually know what kind of hardware is inside their computer? Heck I even have trouble remembering all those parts.

To end that particular frustration Windows Vista includes a feature called Windows Experience Index. Basically this is a number as opposed to hardware specifications which tells you whether your computer will be able to run a certain application or game. The overall score is determined by the lowest number (in my case memory) and tells the user where an upgrade would make the most sense.

Add to this that Windows Experience Index is nicely integrated into the Games Explorer and you have yourself a very nice way of easily determining if you will have a nice time playing a particular game.

Now all that remains to be seen is whether PC game makers will have more sense when it comes to determining the recommended experience index than they do today with their recommended hardware requirement. In any event the single number is much easier for the user to get some kind of sense of what is needed to run a particular game.

One thing which annoyed me to no end when I made the switch to FireFox was the missing ability to click Run when I start a download like I could in Internet Explorer. Having to go through the entire process of selecting a place to download the file, then waiting for the download to complete, and finally clicking Open in the Download Manager is just a plain waste of time. Not a problem with the OpenDownload extension which adds the missing Run button to the download dialog.

Download OpenDownload extension (file is missing at the moment so use MozMonkey.com for now). No go run some malware executables off of the Internet will ya? :)

For some time I have been wondering why anyone would not use Skype entirely for their corporate VoIP needs. Of course the hosted PBX solutions offer a much more flexible solution but to my mind the main feature missing from Skype is the ability to transfer a call to another Skype user. Looks like we will see this feature in the near future as it is slated for Skype 3.0 with final availability in version 3.5. Skype is becoming even more compelling these days.

Skype 3.0 introduces the long-awaited interface to enable call transfer. Call transfer is being phased in over two releases, and won’t be exposed to users until the 3.5 release. The reason for this phased release is to ensure substantial penetration of Skype 3.0 among users, because call transfer requires that all parties are running Skype 3.0 or higher. Our goal is to enable you to start building and testing great new apps now which will be ready to blow peoples’ minds away when we release 3.5 next year. No more playing catch up with the client!

Skype 3.0 Dev Notes - Call Transfer 3.5

More information about phase one and how to use the API in version 3.0

I enjoy Google's Gmail and companion products very much but I don't want to spend my entire day in the web browser simply due to the fact that I use Outlook to organize my work day. Gmail in contrast does one thing and one thing only: E-mail. It does this well and I absolutely adores that no nonsense interface the Google engineers have come up with.

I am already getting very good mileage out of Gmail which I use as both backup for my e-mail and webmail. In essence Gmail is my Exchange for free.

What is missing from my free Exchange you ask? Well my calendar of course. Until recently I used Plaxo for synchronizing my various Outlook calendars. With the release of Outlook 2007 I have found Plaxo useless becuase it does not support this particular version of Outlook yet. Bummer.

Google Calendar and CompainionLink for Google Calendar (boy is that a mouthful) to the rescue. Google Calendar in itself is a very cool tool but as with my e-mail I rely heavily on Outlook to get my work done so living in the browser is not on option. CompanionLink for Google Calendar, you guessed it, is a tool for synchronizing Outlook with Google Calendar. It does a two way sync which means that I not only have the Plaxo functionality back additionally I have a web calendar it my disposal.

CompanionLink for Google Calendar syncs other PIMs as well:

Blackberry/RIM, GroupWise, Lotus Notes, Palm Desktop, Palm Hotsync, and a couple of handheld devices.

Having found this product of course I wanted it to run automagically because having to run a tool manually is kind of ghetto and it would last for about 10 minutes before I would get tired of it. So I raced off to the Task Scheduler of Windows Vista to set it up. Only problem was that the thing would pop up during each sync to report status and it would finish off with another popup to let me know that everything went fine. Now imagine that happening every 10 minutes as I initially set it up to do.

Luckily it turns out that you can add a switch to the arguments of the tool to make it run silently. The magic and obviously very secret switch is .... wait for it ... -silent. Who knew?

My calendar is now handily synced with Google Calendar and shared with my wife online so she can know my every move minute by minute :D

CompanionLink for Google Calendar is $29.95 and well worth it even if you only need to sync with Google Calendar. Additionally you get the opportunity to sync multiply Outlook calendars if you desire to so. I know I do.

CompainonLink for Google Calendar

Google Calendar

Google Gmail

Microsodt Outlook

Microsoft Exchange

I recently took a look at NDepend to checkout whether I'd be able to do some analysis of our solutions with regard to code reviews and overall architural integrity. I must admit that I didn't get the tool, I went ahead and looked at some of the reports but the main window of the tool is just extremely busy. Finding heads and tails of it was beyond me in the 15 minutes I looked at it. Basically I decided that it generated some interesting reports but that it really wouldn't be all that helpful.

I'm thinking that I might have to give the tool a second chance having read Scott Hanselman's post Exiting The Zone of Pain - Static Analysis with NDepend. Getting a down to earth explanation of how to read the charts really made sense of some of the stuff I was seeing. However I still feel that the main window requires lots more investigation before I can effectively use it some anything. The real power of NDepend seems to me to be the query language which lets you find stuff like unused methods. ReSharper already does this for me but only in a very localized way, i.e. only the file I'm currently working on. Having the ability to do this globally in a solutions really appeals to me.

Back to NDepend for a close look.

Conclusion: First read Scott Hanselman's post on NDepend then go download and play around with it.

The tool which every .NET developer need but don't know about is out with a new version bringing us up to version 5. Check out what Reflector is and why you need it.

Download Reflector 5

Introduces features such as Windows Vista support and support for hardware virtualization found in newer CPUs. Also my experience is that you'll gain a performance boost with this version even on machines without hardware virtualization. My three year old laptop was none too happy about running VPCs on Windows XP with Virtual PC 2004. With Windows Vista and Virtual PC 2007 however everything seems to run more smoothly.

Download Microsoft Virtual PC 2007

It's both funny and a little bit disturbing how far Apple is willing to go in order to bring down Microsoft's Vista launch. To my mind Apple is [mis]using their MP3 player monopoly to slow down adoption of Windows Vista by releasing support articles stating stuff like,

"iTunes 7.0.2 may work with Windows Vista on many typical PCs. Apple recommends, however, that customers wait to upgrade Windows until after the next release of iTunes which will be available in the next few weeks."

Apparently there are incompatibility issues between Windows Vista and iTunes thus you should avoid upgrading to Windows Vista until Apple has released a newer version of the iTunes software. They're absolutely right I personally have witnessed one such incompatibility but it's important to note that it was about 6 months ago and the versions involved were Windows Vista pre beta 1 and iTunes 6 (not even sure Vista was called Vista back then). Also worth of note is that the incompatibility was purely cosmetic as the problem was that the Aero UI would shut off when iTunes was running. Everything else working without a hitch. The Java Runtime Environment version 5 caused a similar thing to happen. No big deal.

Also going as far as releasing software to address the "problem" seems a bit extreme. If such incompatibilities really existed why haven't anyone heard about them yet? Yes Windows Vista hasn't been out for more than a couple of days but that's only counting the general public. Developers and business have had access to Windows Vista for two months and I dare say that we would have heard something by now if a real problem existed.

Why is this funny? Well the Apple community are all up in arms about Microsoft are their evil ways but when it comes to Apple they're a closed minded bunch of drones all going, "Apple is so cool, Apple does no wrong". I have a law suit against Apple that says otherwise, I have a conviction of Apple that says otherwise, and now this.

FUD, pure FUD from wonderful Apple.

If an incompatibility really does exist should you wait with the upgrade to Windows Vista simply because you're iPod might not work? That's a big thing to postpone simply because of an "if" and an MP3 player. It all seems a bit snobby to me.

Let the hate-mail flow :)

Give User Account Control a chance. I know how annoying it is when you're getting everything up and running but when the system is all installed it's really not all that annoying. I was about to turn it off when I decided to live with it for a while longer to see what the experience in the long run would be and I'm pretty happy I did.

Don't let the initial bad impression of UAC make you disable it. Stick with it. You'll see it does actually get better.

Usability experts talk about giving the user a good experience right off the bat and UAC is certainly not an example of doing so. Quite the opposite in fact. It will continually get in your face and annoy the heck out of you before it's able to do its intended job: Everyday protection from malware. Most users won't ever get the benefits of UAC simply because Microsoft goes about selling the feature to user the wrong way. Now what would the right way look like? I have no idea. Maybe you could leave UAC off for a couple of days following the initial Windows installation because usually that's when the most heavy install process is going.

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 is getting pushed out via Microsoft Update and the one question which keeps popping up here at the office is why the installation fails. Typically this is caused because some version of Web Application Project is installed. WAP is included in SP1 which is why the install fails.

 You will need to remove it before you can successfully install SP1. It would appear that the SP1 installation isn't very clear on this.

Just a little heads up. Scott Guthrie posted about this a while back.

Nvidia has finally released a final version (100.54) of their Windows Vista driver for GeForce 8800. Grab it from their site. I'm getting ready to install it myself and have heard rumors that the SLI capabilities are somewhat lacking in this version. Expect frequent releases from Nvidia from this point on.

Does Firefox stick out like a sore thumb in your fresh Windows Vista installation? It sure did in mine so I was very glad to find that someone went ahead and did something about it and that that someone wasn't yours truly :)

*solidfilter from DeviantArt has the goods. Want to make Firefox go from this:

To this:

Then take a look at the Windows Vista theme for Firefox. The download link is for a .jar file and if you're like me you won't have any idea of what to do with it so to save you the bit of trouble I went through: You just need to open Tools => Add-ons => Themes window and drag the .jar file onto it. Presto. Easy if you know how.

One thing I noticed is that there seems to be a small incompatability between the Tabmix Plus extension and the theme as a small graphical error appears next to the close button in inactive tabs. You can remove the close button the Tabmix Plus extension but I'm sure a fix will come along.

Lots and lots of people have taken a look at Windows Vista and found it underwhelming. I've been playing around with Vista since beta 1 and basically I took a very cynical stance too. I simply couldn't see Windows Vista brings to the table when compared to Windows XP. Sure the Aero glass interface is pretty, sure Windows Vista brings a lot of new stuff beneath the covers but why should the average consumer really care about stuff you only get to see if you're a developer?

Having had a chance to use the final version of Windows Vista since the release to MSDN in November on my primary machine at home I can now finally point to a number of features which are sure to impress and increase productivity. As hinted they are not immediately obvious to new users of the OS which is something I hope to remedy with a series of articles starting with the single most important feature as seen from an end user perspective: Search.

We've had desktop search around for some time so what makes the Windows Vista desktop search so different that I would actually sit down and do an article about it? As it turns out having search deeply integrated in the shell makes all the difference in the world. I've given Google Desktop, Windows Desktop Search, and Copernic Desktop Search multiple tries but they've never stuck. Of the three Copernic stayed on my system the longest but ultimately it had to go too. The main reason was that they simply needn't allow me to access my stuff faster than I was able to without all the "help". Out they went and I never looked back. One desktop search-like program which actually stuck was Launchy which I've raved about a number of times on this blog. Launchy makes me more efficient in that it allows me to launch programs much quicker than I would normally be able to.

Search from the Start Menu

It would seem that Microsoft found this to be a good idea also as they've gone ahead and implemented the same functionality in Windows Vista. They've actually done one better than that and enhanced the experience to make a remarkably nice keyboard driven interface.

Take a look at the screenshot below and notice the "Start Search" box at the bottom of the start menu. Yes, search is integrated right into the start menu and provides easy access for every single aspect of the start menu. When you popup the start menu the field has focus and you just start typing to start the search. The results are refined as you type.

Want to launch Firefox? Just type start typing "firefox" in the search box and look what happens. What the screenshot doesn't convey is the speed of this thing. It's lightning fast; you literally type firefox, push enter, and up comes Firefox. No waiting at all.

Now what if you had a particular web site in mind? You can actually just launch a URL directly from the start menu. No need to go through the process of opening the browser and typing the URL. Just enter the URL in the start menu and watch your default browser pop up with the URL you just specified. Don't let the Favorites and History heading fool you any URL will do. Speaking of Favorites and History. You can access that too. Yes I do spend way too much on Digg.com :)

Search from Windows Explorer

Another cool thing is the ability to search from anywhere in the system using Windows Explorer. Notice the search box at the top right corner of the Explorer window? That box is pretty much omni-present in Windows Vista. Open Explorer it's there, open Control Panel, it's there. Open Printers, it's... well you get the idea. Everything is driven by Windows Explorer like in Windows XP which is why you get the search capability anywhere. It works much like the start menu: Stat typing and the contents are filtered accordingly. Also you get the ability to search current folder and subfolders in one go. Don't worry if you like the old behavior where focus moves according to what you enter you can simply turn off the "search when you type" feature. Also searches can be saved as virtual folders making for some interesting use cases.

Vanilla Desktop Search

Windows Vista has got something for those who likes the standard desktop search experience. We're all familiar with the search window which provides access to the standard search packages. You basically get that too although I can't really see why you would want to use it with the rich integration provided by the previous two features I described. Click the Search item on the start menu and you get the search window.

There you go. The Windows Vista search capability is truly the killer feature of the OS seen from an end-user perspective in that it provides easy access to files for people not too comfortable with using computers and it provides quick access to programs, files, and settings for those of us who know our way around the computer. Integrated search is the one feature I miss when I sit down with a Windows XP computer as the habit of pushing the Windows key and entering the name of the program I want is already pretty much down.

Here's something interesting I literally stumbled upon tonight: Hamachi is a VPN client which allows you to create VPN between a number of computers. And here's the kicker: It does it P2P style meaning no central server needs to be setup. It even provides NAT traversal by employing a mediation server to create the initial connection. Here's what the site says:

"LogMeIn Hamachi is a zero-configuration virtual private networking (VPN) application.
In other words Hamachi is a program that allows you to arrange multiple computers into their own secure network just as if they were connected by a physical network cable."

Check out Hamachi. If you have doubts read more about Hamachi on Wikipedia. Alternatively you can take a look at OpenVPN which does much the same thing.

I read Omar Shanine's post about Adobe Acrobat Reader 8 and how it puts an Updater5 folder in your documents folder and never thought twice about it. Sure it's annoying but hey that's why I set the path of my documents folder to my personal folder instead. Keeps my documents folder nice and clean and allows me to access everything right from the start menu. Handy.

The point of this post however is that today I noticed that Reader 8 was updating itself and in doing so I wanted to see what it was doing. In doing so it turned out that you can actually configure the place where the updates are stored. I went to Help / Check for Updates, clicked Preferences. From there I simply changed the Updater5 folder location to c:\Windows\Temp.

I did try to find the option in Edit / Preferences but I wasn't able to find it there. Not too obvious that you would need to check for updates to actually change the settings. Oh well. No more Updater5 folder in your documents, Omar.

I'm surprised to find that Adobe has actually created a version of Acrobat Reader that doesn't suck. Yes you read that right: It doesn't suck. It's speedy loading up documents as quickly as FoxItReader. Another new feature is that you can select text in a PDF without clicking a button to do so first. Welcome to 2007 Adobe glad you could join the rest of us :) Also the UI has been revamped removing the ridiculous Yahoo toolbar and generally making for a much nicer and clean experience.

They're still trying to bundle all sorts of crap with the product when you download it but I'd still give it a whirl now that they're to par with third party products.

Somewhere must have gotten pretty cold when a Mac user actually proclaims,

"It doesn’t suck."

And goes on to say,

"Vista has a few features that I wish I could use on my Macs."

Yes people hell may not be the warm place to go to this summer with statements like these flying about :) Head on over to MacUser and read the entire thing. He has some nice things to say about Vista.

Ihnatko: Windows Vista... doesn't suck

I completely missed this yesterday: Visual Studio 2005 SP1 has been released.

Scott Guthrie has more information about it.

This SP release is a pretty major service pack, and incorporates a lot of bug-fixes and feedback from customers.  Included built-in with the service pack is support for VS 2005 Web Application Projects (which we also made available as a separate download back in May).  It also contains a number of design-time performance optimizations and fixes across the product.
[Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Released]

Download Visual Studio 2005 SP1

SHG.dk has got some quotes on Windows Vista prices and they list the licenses as being available January 15th. They are only OEM prices at this point but who cares. If you can buy you can buy it right?

The SHG homepage is pretty sucky when it comes to linking in but I'm giving it a shot anyways. Check out the Windows Vista prices.

I like to have information stored once in a single place, exactly how I like to have a code block which does a single thing exactly once in my solutions. Long ago I chose to go with the favorites feature of Windows and Internet Explorer because I found it to be more readily backupable than Firefox bookmarks. Also synching the stuff across multiple computers requires no special programs as we're basically talking about files in a folder when dealing with the Internet Explorer favorites.

Lately I've taken to using Firefox. Performance, flexibility are the key factors for my decision to do so but I found myself missing my favorites. I don't use Firefox exclusively and I want my favorites both in FF and in IE. What to do?

Luckily a guy named Alex Sirota created a small extension for Firefox called PlainOldFavorites which basically puts a new menu item on the Firefox menu called ... you guess it .... Favorites. Instant access to the favorites folder from Firefox. I've been using this extension since my switch to Firefox but with the release of Firefox 2.0 compatibility was broken and I waited ... and waited ... and waited for an updated version of PlainOldFavorites. But such a thing wasn't forthcoming. I even started looking at the alternatives and believe me there are many alternatives out there for synching IE and FF bookmarks but they all seem to be overkill for my simple purposes.

Well the other day I was listening to the HanselMinutes episode Life Hacks with Gina Trapani where Gina mentions that Firefox extensions are nothing more than an archive in disguise. With this knowledge in mind I went ahead and downloaded the XPI for PlainOldFavorites, opened it up in WinRAR, and extracted the install.rdf file which is the manifest for the XPI package. In there you'll find stuff like which version the extension is compatible with and the version number of the extension itself. I figured that the extension is so simple that I could safely trying mucking around with the compatibility information of the manifest. Lo and behold it actually works. I've updated the extension with support up to and including Firefox version 3 and I've gone head and bumped the version of the extension to 0.5.6.2.

Hopefully Alex Sirota will get around to updating the information himself but until then you can download my updated version from below.

Download PlainOldFavorites vesion 0.5.6.2 with support for Firefox 2.0

It's actually been out for a couple of days now but I wanted to take the time to try it out in various scenarios before telling you about it. It's no secret that I've been very fond of ReSharper in the past. Of course I cooled down a bit when I tried using it on very large projects and it slowed all the way down to the point where it was just painful to develop with it installed. At that point I decided to give it a rest for a while and it wasn't until recently that I noticed that the EAP program for 2.5 was in progress.

Taking a quick look at the feature list I noticed that performance was one of the main problems being addresses in the release so naturally I was excited and got it installed.

Having used it on both large and small projects I can safely say that the performance improvements are definitely there. So much so that I'm back loving ReSharper.

A couple of pain points still exist for me:

• Automatic intellisense for enum values when you assign to an enum type.
• Migration of settings between installs is painful. Between versions even more painful as the command names you bind your hotkeys to actually changed between 2.0 and 2.5.
• Standard hotkeys in VS you use all the time are actually remapped which leaves you with the option of mapping them back or trying to figure out standard hotkeys in ReSharper which does the same thing (hello there F12 vs. CTRL + B).

To relieve the last pain point I'm actually trying to stick with the default key layout as my two last points are closely related to me having to remap keys every time I install ReSharper. I do the same thing with VS because I don't want the hassle there either.

Also please be aware that JetBrains is raising the price for ReSharper to $249. You can buy ReSharper for the usual $199 until the end of the year. So get those credit cards rolling if you're considering getting a license.

Download ReSharper 2.5 (you'll be glad you did).

Microsoft has released a little app to demo the new graphical capabilities in Windows Vista. Personally I have a hard time seeing how displaying RSS feeds in 3D can be beneficial to me but I'm always for checking out new apps. This one is definitely unique :)

UniveRSS - a 3D Vista RSS reader

Not really .NET related as such but it's something I've wanted for myself ever since it was announced that the Xbox 360 wouldn't play anything but Windows Media Video. I was wondering whether I would have to create this myself :) Basically you install a piece of software on a different machine and it then transcodes your various unsupported formats to WMV and streams them to the Xbox. Nicely done.

Playing DivX and Xvid content on Xbox 360 – An easy guide!

So I've wanted to try out Windows Live Writer for a while now but of course DasBlog 1.8 doesn't work with Windows Live Writer. The other night I got around to finally updating my blog to version 1.9 which should have support for Windows Live Writer. If you are reading this it works :)

Hey it actually does work and it includes a thumbnail feature as well. It even configures itself with DasBlog so I'm able to upload images. I've used BlogJet up to this point but I actually think Live Writer is turning out to be a better more polished product. And it's free too :)

Great productivity booster.

I found a neat little feature in Launchy today: Directories. Basically Launchy allows me to index folders around my hard drive. I connect to a lot of Remote Desktops every day thus I’ve put the feature to good use by creating a folder with all my Remote Desktop connections so I just need to type the name of the machine I need to connect to and boom I’m there.

Next I think I need to create a folder with shortcuts to actual folders I access a lot such as documents, Visual Studio Projects, and so on.

I recently got myself a monster of a computer for work (read: games and stuff). All the latest bells and whistles, dual-everything basically. Of course I was a bit annoyed when I realized that I could get just about 10 minutes of game time in before the sucker crashed. Same thing each and every time I loaded the game the machine would freeze. Here I’ve got a monster of a machine sitting on my desk and I’m only able to do Word reliably. Great stuff!

Turns out that when you update NVIDIA drivers you should be extremely careful with the uninstallation of previous versions of the drivers. Basically version 91.xx leaves stuff behind which will confuse the updated driver and cause it to now identify your graphics adapter correctly leaving you with a system that crashes on a regular basis when you play games.

The fix is pretty easy. When you need to install a new Forceware driver you just follow these steps:

Install DriverCleaner

Uninstall existing driver using Add/Remove Programs

Reboot into safe mode

Run Driver Cleaner using the NVIDIA profile

Reboot into Windows

Reboot again (this is important)

Install the updated drivers (91.47 at the time of writing)

Reboot

Apparently this is an issue with P965 and 975X chipsets from Intel and the current drivers from NVIDIA (91.47) according to the Anandtech forums.

We figured out the issue and why one board works perfectly and the next one will not. It is due to a weird combination of previous NV driver sets and two different bios versions from NV on the 7950GX2 cards. We have found that unless you completely uninstall the driver set (using DriverCleaner) the board will sometimes miss installing the pci-e bridge required for XP to recognize the second GPU. I will explain this further in our 965 roundup but even switching 7950GX2 cards with a different bios will cause the same issue. We have been able to recreate this on boards from Abit, Asus, and Gigabyte in the P965 series and the 975X boards from Abit, Asus, and DFI. We are working with NV at this time along with the board suppliers as even a simple bios update on the board can create the same issue. The solution at this point is to uninstall the drivers completely, reboot into safe mode, use DriverCleaner, reboot, enter XP, reboot again, and then install the 91.47 drivers. Should work consistently but I am now testing each official bios release to see what happens on bios updates.

I’ve been singing the praises of Omea from Jetbrains for a long time. It’s been a product with great promise but sadly Jetbrains just isn’t able to deliver a stable product which works in a predictable manner. Case in point: Some of the latest versions of Omea started to confuse feeds and mingling them in different folders. Now keeping track of feeds and putting them in the appropriate feed folder is what I consider a core feature which should work predictably from version 0.1. This combined with a couple of other unfortunate bugs made me consider other alternatives.

And boy am I glad I did. I didn’t have to look very far: Newsgator delivers in the form of FeedDemon. What a great piece of software. It’s simple and does its job very well and adds a synchronization feature which I’m growing increasingly fond of. Having my feeds synchronized between computers makes me want to read my feeds because I basically don’t have to worry about filtering read posts manually anymore. My OPML AND read status for individual posts are synchronized across computers for a very smooth user experience. Even if you just need a very polished RSS reader, I think FeedDemon is the way to go.

Now I just need to find a nice newsgroup reader which Omea provided me with.

That’s right Microsoft has finally deemed it necessary to release a service pack for Visual Studio 2003 .NET. This is great news as we still have a couple of projects around based on .NET Framework 1.1 and 2003 .NET. I’ve toyed with the idea of migration them to VS 2005 and using something like MSBee to target builds for version 1.1 but somehow the effort just doesn’t seem to be worth it to me which means I’m stuck with VS 2003 for better or worse from time to time.

Release notes

List of changes (the knowledge base article isn’t online at the time of writing)

SP1 download (153 MB no less)

Inspired by Scott Hanselman I bring you my own list of software I absolutely positively cannot live without. This list of software has taken years to compile: I didn’t start out with a list of software as a goal, I simply needed to get a job done. Every single time I need to get a new job done I go out and select the top ten pieces of software which solve a given problem. This list is narrowed down until I’m left with a single piece which will go into my tool box. I refine my tool box continually but some of the piece of software has lived in my tool box for many years, EditPlus is one such piece of software, WinRAR is another. Some categories are left out entirely as time moves on, examples of these would be FTP and IRC which I used religiously previously but have no need for recently.

My quest for an ever increasing level of quality in my tool box has even taken me so far as to consider an different platform than Windows altogether. I’ve yet to explore the Apple platform but I do find that some very interesting pieces of software live on that particular platform. Maybe in the future, for now I’m bound to the Windows platform.

Usability

Launchy

Provides fast access to your start menu by popping up a window in which you type the name or part of the name of the program you wish to launch. No need to click on the start menu ever again. My thoughts on Launchy.

TweakUI

Allows for customization of a lot of Windows XP settings. I primarily use this tool to change the location of the “My” folders pointing to locations outside of the Documents and Settings folder in order to facilitate easy backup and faster access. I usually keep my folders on a separate drive than the Windows drive in a folder called Users. Also I point the My Documents folder to the root of my user folder instead of the documents folder which gives me quick access to all my files from the start menu,

Office

Firefox

Firefox needs no further introduction. I debated long and hard whether to include it or not. Since I use this browser pretty intensively I figured that I’d better put it on my list as it is usually the first piece of software to get installed. I like Internet Explorer 7 and I think that the user interface of that particular browser is better than what we get with Firefox, but Firefox brings lots and lots of plugins to the table which enables us to customize to our heart’s content. Specifically I enjoy TabMix Plus as it allows me to configure my tabs exactly the way I want them.

FeedDemon 2

The easy-to-use interface makes it a snap to stay informed with the latest news and information. You can completely customize the way feeds are organized and displayed and set up custom news watches based on keywords. You can even download podcasts and audio files and have them show up on your portable audio device. In addition, FeedDemon now synchronizes with NewsGator Online and the rest of the NewsGator RSS Suite. The software is pre-configured with dozens of feeds, so you can unleash the power of RSS right away. My thoughts on FeedDemon 2.

FeedDemon 2 replaces Omea Reader as my RSS reader recommendation due to persisting bugs in the Omea product.

BlogJet

BlogJet is a weblog client for Windows that allows you to manage your blog(s) without opening a browser. Those who are seriously concerned with blogging, cannot imagine their work without using this wonderful tool with elegant interface.

EditPlus

Notepad replacement supporting multiple documents in the same window. Automatically colors code with support for many languages.

FoxItPdfReader

A faster less cluttered PDF reader.

Nero 6

For burning CDROMs and DVDs. I’m not too fond of the latest version of this software so I may end up finding something better. If you have a suggestion please feel free to mail it me.

PureText

PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY.  The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically. I use this tool all the time when copying snippets from sources around the web.

Programming

WinMerge

A visual text file differencing and merging tool. It is highly useful for determining what has changed between project versions, and then merging changes between versions.

Resharper

JetBrains ReSharper is a Visual Studio .NET add-in that brings intelligent C# code editing and coding assistance features to VS.NET. By intelligent features we mean usage search, powerful refactorings, smart type completion, using assistant and more. In brief, ReSharper truly understands C# code. My thoughts on Resharper.

Consolas Font
The Microsoft Consolas Font Family is a set of highly legible fonts designed for ClearType. It is intended for use in programming environments and other circumstances where a monospaced font is specified. This installation package will set the default font for Visual Studio to Consolas. My thoughts on the Consolas Font.

CopySourceAsHTML
An add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 that allows you to copy source code, syntax highlighting, and line numbers as HTML. CSAH uses Visual Studio's syntax highlighting and font and color settings automatically. If Visual Studio can highlight it, CSAH can copy it, and your source should look the same in your browser as it does in your editor.

Cool Commands for Visual Studio 2005
Adds a couple of useful features to Visual Studio 2005: Open Containing Folder for Files,Copy Reference, Add Projects from Folder are the ones I use the most. My thoughts on Cool Commands.

Imaging

Paint.NET

An image and photo manipulation software It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. Covers the basic image editing needs. My thoughts on Paint.NET.

Picasa

Picasa is a photo management tool from Google which provides a very nice interface for browsing your photos. Also includes basic photo editing tools such as red eye removal.

Cropper

Cropper is a screen capture utility. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site. My thoughts on Cropper.

GetCanon!
Image downloader for Canon digital cameras. It's small, quick and simple. It can download images, rotate them automatically and delete them from camera. If you hate the "designer" interface of Canon utilities and hate Windows messing with image filenames, this is the right tool for you.

Music

iTunes

iTunes doesn’t really need an introduction. I use this guy because of the very nice integration with the iPod and the sleek podcasting support.

AirFoil

Send any audio to the AirPort Express. My thoughts on AirFoil.

System

WinRAR

Archiver with support for almost all the archive formats out there. I use this one to avoid having multiple archivers installed and because it integrates nicely into the Windows shell.

Daemon Tools ISO Mounter

A tool for mounting ISO images as CDROM drives.

FolderShare

FolderShare is a service that allows you to securely keep files synchronized between your devices, share files with friends or colleagues, and remotely download your files from any web browser. I use this tool for both remote backup and synchronization between work and home.

µTorrent

Bittorrent is becoming a pervasive means of distribution on the internet and this client brings a whole lot of features to the table making it on par with clients such as Azureus and BitComet but at the same time being smaller and more importantly not a Java based piece of software

One little gotcha I’ve noticed with Windows Vista is that you really want to install programs running as administrator. You do this by right-clicking the Windows Explorer icon in the start menu and clicking Run as administrator. From Windows Explorer you launch the installer you need to.

Simple stuff but Windows Vista’s security model is just different enough to confuse. Installed programs will works 90% but some areas won’t function properly unless installed using the method detailed above. Cases in point Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server Management Studio Express. I know I ended up with a couple of bad installs because of this little feature.

When I first took Vista for a spin months ago I needed a tool for mounting ISOs for installing various stuff. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find such a program at the time that would actually work without taking out my Vista installation.

Now however guidmaster has found a program to solve the problem: Virtual CloneDrive.

I’m currently working on my zero day install list of software I cannot live without but I simply cannot wait to point out this nifty piece of software a colleague just showed me. The premise is simple: Intellisense for SQL Server. Red Gate delivers on this as they have done so many times before on other products for SQL Server, best of all, it’s free. Can you believe that?

Now on to the important stuff: SQL Prompt which is the name of this delicious tool. It’s a whole bag of tricks for your SQL statements:

• Intellisense on tables, columns, and even joins.
• Auto capitalization of keywords like SELECT, INSERT, and so on.
• Keyword formatting, code snippet integration other extended features.
• Works in SQL Management Studio, Query Analyser, Enterprise Manager, Visual Studio .NET 2003, Visual Studio 2005, UltraEdit, and surprisingly EditPlus 2 which is my text editor of choice.

• It’s free for now. You can grab a copy for the price of nothing until September 1st.

I give this tool a solid thumbs up.

Red Gate SQL Prompt.

Well maybe not exactly but Windows Vista does come with an implementation of Launchy which to me is great news seeing as Launchy is the best thing which has happend since sliced bread

Basically you pop up the startmenu using the WIN key and you’re ready to type just like you are with the Lacunhy shortcut. In previous builds of Windows Vista I didn’t even consider using the feature it was so slow, not so with beta 2. Everything is snappy and happends instantaneously.

I do believe that the startmenu search feature will be my favorite feature of Vista.

Oh yeah, did I mention that Vista is fast on a desktop machine? Stay tuned for more posts about Vista, the next one will probably be about how I lost all my data due to running beta versions of both my OS and Office

Up until this point I've only ever tried out Windows Vista on my laptop and have found the performance to be lacking. I'm pleased to inform you that Windows Vista runs sooo much more smoothly on a desktop machine. I mean we're talking leaps and bounds here. Granted my laptop is getting a bit long in the tooth but we're still talking 1.5GHz Penitum-M with a 7200 RPM hard drive, and a gig of memory. Not too shabby even for a two year old laptop.

My desktop machine is equipped with a Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading, and my guess is that the hyperthreading is making all the difference in the world, seeing as the only difference between my laptop and my dekstop machine is the CPU. My desktop is even older than the laptop in any case :) Vista seems to be much more comfortable in a hyperthreaded or even better a dual core environment.

If you were to ask me about one thing to make sure to get for your Vista machine it would definitely be a dual core CPU of some kind.

I while back I wrote about Launchy which I described as a command prompt for the start menu. I usually don’t write followups for software I recommend but in this instance I’m making an exception as Launchy is THE best damn piece of software I’ve installed on my computer in a long time and here’s why:

I’ve been trying to make access to my programs faster; the time from thought to launch should literally be less than 2 seconds. So far I’ve tried manually reorganizing the startmenu, using My Documents as base folder for my apps, having programs running in the tray and so forth. All these things have helped marginally but I’ve always felt that something more could be done.

Enter Launchy. If you haven’t already given the application a fair chance please do so. I’m pretty sure that if you give a week or two where you try to incorporate it into the way you work, you’ll see the light  Just think of programs such as Internet Information Services Manager, Computer Management both deeply buried in the Administrative Tools, you can have at them very quickly with Launchy.

I pretty much don’t use the startmenu any more. Just for that rare access to something new I can’t remember the name of. Nothing more. Total bliss.

I was beginning to think that Jetbrains would never actually get ReSharper 2.0 out of perpetual beta. It seems though that that is just what has happend: ReSharper 2.0 is done and ready for prime time.

I sure will be taking this one for a test drive through one of our largest solutions to gauge the performance which previously has been a big issue.

Jetbrains ReSharper 2.0

A new version of Cool Commands is available adding a couple of new … well … cool commands

• Open Containing Folder for Files.
• Copy Reference.
• Add Projects from Folder.

CoolCommands 3.0 for Visual Studio 2005

I’m a huge fan of software which does one thing only and does it very well. For screen capturing Cropper fits the bill perfectly. I often find myself communicating using screen captures to get a point across more clearly and Cropper comes in handy every time.

It being developed using the .NET Framework and C# adds major bonus points in my book as well  Be sure to check out Brian Scott’s blog who develops Cropper.

Definitely on my short list of utilities which get installed first thing after a repave.

Now here’s something interesting: A blogging tool from the company who claimed that the Internets was a fad  All jokes aside the UI looks pretty cool and I’ll certainly give it a spin.

Head on over to wincustomize.com and check out the small piece they posted on Office 2007 and the blogging tool:  Microsoft Office 2007 Office Vista - a first look.
 

Please somebody explain to me why Microsoft hasn’t bought Paint.NET and integrated it into Vista? Paint has been around forever and needs its retirement  The developer keeps a blog too: Rick Brewster's blog.

The Apple folks has had it all in the past: First iTunes, then Airport Express, and lastly Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba. The Airport Express is a nifty piece of hardware which allows you to stream your music to a set of speakers wirelessly. The one caveat to this was that you could only do so from iTunes on the PC tying you to Apple’s music platform.

I use the past tense because Rogue Amoeba (love the name) has released a beta of their Airfoil application which acts as a shim between any audio application and the Airport Express allowing you to stream from any application to you Airport Express.

I’ve already bought a license for the sucker because I live in an area where radio reception is extremely bad but with Airfoil I simply fire up Media Player and connect it to my favorite net radio station and presto: Beautiful reception where previously there was none.

Scott Hanselman turned me on the Launchy with his Replacing Start|Run episode of Hanselminutes (a fantastic podcast BTW). With Launchy installed you basically push a shortcut key which pops up a small text area where you start typing. Launchy will then search your startmenu for that particular piece of text on the fly and present you with a likely match. Pushing enter will then launch the program. Pretty neat.

I brought up BlogJet in a flash via Launchy by typing blog. Think of it as intellisense for your startmenu.

Microsoft was kind enough to release the Consoles font from Vista for VS 2005. I hadn’t noticed the first time around how nice this font is but it does actually make a difference when reading coding although it did take some getting used to before I was convinced. Give it day before you decide.

I highly recommend downloading and installing it.

Both Scott Hanselman with Consolas Font Family now available for download and guidmaster with Consolas Font Pack tuned me in to this one. Thanks.

Scott Guthrie has announced that Web Application Product 1.0 is available. Other than being a final version of the project we’ve come to love in VS 2003 it introduces a couple of new feature not available in any of the preview releases:

• Team Build Support with VSTS: You can now perform automated and command-line builds with VS 2005 Web Application Projects and VSTS

• Resource support with the App_GlobalResources directory: Strongly typed resource classes are now automatically generated for resource files defined with the ASP.NET app_globalresources directory (allowing you to program against these directly).  You can also alternatively define .resx files within the code-behind assembly of the project itself.

• Custom Build Tool Action Support: You can now configure and define custom build tool action support for file-types within a project.  This was missing in the previous release candidate and prevented some third-party utilities from working.

• Edit and Continue Support: You can now make code updates that apply immediately to applications while the debugger is attached and running (see walkthrough below for details).  This is supported with both VB and C# projects. 

Download Web Application Project 1.0. Be sure to uninstall any older version of the software you might have installed.

I’ve often sung the Reflector praise and today is no different. You sometimes end up in a situation with two assemblies; you don’t know which version is which and need to know specific differences between assemblies.

Enter the Reflector Diff plug-in by Sean Hederman which allows you to do text style diffs between two assemblies. A truly inspired use of disassembly and by  itself reason enough for the existence of Reflector 

Also be sure to check out Sean Hederman’s blog while you’re at it.

An updated version of the beta 2 preview of Internet Explorer 7 is available as of today. Go get it while the getting is good and be aware that you need to uninstall previous beta versions before installing the refresh.

More information on the IEBlog: New IE7 Build Available from MIX06!

Update: If you are doing any sort of webtesting with Team System on your box please be aware that neither this nor the previous build of IE7 will work with the webtest recorder. I’m told that work is being done to fix this.

I was very fond of Whidbey Commands for Visual Studio 2003 so naturally I was disappointed when the features wasn’t included in VS 2005 as I originally assumed they would be. Anyway I discovered that Gaston Milano was kind enough to port his code to VS 2005 in the form of Cool Commands for Visual Studio 2005.

It adds the following features of which I find “Open Project Folder” and “Collapse All Projects” very useful:

- Reference Manager

- Collapse All Project, Command Prompt Here, Open Project Folder, Demo Font and Wheel Font Zooming

Check out CoolCommands for Visual Studio 2005 RTM, you’ll never know how you made do without it  Please note that you need to run the install.bat from a Visual Studio command prompt for it to work.

Microsoft finally released the next version of their anti spyware utility Windows Defender, formerly Microsoft AntiSpyware. Hope this one will be able to remember allowed programs so I can stop clicking that annoying allow dialog every single time my computer starts up.

Microsoft Defender

Speaking of UI changes in IE7 I stumbled on the “A New Look for IE” post on the IE blog which describes many of the changes made to the UI. Great read for sure.

Here’s snip, “Hello, I’m Max Stevens, and I recently joined the IE team as a Program Manager working on the user experience. In anticipation of our next major pre-release of IE, I’d like to give an overview of some of the great work we’ve done in the UI, especially a lot of the progress we’ve made since Beta 1.”

I went ahead an installed the preview version of Internet Explorer 7 and I got to say that lots of neat stuff has happend to the product. IE 6 was great in its day but was getting a little long in the teeth, especially missing a key feature such as tabs.

Most notably other than the added tabs in IE 7 is the snazzy new interface which is more evolution than revolution although it does improve on the space used by the UI quite a bit. Much more space is dedicated to the actual content window than before and the icons all got a shine looking even more polished than before.

I think IE 7 will be sticking around on my main machine for the time being. Having spent the evening playing around with it I haven’t found any issues thus far. Being nit picky I could cite the performance which is less than staller but wa t do you expect running beta software on a laptop?

Download Internet Explorer 7 if you want to give it a go and be sure to report all that feedback to Microsoft so they may improve on the product even more.

Snippet Compiler is a tool I first learned about in the book From Coder to Developer by Mike Gunderloy. Basically it does what the name implies: Compiles snippets of code which is great for testing and debugging small pieces of code.

While version 1 was useful I didn’t spend a whole lot of time with it simply because there was no intellisense. Today, however, I took Snipper Compiler for a spin again and went to check for a new version on the website. Sure enough version 2 had popped up there and what a joy it is to use: Intellisense was added along with support for .NET Framework 2.0.

I’m sure I’ll be seeing a lot more of Snippet Compiler on my desktop in the future

With the continued development of Omea the product just keeps getting better and better feature-wise, however one of the things which have been bothering me from v 1.0 is performance. Omea simply isn’t a very appealing application to use every day simply because of lacking performance, a shame.

Needless to say I was exited to find a post in the Jetbrains newsgroups with details on how to speed up Omea by making it run on the .NET Framework 2.0.

Here’s the lowdown from Michael Kent Werle:

I have no real data to back this up, but Omea "feels" much faster when I run it under .NET 2.0 by changing Omea Pro.exe.config to:

<configuration>
<startup>
<requiredRuntime version="v2.0.50727" />
</startup>
<system.net>
<settings>
<httpWebRequest useUnsafeHeaderParsing = "true" />
</settings>
</system.net>
</configuration>

(Thanks to Daniel Cazzulino for the tip on how to force Omea to load under .NET 2.0.)

In particular, I noticed this today when installing 2.1.1 -- it felt much slower until I realized that I had to re-do this change.

I was sceptical but it really does seem to have an impact on performance. Startup is faster and the UI is generally more zippy.

Enjoy!

You probably know the new security feature introduces in Outlook 2003 to disallow other programs to access Outlook doing away with some of the most simple worms out there. One problem with the Allow Program Access popup is that it gets quite annoying in the long run when for example syncing calendars and contacts to a mobile device using an external program.

Advanced Outlook Security from MAPIlab to the rescue. It adds a much needed feature which allows you to specify that a program should always be allow access to Outlook. For me iTunes is now always allowed in order to allow me to sync calendars and contacts to my iPod without any action on my part, just as it should be.

Here’s a blurb:

Get rid of annoying security alerts in Microsoft® Outlook®! Advanced Security for Outlook allows you to determine the violator as well as specifying the status for this program for future occasions e.g. allow access, block access or run the default Outlook handler. Future specified actions will be executed automatically and Outlook Security will cease to annoy you with messages concerning attempts to access e-mail addresses you have stored in Outlook.

Definitely a keeper!

Looks like Jetbrains is at it again developing the Omea product. The internal version is now up to build 875 from 671.6 which was the final build for version 2.0. Now if only we could get some info on what’s new in this internal build of theirs  I, for one, certainly hope that performance optimizations will be made as my laptop is strugling to keep the program running at acceptable speeds. I even went so far as to start looking for alternatives even though I paid for the pro version; only problem is that Omea Pro can’t be matched for features at the moment (it’s both good and bad as I’m continually routing for Jetbrains ).

When all connections to a Terminal Services server are blocked, either by idle connections or active, you can always connect to the server by using

mstsc.exe -console

Just remember to only use that particular switch in emergency cases you can’t get at the server any other way, otherwise you’ll just end up blocking that session as well, leaving no way to get to the remote server.

Recently I bought an Apple Airport Express, a marvellous little device enabling me to stream music from iTunes to my stereo. Everything worked well until I enabled my firewall, at this point iTunes could no longer connect to the speakers.

Searching around the internet I found that iTunes uses port 5353 to stream but opening the port in my firewall did nothing to make it work.

Using Active Ports I saw that a couple of connections to remote TCP ports 5000 and 6000 were trying to open to the Airport Express. Opening these remote ports in my firewall turned out to do the trick.

Thought I’d pass the info along as my searches through the Apple forums yielded nothing more than, “just turn off your firewall”

According to Jetbrains’ Chief Scientist and Vice President of Product Development, Valentin Kipiatkov, we can expect to see an EAP version of Resharper 2.0 soon. He states that a probable time of release will be in two weeks time. Resharper 2.0 is of course the version which we’ve all been waiting for; primarily for the added support for Visual Studio 2005 which is also yet to be released.

Valentin Kipiatkov, “My best guess is in 2 weeks.”.

As a quick followup to my last post I’m happy to say that Jetbrains released build 603 of Omea and it seems to fix the problems related to the handling of cookies. I highly recommend this release to everybody 

The new release is actually quite speedy and has undergone some cosmetic changes making it look even cooler. The UI is getting brighter and cheerier than ever.

Other improvements include:

- Fixed major crash bug related to cookie support.
- Mozilla/Firefox plugin for Omea now works on Firefox 1.1 (Deer Park) alpha.
- Improved support for recovering corrupt databases during upgrades to new
table format.
- Fixed a number of crash bugs in wvWare (Microsoft Word document converter).
- UI look improvements.
- Bugfixes and assorted small improvements.

Get it at http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/download/eap.html

Jetbrains came through in a big way on the whole crashing issue with the latest beta version of Omea which crashed for me on startup. Basically I made a post in this space saying that i was switching from Omea for the time being to allow the beta to mature a bit after the latest regression.

Well today I found a comment from Vyacheslav Lukianov one of the developers of Omea giving me the following piece of advice:

“We have discovered the source of the crashes. Next build will contain fix, now you can run Omea if you edit the OmniaMea.ini file in the Omea Database directory. Go to the "[Cookies]" section and set all (actually only two) its settings to the "None" value instead of "Internet Explorer". This will help, but please don't use Internet Explorer cookies until next EAP build.”

I your ini file doesn’t contain the [Cookies] section you can add the keys yourself. Vyacheslav was kind enough to provide me with those as well:

[Cookies]
JetBrains.Omea.Favorites.FavoriteJob=None
JetBrains.Omea.RSSPlugin.RSSUnitOfWork=None

Great service from Jetbrains restoring my faith in the Omea product and once again proving that they are backing their latest product 100%. Also a review of Omea will be up in this space once they release the final version of the product.

I take it back. Sauce Reader will not replace Omea as my temporary RSS reader simply due to the fact of one glaring omission and a bug. Firstly the omission which is a missing sort function of feeds. When importing my OPML file my subscribed feeds are added in a seemingly random order. Great lets just sort them shall we? The answer is no, there is no sorting function in the program. w00t?

Secondly the bug. I like the ability to catch up with feeds by marking everything as read when I’m content that I’ve looked at what I find interesting, also a shortcut to the function is essential for speedy handling of lots of feeds. Sauce Reader does provides both the function and the shortcut but sadly the shortcut does not work.

So Sauce Reader is out and SharpReader is in. I’ve previously reverted to SharpReader when my primary reader went awry and it does the basic RSS reading very well. All I need from it to become my primary reader is a little bit of bells and whistles. Lets face it SharpReader does not sell itself all that well. For me two things are important in a program, 1) It fulfills it place in a correct and fast manner, 2) It makes me want to use it with some nice UI.

There I said it, I’m a UI whore

Looks like Sauce Reader is back as my primary RSS reader after the latest Omea Pro crash. Sauce Reader will remain in place until such a time when a stable release of Tokaj is made. The betas have been pretty solid up until this point with some random lock ups and crashes but the program always kept running. Build 600 sadly crashes right after starting making it completely useless for me. The behavior was observed on two different machines with both Pro and Reader version.

Too bad Omea was really shaping up to be a pretty decent product. It may still be but my trust in the product is weakened.

More to follow.

From what I gather from the Jetbrains newsgroups Omea will have some sort of synchronisation features in future version. This is really something I’m looking forward to. Basically a combination of NewsGator 2.5 beta and Omea would make the perfect RSS aggregator as far as I’m concerned.

Omea’s interface makes the flow of information easy to handle while the new synchronisation features of NewGator makes sure that I don’t have to worry about reading the same items more than once, and I don’t have to think about synchronising my subscriptions between machines. Definitely the way to go.

Here’s the quote Dmitry Jemerov which he wrote to a question regarding adding synchronisation features to Omea:

All I can answer to this is: Stay tuned for further announcements... There is some work planned (and already happening) in that direction, but unfortunately I can't disclose the details yet.

Looking forward to more information on this.

I love it when I’m right  Build 582 of the Omea RSS reader was released yesterday.

Changes include:

- User interface design changes.
- Performance and memory usage improvements.
- Changed the way Outlook send/receive is performed, to improve robustness
and reduce flickering.
- Found words are highlighted in the context strings displayed in the search
result view.
- Added "Save As" action for news articles.
- RSS Subscribe Wizard redesigned, added possibility to subscribe to multiple
feeds from a site in one subscribe operation.
- More correct display of PDF documents when Acrobat 7 is installed.
- Added option to show the contents of subcategories when a category is selected
in the Views and Categories pane.
- Possibility to activate and deactivate tray icon rules.
- Added "Categories" button in the task edit form.
- Added possibility to configure delete confirmation for individual resource
types.
- Bugfixes and minor improvements.

I’ve recently switched to JetBrains Omea Reader and have been using the EAP version almost since day one. While the EAP is pretty stable it has a tendency to crash from time to time as can be expected from a beta product. Now JetBrains has been very good at delivering new and improved versions of the beta but lately they have been pretty quiet.

Looking in my referrer logs I see build numbers of Omea which aren’t public yet, so I can only summize that they (you know, “them”, the aliens and such) visit my site using the latest build without letting the general public in on the action.

Give me the final version yesterday I say!  In case you were wondering JetBrains seems to be up to build 580 internally with 568 being the latest public build. Also new versions are being cranked out almost on a weekly basis.

Maybe they are finalizing the release version and don’t want to spend too much time putting together stable beta? Anyways this, of course, is all speculation at this time.

Even more issues with Google Web Accelerator are turning up. The latest: Users sharing sessions. This alone is reason enough for me to remove the tool. As nice as it is in theory this really unnerves me. I think some months are needed for the tool to mature.

“Google Web Accelerator is currently in beta and automatically stores and updates the content of pages accessed through it. However, ZDNet reports at least one user having problems as he suddenly discovered he was logged in as someone else.”

[Security Fears Over Google Accelerator]

 

As with all things Google you should read the privacy policy before installing. Basically everything viewed over a non-secure connection, i.e. HTTP, will be sent to Google thus raising concerns over privacy.

Google does not require any personal information when you download Google Web Accelerator, although we do collect standard information about your computer, such as the type of browser you use, etc.

When you use Google Web Accelerator, Google servers receive and log your page requests. Page requests and data sent in encrypted form using an HTTPS connection will not go through Google. It is possible that some personally identifiable information could be sent to Google, if the information is sent without using an encrypted (HTTPS) connection.

[HAACKED - Google Web Accelerator - Let Google Watch You Do Everything]

Synop is back with a new version of Sauce Reader. The biggest news is that they’ve dropped the .NET framework in favor of a native approach due to performance considerations. Now it’s commonly known that Sauce Reader was a dog when it came to performance, but blaming on the .NET framework is a little too easy. I know that RSS readers have to deal with large amounts of data coming in but still other .NET based aggregators like SharpReader have been able to cope without too much trouble.

In any case version 2.0 of Sauce Reader sports the same Outlook 2003–like interface and the performance is up to par with some of the fastest reader out there. You should definitely check out the latest version if you need a fast and easy to use RSS reader. This version is definitely going on my parent’s computer first thing

Sauce Reader 2.0 is a complete rewrite and no longer requires the .NET framework. Using .NET for Sauce Reader v1 we were never able to achieve the level of performance we considered appropriate for a heavily used productivity application. .NET is a compelling and powerful platform, but currently unsuitable for widely adopted client side applications.

[Sauce Reader v2.0 (BETA)]

This latest tool from Google adds a little tray icon which will prefetch links on the sites you visit in your IE or Firefox browser promising to provide a better web browsing experience. I’ve actually been wanting a tool like this for some time as clicking through all those next links and waiting for the pages to load is just plain old annoying.

One of my pet peeves is using IT to provide more spare time in a world with increasing demands on our personal time. The Google Web Accelerator application is one such tool and it’ll have a permanent home on my machine if it indeed delivers what it promises.

Update: A link to Google Web Accelerator would be nice, no? :)

From the creators of Coderush comes Refactor! a refactoring tool for every version of Visual Studio .NET. If you haven’t seen this thing in action yet you need to check out Carl Franklin and Mark Miller show off Refactor support in VB 2005 posted by Carl Franklin.

Many of the same cool visual effects found in Coderush are present and best of all the product is free for Visual Basic 2005. Of course I’ve found a friend in Resharper but I may have to give the Coderush / Refactor! a spin in the near future. One thing I was missing from Coderush when I first tried it out is the background compile-like feature found in Resharper. This is the one feature I miss the most when switching from VB to C#.

Also be sure to check out the official Visual Basic 2005 Refactor page on MSDN and the product page at DevExpress for the pro version with C# support.

If you work with Commerce Server you will find the following tools invaluable. These tools were created by Max Akbar, who recently joined our Program Management team, but has been working on Commerce Server for a long time and has a very detailed knowledge of everything Commerce Server. Kudos to Max for sharing these out (for all these years!) with the community.

[Nihit Kaul's WebLog – Cool Tools for Commerce Server]

As a follow-up to my post entitled Jetbrains .NET IDE I’d like to point you in the direction of Sneak Preview of ReSharper IDE which has just been posted on Jetbrains’ web site. This essentially seems to be a reply to my errornous post where a screenshot of the ReSharper IDE was mistaken for a screenshot of ReSharper 2.0.

Great to see Jetbrains on their toes. I’m liking this company more and more for every day which goes by. Their Omea product is helping that along as well. Expect a full review of both Omea Reader and Omea Pro.

Caledonia was kind enough to post a comment containing a link for A Patch which is a small program which modifies MSN Messenger. It basically removes all the annoying gunk which was added to version 7 leaving only the clean Messenger interface we know and love. It actually makes Messenger 7 appear much like Windows Messenger 5, only with the groups still in place and the slick interface intact.

A-Patch

Now here’s something really interesting. Looks like the screenshot I posted earlier is not ReSharper 2.0 but rather a new IDE in itself. Looks like the .NET community is getting a IntelliJ-ish IDE from JetBrains. VS is a great tool but it’s always great to have alternatives, especially if those alternatives force Microsoft to push the envelope on development even more.

NET IDE Forging Begins

Finally, those of you who have yet to hear the good news, we here at JetBrains have begun to hammer out our own .NET IDE, tentatively lacking an official name (we will have one soon, but if you have some suggestions, bring it to our forums!). If you are familiar with our Java IDE IntelliJ IDEA, we are going to be implementing many of the same navigation and usability features from this IDE into our own .NET IDE. Users can look forward to close integrations with VCS systems, industry leading refactoring support, powerful intelligence features, and a whole lot more. However, the final feature list is still under consideration, but you can start pushing for the features you would like to see in the IDE in our USENET group

Once more about the .NET IDE becomes ready for public consumption, I will be sure to pass it along to the rest of the community.

I was looking around the JetBrains newsgroups and found a screenshot of ReSharper 2.0.

Update: As stated in the comments this is in fact not a screenshot of ReSharper 2.0 but rather a whole new IDE being developed by JetBrains. You can read more about it in my post Jetbrains .NET IDE

Looks like MSN Messenger 7 is ready for prime time. Neowin found a download link for the final build of the program. MSN Messenger 7 Build 777 - Final.

According to reliable sources, MSN are preparing to go live with the next version of their widely popular instant messaging client, MSN Messenger.

[MSN Messenger 7 Final Due Tomorrow - Download Now!]

… or at least it will be eventually when they get a release put together. Right now there’s nothing more than a GotDotNet workspace but it sure would be nice to have now that Microsoft has announced the price of the Visual Team System.

NTeam will be an open source alternative to the upcoming Visual Studio Team System(r) and will utilize many existing open source applications such as NUnit, NAnt, and will link with various open source project, issue, and task management applications. NTeam will integrate with both proprietary and open source IDEs and will target small- and mid-sized businesses.

[NTeam: Workspace Home]

For even more information about NTeam please check out their forums where information about the Feature list and road maps is available.

At more than one occasion I’ve heard people from Microsoft state that a smaller version of Team System will be forthcoming which will suit smaller shops better both feature-wise and in terms of pricing. I wonder whether the NTeam team (?) will be able to put together a release before that, and even more importantly be able to match the features of this new version to hopefully come out of Microsoft.

I just received an e.mail from Valentin Kipiatkov who posted the ReSharper 2.0 Plans. He states that while the upgrade for 2.0 is free for existing customers an adjustment of the price is expected for new customers. The new price will probably be $199 so if you’re contemplating buying ReSharper you should buy version 1.5 now and save $100 on version 2.0.

Upgrade to ReSharper 2.0 will be FREE for all customers of ReSharper 1.0 and ReSharper 1.5. The pricing for new customers is not defined yet and it's likely that it will be increased to, say, $199.

Even more information available in the post ReSharper Returns to Intended Price which states that the current price of $99 was temporary all along. The normal price for ReSharper is $149; all the more reason to go out and get ReSharper today. Even though it looks like VS 2005 provide much of the same, I can tell you right now that that isn’t the case. Running VS 2003 with ReSharper feel considerable more powerful than running VS 2005 without ReSharper. It’s that good.

Oh yeah, the $99 offer ends April 5th. Go buy now!

As a happy user of ReSharper 1.0 and general software update junkie I’m eagerly looking forward to the next version of ReSharper.

JetBrains has released a detailed list of new features found in the next release. Now we only need to know whether existing customers can upgrade for free.

Update: David Stennett of JetBrains says the following in the comments, “Yes, current ReSharper 1.X customers will upgrade to ReSharper 2.0 for FREE.”. Free upgrades for everybody, happy days.

Spam Bully could learn a lot from JetBrains if you ask me.

I’ve raved about Reflector many a times, so it’s only natural that I should point you in the direction of Darrell Norton’s post entitled List of Reflector Addins which lists … wait for it … Reflector addins

Among those i see myself using in the near future is Reflector.Diff and Reflector.ClassView.

Update: Looks like the site is hosted on a free service with a monthly bandwidth cap. Luckily tomorrow is a brand new month so be sure to check it out then.

More information about the much needed update to IE.

Will Internet Explorer (IE) 7.0 have tabs? Will it comply with the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) 2.0 standard? Exactly how will it make browsing more secure? Will it ship in 2005?

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 Details Begin to Leak

Like what’s been coming out of MSN lately? There’s an entire page dedicated to new software and sites coming from MSN like Windows AntiSpyware, MSN Messenger 7, Lookout, and much more.

This is the place to play with new MSN technologies, look at prototypes, and peek behind the scenes at some of our new ideas. Let us know what you think about how we can improve MSN for you. Thanks for visiting the Sandbox.

http://sandbox.msn.com/

Also be sure to check out Microsoft’s online RSS reader at http://www.start.com/2/, and their Javascript enabled search page at http://www.start.com/1/.

When thinking about new home projects I’d like to create I often get stuck at the point in the process where I need to think about the interface for the application. More often than not I have a very good idea of where I want to take the app, but not really a clear idea of how I’ll get there.

Interface Design Tips That You May Not Know About may help me get to the actual implementation of the interface for a change

If that head line doesn’t get you off of your chair, nothing will  Graham Glass, John Wiegand, and Erich Gamma offers some useful advice for building good software in a series of posts on Graham Glass, etc.

How to Produce Good Software, Part 1

I've decided to write a series of blog entries about how to produce good software. Over the years, I've had the pleasure of writing a lot of award-winning software, and thought it would be fun to document the way that it was done. I also hope that the lessons learned will be useful to readers of this blog.

The specific areas that I intend to cover include:

• methodology
• tools
• building a team
• release cycles
• testing
• support

How to Produce Good Software, Part 2

In this part, I thought I'd present a little bit of my software writing background to provide some context for future parts.

How to Produce Good Software, Part 3

In this part, before I delve into the production of the software itself, I thought I'd write a little about why we chose to build the particular products that we did.

How to Produce Good Software, Part 4

In this part, I describe the activities that took place in the first few months of development. Things like marketing, pricing, and other such stuff are left out because they're outside the scope of this series.

How to Produce Good Software, Part 5

In this part, I focus on the power of simplicity, which contributed to the widespread awareness of products like Glue

How to Produce Good Software, Part 6

In this part (written during my lunch break while visiting webMethods in Sunnyvale, CA) I focus on how we planned product roadmaps.

Somehow the desktop tools from Google and later MSN just didn’t do it for me. Google Search fell on the horrible web server which inject results on the Google. The basic idea of transparently injecting the results into my normal Google searches appeals to me but it just isn’t that practical in my day to day routine. The outlook of security holes in the web server software makes it an even easier choice to remove it. Also searching everything as administrator gives you access to every other user’s files on the system which can be a plus but I find that I’d like to be able to decide the default behavior.

MSN Search did a lot of things right but again I just didn’t use it all that much. It must be the fact that MSN Search was horrible for a long which kind of branded that impression in my brain and now I can’t seem to shake the feeling. I can’t put my finger on what made me remove it, it just didn’t feel “right”. One thing I do miss from MSN search is the ability to search

Enter Copernic Desktop Search a very overlooked piece of software. Something feels different here. Again I’m unable to put my finger on something specific. Maybe it’s the polished user interface, maybe it’s the fact that if I choose to search files and don’t find anything it tells me that something was found in say e-mail. Maybe it’s because it kind of reminds me of the standard Windows search features which I’ve been using for years. Maybe it’s the preview feature of the search result which will display the contents of Word files for example.

My favorite spam filter for Outlook got bumped to version 3 recently. Of course I was delighted to learn that a new version is out and went to their site to grab the update. Upon installing the new version it told me that my purchased key for version 2 was invalid. Puzzled I browsed to the Spam Bully site and learned that apparently you need to buy a new key for version 3, although at a slightly reduced price.

What’s up with that?!

Been wanting to get your feet wet with Visual Team System? Daunted by the outlook of lacking documentation and buggy pre-beta software?

Fear no more. David Bost has what you need: Installing the December CTP Release of Visual Studio Team System which is an article on MSDN on how you go about installing VSTS on Virtual PC software. I might even give it another chance, though I’ve pretty much resigned to waiting for a proper beta where more stuff works. Sure would have loved to have this article in hand when I first started installing the CTP

From the bright minds of Omar Shanine and Scott Hanselman comes an dasBlog1750162Released.aspx">update to DasBlog which addresses a security bug found, and more importantly adds a URL rewriting feature which generates better permalinks for posts, e.g. the permalink for this post is DasBlogUpdate.aspx. This will ensure better page ranks on Google and make the links easier to remember. Before you turn on the feature (Use Post Title for Permalink) please bear in mind that every post will be assigned a new GUID so your RSS feed will republish previous posts as new ones.

If you are using my updated MetaWeblog API DLL which enables posting of images, you need to redeploy the DLL after you complete the update. It doesn’t look like any changes were made to that particular namespace but I took the time to recompile it anyway, just in case.

I never thought I’d live to see this day but somehow it happened and Deutsche Bahn deployed Linux on 55.000 desktop machines which were running Lotus Notes prior to the Linux roll out. The server side move happened some time ago according to ZDNet.

Linux is great piece of server software but I never imagined that such a large scale deployment on the desktop would succeed due to the issues involved getting users up to speed on the new system. Don’t get me wrong I was hoping that it would happen as we all know competition is good for you and me as consumers. Also a well done IT project is something which warms my heart any day :)

I was very interested in seeing how the Munich project would pan out but unfortunately it was stopped it was terminated due to some patent issues.

Source: Verdens største Linux installation vokser (news story in Danish).

FTPOnline has an article which covers some of the new features to be found in Microsoft Internet Information Services 7 (IIS). Free registration required for page 2 of the article.

Here’s a quote to wet your appetite:

“In a candid interview on the topic, Staples and Colvin discussed the coming changes (also see the sidebar, "Top 6 Features in IIS 7.0" by Eric Deily, who will be talking about IIS 7.0 at VSLive! next week). The most important of these is the componentization of IIS. All of IIS's functions will be specific components that you can turn on or off at your leisure. This means that when you install the Web server, you'll be able to add only the functionality you need, one piece at a time.”

I finally caved and bought BlogJet 1.5. Actually I was pretty happy with SauceReader which I have been plugging heavily in the past but the few annoyances it has finally made me pay for what seems to be a quality piece of software according to what I read on my various subscribed blogs.

The main reason why I chose to replace SauceReader with BlogJet is that I could never count on SauceReader to work. Frequently I would get weird errors with the final straw being a Javascript error. Also the speed of the application is something I’ve mentioned before, although it took a great step forward in that department with version 1.10 but it’s still not what I would call a super responsive app.

The only feature I know I will be missing from SauceReader is the ability to post images to my blog using the Movable Type API which SauceReader supports. Guess I’ll have to do some lobbying to get the BlogJet people to add that particular feature :)

Microsoft just covered another one of the security bases with the acquisition of GIANT's anti spyware solution which is now available for free from the MS website.

I installed it and found it very nice, it even found a couple of spyware programs which Adware had missed. The one feature to rule them all is the background protection feature which is kind of like a firewall for spyware. This piece of software is going on my parent's computer ASAP :)

Download Microsoft Windows Antispyware.

A few months back I bought myself a laptop computer from Zepto as my son has taken over the office with no place for me to put a desktop machine. When I got the little beauty (the laptop of course :)) I of course went out and tried to install the newest Catalyst drivers for the onboard Radeon 9700 Mobility only to find out that this is not possible and that I should wait for the manufacturer of the laptop to release the driver themselves. Of course this never happend so I went searching for a way to get the drivers onto my computer another way.

The solution is made surprisingly simple by patje of Driverheaven.net who created a tool for modding existing Catalyst driver packages so they will install on the Mobility line of graphics adapters. The magic happens by modifying the inf files in the driver package adding some information about the Mobility adapters and while this is possible to do by hand you wouldn't want to do that, trust me :)

A new version of Patje's Mobility Modding is available supporting the latest Catalyst 4.12 release from Ati.

Supported adapters are:

• Mobility Radeon 9600
• Mobility Radeon 9700
• Mobility Radeon 9800
• Mobility Fire GL 9000
• Mobility Radeon 9000
• Mobility Radeon 9200
• Radeon Mobility
• Radeon Mobility 7500
• Radeon Mobility 7800 GL
• IGP 340M /345M
• IGP 320M
• ATI MOBILITY FIRE GL T2

It seems that the latest version of Maxthon has had some updates done to the built-in search bar. I've taken the plunge and started using it instead. The one thing I was missing from the built-in search bar before this version was the keyword which are put on the Google bar automatically whenever I perform a search making it easy to find the words in a particular page. Maxthon now has this capability as well so there is really no reason for me to keep using the Google bar which sends all kinds of information back to Google, no need for the entire world to know my preferences in pr0n :)

Another great feature of the built-in toolbar relates to my last post about shortcuts in Maxthon, specifically to the CTTL + SHIFT + F shortcut which takes you to the search field, I've been missing this in the Google bar.

Also be aware that you can add your own search engines to the built-in search making it easy to access just about any search engine on the net, just as long as they support passing the query in the URL.

You may also be interested in knowing that there is an option for search an entire list of search engines all at once, something which has been available for some time in stand-alone search programs.

I'm a keyboard junkie and always need to know what the keyboard shortcuts in a particular program are. There's a sticky in the Maxthon forum where all the shortcuts are listed. Thought I'd post it here for easy reference.

Maxthon Keyboard Shortcuts.

Want to know more about what the new Commerce Server will offer? I sure did so I went straight to the source after reading the Commerce Server 2006 Overview post on Bink.nu. You can read the full overview at Microsoft.

For those of you still using Windows Messenger there's a new version available from Microsoft. Be aware that it is only available in English at this time.

New stuff includes:

Windows Messenger 5.1 has been updated with changes in the following areas:

• Improvements in file transfer functionality for users with multiple network connections (such as configurations involving both wired and wireless network connections or users of VPN connections).
• Improvements in Tablet PC and laptop support. Specifically, this includes improved support for ink as well as improved performance when using power saving features in portable computers such as standby or hibernation.
• Improvements to presence integration with applications, including better presence integration when applications are in full-screen mode (to avoid unwelcome IM interruptions) and also quicker refresh of presence information in applications such as Microsoft Outlook or Windows SharePoint services.
• Improvements to the sign-in process, enabling a quicker sign in.

For customers using Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005, Windows Messenger 5.1 is the required client to take advantage of the following new features in Live Communications Server 2005:

• Federation (sharing IM and presence between two or more organizations)
• Advanced architecture (higher availability and failover support)

Download Windows Messenger 5.1 from Microsoft

Want to know more about what the new Commerce Server will offer? I sure did so I went straight to the source after reading the Commerce Server 2006 Overview post on Bink.nu. You can read the full overview at Microsoft.

If you're a regular reader of my blog you know that I've been playing around with Team System lately, trying to get the server side of things working. If you're considering do the same you need to check out the Ten things to know before starting VSTS Foundation Server Installation on Saravana's Blog which contains some details about the installation I would like to have known before setting out.

There is a new build of MSN Messenger 7 available, build 0425. You can download it directly from Microsoft so I guess it's OK to post about it :) I have installed and verified the link below. I spotted one new feature which enables you to hand write messages to your friends, pretty though most useful for people owning a Tablet PC or a digitizer.

Get it while you can.

I posted about the Azureus Bittorrent client a while back and while I was fond of it back then I'm positively in love now :) The client has seen lots and lots of development hours put into it over the last months and really you won't find anything better out there.

But that's not really what I wanted to write about, what is interesting this time around is a new plugin for Azureus: The RSS Import plugin. Basically you install this plugin and specify some keywords for a RSS feed containing enclosures with .torrent files. Azureus will now happily download anything in the RSS feed which fits the specified keywords.

An example would be a feed containing TV shows where you could have any TV show you find interesting downloaded automatically to your computer.

It's kind of like a TIVO but free :)

Firefox is done. You should upgrade if you are using this browser. I did some trials last week because of the Maxthon/Google Toolbar issue and found that while Firefox is a very nice browser the plugins leave at lot to be desired. They include conflicting functionality and have bugs.

Maxthon just works the way I like it and it stays for the time being my browser of choice.

Check out the Firefox release notes while you wait for the download to complete.

Recently my copy of Maxthon stopped working with the Google Toolbar. Part of the reason of chose to go with Maxthon (MyIE2 back then) was the Google Toolbar compatibility so naturally I was a bit perplexed when the toolbar suddenly stopped working. I did the obvious reinstall of the browser thinking I might have messed something up, sadly to no avail.

Later a search in the Maxthon forum showed that an incompatibility exists between Maxthon and the latest Google Toolbar. Luckily this can easily be remedied by installing an older version of the toolbar. Not the prettiest solution but hey it works.

One of the things which have kept me from posting is the fact that writing a post isn't very easy ... or rather it's pretty easy but I have lost posts in the past due to the fact that I was writing them in the browser interface for dasBlog, a less than ideal solution for my post writing pattern which basically is multiple iterations over the same post until I think it is in shape for the blog.

As you may know I'm a freak for new tools to try out. Various FTP clients, web browsers, notepad replacements, and so forth have been put through the paces to find the piece of software which fits my usage behavior perfectly. Actually one of the reasons for me starting this blog was to share what I learned through these periods of trial of different pieces of software.

I went through a similar thing with blogging software never finding a piece of software which made it perfect for me to write posts off line. My demands for a posting tool include:

• Easy posting to the blog.
• Support for dasBlog and specifically dasBlog categories.
• Save drafts of posts.
• Add pictures to the post without the need for a FTP account in order to upload the picture to the server.
• Easy formatting of the text.
• Full control over the formatting of the text.
• HTML formatting of .NET code.
• Nice clean interface.
• Free. I'm cheap :)

I thought that was quite a modest list but as it turns out nothing is ever as easy as you might think. I went through all kinds of clients never finding the one fitting my needs. Some posts in this include BlogJet, W.Bloggar the Posting Tool - NOT, Post From NewsGator, and Test From Outlook. While BlogJet came close to being my number one choice for posting it had some quirks which caused it to crash in earlier versions, the formatting of text wasn't exactly easy, and it was unable to HTML format .NET code.

The dasBlog plugin for NewsGator made life easy but it was just cumbersome to use and it didn't support categories in a nice way; you had to know the categories and type them in a comma separated style in Outlook, a nice way to get all kinds of spellings of your categories I think :)

W.Bloggar just sucked. Not so much to say about that.

None of the tools made for easy posting of pictures, they all require some kinds of FTP account which isn't an option.

I finally gave up and figured that I would pay for BlogJet at some point and be done with it. I never got around to it and before long I had started a never trial on RSS Readers. While I am fond of NewsGator and particularly of the online features which allows you to sync subscriptions and read posts between machines I wanted to know whether someone out there was doing something new. During my trial I found something unexpected: The posting tool which I was searching for earlier and a nice looking RSS reader all in one, its name? Sauce Reader. While it's slow as a dog even in the latest version it features a great blog posting tool which basically supports all my mentioned requirements except for one: HTML formatting of code. That however is easily taken care of with the handy Copy as HTML extension for Visual Studio which I talked about in a previous post. Sauce Reader sports a nice Outlook 2003-like interface which I like. The only caveat with this program is that it's slow. Not that it really matters if you choose to use it just for posting like I do.

Oh yes Sauce Reader also supports editing and deleting from the server which I guess is kind of a given but still nice features to have.

Need to show source code to other people in a nicely formatted way? The answer may be this extension for Visual Studio .NET which copies your code to the clipboard as HTML.

I am finally done with Doom3 and while the experience was above most games I had expected more. Sure the game managed an eerie setting and did get me jumping in my seat from time to time but having monsters materialize in front of you gets pretty old, more so when the same recipe is used over and over with one monster materializing in front of you and one behind you.

I got to admit that the hell level were pretty cool mostly due to the structure of the levels changing on the fly, very cool stuff. Doom3 was basiclly a pretty technology demo in my opinion and as such did a great job of showcasing the talent at id software.

I can't wait to see what other developers can do with the technology from id software, I enjoyed Call of Duty very much which as far as I recall was built on the Quake3 engine.

One question lingers on my mind: Will Doom3 have the same lasting effect as previous id games? I don't believe so most of the appeal of the previous games lie with the multiplayer and Doom3 simply doesn't have much to offer in this aspect. The maps are cramped and the areas dark, not elemets with make up a great multiplayer game. Sure Splinter Cell 2 works off of this principle but the game offers so much more in the way of team work, yet another area where I think Doom3 is lacking.

I see Doom3 as the first in a long series of first person horror games where the mood and ambience is what will drive the game. Doom3 had some great scenes but needed more in my opinion. Lets see what future games like FEAR and of course the ever looming Half Life 2 will bring to table.

I picked this up from Eric Gunnerson's blog where he writes about enabling ClearType on a desktop machine, it's not on by default which is a shame. I love ClearType so of course I have already tried this but it didn't look very good, probably due to the fact that my machine here at work is running a crappy onboard Intel graphics adapter.

What Eric did was point to a web page which takes you through a couple of steps and actually tunes your ClearType settings. Having done this ClearType looks absolutely beautiful on my machine.

You may want to check out the ClearType Tuner if you have trouble with the default ClearType settings of Windows XP. I know I will want to keep this bookmark around for sure.

Reading Robert Scoble's blog pointed me in the direction of a great piece of software: FavoriteSync. It basically stores your favorites on a server somewhere and keeps them synchronized across every machine you have FavoriteSync installed. I have actually started using favorites more because of because I can add a favorite anywhere and have it available at all the machines I use.

When I saw that someone had figured out how to mount Gmail as a drive on a Linux box I immediately thought that this is something I want for Windows, as it turns out now I can have Gmail mounted as a drive in Windows too. Incredible! :)

An obvious use for this is for backup of digital images as they rarely it the 10 mb limit imposed by Gmail. These are great times for sure :)

If you know the name NewsGator you know that it is in no way associated with spyware, however new users does not know this and Greg Reinacker is wondering whether this is hurting sales which made him wonder about a new name for the product. I think that a name change is in order seeing that the name is directly associated with the company which created the first ever spyware, not a great association. If that isn't convincing enough just take a look at what Gater Corp. did, they actually changed their name to something else to start over, if that isn't damning evidence I don't know what is :)

Take a look at the Greg's post and the discussion, brand recognition is always a fascinating topic. The idea of taking something without meaning and actually adding value to it is a mind boggling concept, just take the word 'Nike' which I am sure everybody agrees is a valuable trademark, weird to think that is comes from nothing...

Firefox version 1.0 was prereleased. Of course I swear by Maxthon which is more IE like than the Mozilla browser but I still like to keep up to date on Firefox as it is looking more promising with every release.

A while back I decided not to post about new releases of the Maxthon browser seeing that it has a notification feature which tells you exact that information so really all I was doing was plugging the best browser out there. While that is OK it gets really old after a couple of posts :)

Now the real reason for this post is that Maxthon is gaining better support for Windows XP Service Pack 2 which you should install right away if you haven't already done so. You can see a complete change list below:

v1.0.0250
+ Support for WinXP SP2 Popup Control and ActiveX Control.
+ In-place toolbar for flash files, pictures and some media files. (Download from Here)
+ Ability to choose more network interface by clicking on network display area of status bar.
+ Unicode encoding to menu.
+ New "Add to favorite" and "Organize favorite" dialog.
+ Ad replacement setting in Adhunter option.
+ 'Allow popup' on popup information bar.
* Fixed favorite sort problem on system systems.
* Fixed iframe resize would cause main window to resize problem.
* Maximize All works.
* Fixed skin installation problem.
* Fixed some other bugs.

It seems that I am on a Team System roll here :) Next up is an article about the unit testing features of the product including code coverage and unit testing of web pages. Great stuff.

Yesterday I made a post about an article of an overview of Team System in which I mentioned a comment someone made about Team System being the difference between walking and riding your bicycle but I couldn't for the life of me figure out where I read it. Well Rob Caron was nice enough to both link to me and remind me that it was Jon Box who made the most excellent description about what Team System will mean to the development community.

I stumbled on a comment regarding Microsoft Team System where the person compared TS with the difference between walking and riding a bicycle and frankly I couldn't agree more. It seems to me that a lot of developers out there are missing what TS promises to bring to the development process; this is especially true for small shops where the individual developer is mostly in charge of doing his or her own testing. Of course TS is so much more than testing, in fact I initially wanted to make this post to point you in the direction of an article on MSDN which gives you the bird's eye on what TS brings to the table.

A while back I made a post about the technical beta of Windows Media Player 10 and now the final version is out... apparently. I have been unable to find an actual download link, the Media Player pages did have nice buttons for the version 10 download but they actually linked to version 9, great stuff.

I finally found a direct download link for version 10 which I thought I would put out there for people having the same difficulties as me getting the new version.

Windows Media Player 10 in all its glory.

Are you using source control in your every day coding or are you just lost on the subject. Everybody should use source control and now there is no reason not to with Eric Sink starting a series on Source Control.

I personally can't wait for Visual Team System 2005 to get released so we get all the spiffy new testing features but more importantly we can put Visual Source Control 6 in the grave which should have been done a looong time ago :)

Now for something more technical than swimming with babies :) I recently got a new cell phone, a Sony Ericsson T630, with Bluetooth and a colleague of mine pointed me in the direction of float's Mobile Agent which is an application which lets you do all kinds of cool stuff with the Bluetooth connection offered by my particular phone; I have no idea whether this program works with other phones, sorry.

I thought the T630 was sexy before I got around to playing around with its Bluetooth connection but man is it cool when you have something like float's Mobile Agent. Cool stuff I have tried with the software thus far:

• Trivial stuff like synchronizing phone book, calendar and reminders with Outlook. Also you can edit entries on the phone and you can manipulate files too.
• Really cool stuff like sending and receiving text messages on my laptop. The program will actually pop up a window containing the text from the received message and let you write a reply on the computer and send it from there. You won't need to touch the phone at all.
• Making and taking calls from the computer. I have not yet played around with this feature but I am guessing that this is like having a headset attached to the phone so you are just able to pickup the phone, not take the actual call directly on the computer.
• Now that is what you can do on the computer but the fun doesn't end there. You can do all kinds of stuff with your computer from the phone like controlling applications like iTunes and Windows Media Player, you can launch the application from the phone and start playing music from there, it provides the basic next, previous and stop functionality.
• Proximity features are another cool idea where the program take certain actions if the phone moves out of range like starting the screen saver and locking the computer. You can make turn the volume up or down too. This is an area where a lot of nice features are possible and I can't wait to see what he comes up with in this department.

The application is stolid at this point and I can't urge you enough to download this baby and give it a spin. I am loving every little feature is has to offer! :)

Everybody have been raving about how SP2 for Windows XP was RTM'd. I figurered I would wait until the time an actual download would be available. This is that time and you should go download service pack 2 right away and get ahead of the virus programmers :)

Be advised that the security enhancements provided by SP2 do break stuff in some apps so if you are running some exotic piece of software you need to check whether SP2 breaks your particular app.

Download SP2 from Microsoft.

I use this tool all the time so it is great to have a new version to play. This version adds support for testing categories also a new overload for Assert.AreEqual was added which makes it easy to compare arrays. Believe it or not you had to do it the hard way by comparing all the elements of an array by hand in the previous version.

For a complete list of changes take a look at the changelog. You can download it from  Sourceforge.

dalager wanted a way to toggle between code and design in Visual Studio using a single key. I found him an answer and thought I should post it here too in case someone else was in need of this.

This post on the Powertoys blog outlines a macro which you can use for that very purpose.

Following the trend from yesterday's post I decided to pimp another cool extension for Visual Studio .NET 2003: Quickjump .NET which enables you to quickly jump to a method, property, any member of your class essentially by choose that member from a filterable list.

Really nice if you have a class which contains loads of methods and properties like on the project I am working on currently.

This one even comes with full source if you want to get started with writing your own extensions.

I just discovered this post from Gaston Milano regarding a plugin he has created for VS 2003 which includes some of the new commands found in VS 2005. They are all context commands and, to my mind, very useful:

File Tab

• "Close All But This"
• "Show File In Explorer"

Project Node in Solution Explorer

• Collapse All Projects
• Open Project Folder
• Visual Studio Command Prompt Here

Download the package. You will need to install the Microsoft Interop Assemblies also.

I have been having trouble streaming Channel9 videos they simply chopped their way through the entire thing making it an unbearable experience, software to the rescue! Net Transport ( the site is currently down ) which is a free download manager has a neat little feature which lets you download a Windows Media stream entirely before watching it.

Needless to say I am not uninstalling this baby in the near future :)

Bringing us up to version 1.0.0178. Download now.

Improvements are mainly bug fixes and performance related.

JetBrains finally finished ReSharper which is a tool I have talked a lot about on this blog because it is so damn cool :) Luckily the final price is a lot lower than CodeRush ( $100 vs. $250 for CodeRush) which provides similar functionality in Visual Studio.

Only thing keeping me from buying this thing right now is that I know that Visual Studio 2005 will provide a lot of this functionality for free when it gets released next year. Gimme now! :)

A new version of MyIE2, excuse me Maxthon, has been released  bringing us up to version 1.0.0168. With this release the browser was renamed to Maxthon and moved to a new domain.

New stuff:
+ Tip of the day dialog.
+ Unicode Support.
+ Remove mode and modeless dialog option in ADHunter option panel.
+ Remove pop-under ADs option in ADHunter option panel.
+ Remove Floating ADs option in AdHunter option panel.
* Setup center and options are combined.
+ skin.ini [SIDEBAR_STYLE] HOT_BUTTON_IMAGE to specify the hot button image of side bar.
* For context menu for menu items, holding control key will keep the menu after select a command.
+ Hold ALT key before download begins will toggle using download manager.
+ Hold ALT key before open a tab will toggle from open in forground and background.
* Rebuild Tray icon after Explorer crash.
+ Reload missing pictures option at Advanced option panel.
* Zoom factor is kept after page refreshing.
* Global Zoom option added to General option panel.
* Config file changed to xml.
+ Zip library.
+ Popups options page.
+ Popup block toolbar at sized popup window.
+ Popup blocked inform toolbar.
+ Redesigned history side bar.
+ Redesigned favorite side bar.

Download Maxthon.

Ever looked at OS X from Apple and gone, "w0000, 1337 dud3"? :) Apparently now you can get the Mac experience right on your very own Windows XP machine.

The Mac OSX on Windows XP post on the Furrygoat (I know :) ) details how you would go about getting it all to run. I have yet to try it myself but rest assured that I will give this whirl sometime soon and report back my findings. I think this will be very cool for testing that Java script on the Mac :)

You still need proof of the thing running? Mike Hall has exactly that in this post here.

Scott Hanselman is always good for some great tips. In this post he talks about using NDoc for generating documentation from the XML comments we make in C#; God I can't wait till we get those in VB.NET 2.0.

Great post with some great info. You definitely don't want to miss this one.

Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2005 is available (and has been for a few days, have no idea how I managed to miss this). You may download it from Microsoft if you have a Passport account.

Also free versions of Visual Studio 2005 has been announced, the Express versions. They are available in beta 1 also. One of these versions stands out in my mind: SQL Server 2005 Express. In case you were wondering what the difference between SQL Server Express and the full-fledged version I got this from the product page:

SQL Server Express is designed to meet the needs of simple applications. Therefore, it is limited to using a single CPU and up to 1GB RAM, with a 4GB maximum database size. SQL Server Express does not include any of the advanced components of SQL Server including Analysis Services, Reporting Services, Data Transformation Services, and Notification Services.

Not too shabby considering that MSDE was the only free alternative a week ago :) There are Express versions of:

• Visual Basic
• Visual C#
• Visual C++
• Visual J#
• Visual Web Dev
• SQL Server

Just spotted this post by Scott Hanselman about the iTunes Album Art Importer which automatically searches Amazon.com for album art for music in iTunes. The application is written using the .NET Framework 1.1 so that is required for it to run.

I had been wanting to write something like this using the iTunes API but I never got around to it. Great to find that the program was made for me :)

Download iTunes Album Art Importer.

I have been searching for a cool Bittorrent client for a while and first went with TorrentStorm but it didn't quite do it for me, it not being able to download faster than 100 KB/s and clogging my Internet connection to the point where I could do little else than have TorrentStorm running. Not a great experience at all.

Yesterday I decided to look at another client called Azureus. Weird name aside it's a great client and I have been able to sustain very high download speed as well as being able to actually use my connection for other stuff. Very cool. I have not seen that many cool Java applications but this one really stands out so I figured I would mention it here.

My main reason for staying away from Java applications has been that their interface is usually sluggish and horrible to look at. Azureus really shines in the UI department as well and fits right into the Windows world.

A few weeks ago I learned abount Reflector by Lutz Roeder which is a tool for browsing assemblies - having downloaded and used it I can't for the life of me think of how I was getting by before :) This got me thinking that there must be a whole bunch of cool stuff out there just waiting to be found whihc is when I found ReSharper a tool which I have ranted about on more than one occasion :)

The reason for this post is that I just found a very nice article on MSDN named "Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now". This is really what I was looking for back when I found ReSharper so I thought I would share it. Sadly ReSharper isn't on the list but it is still something you should take a look at. Oh yeah - I found the article via MSDN Just Released RSS feed. Nice feed, subscribe now!

Hot on the heels of yesterday's release a new version of ReSharper has been made available. Grab build 86 right now.

Being an iPod owner naturally I get excited when Apple releases a new version of iTunes. Even for people who do not own an iPod iTunes is a great music player. You can get the latest version from Apple.

Version 4.6 adds support for a cool piece of hardware called the Airport Express which is a device which allows you to stream music to your stereo wirelessly none the less :)

Read more about the Airport Express at Macworld.

Update: Caledonia pointed out the iTunes COM SDK which you can use for interfacing with iTunes programmatically. This blog being partly a development blog I thought that I'd add the link here :)

A new version of ReSharper has been released. Check it out. In case you are wondering what ReSharper is I have written a little something about it previously.

I have previously mentioned CodeRush here which is an add-in for Visual Studio .NET which adds many of the things we will see in Visual Studio 2005. At $250 a license it is pretty hard to justify when the feature will be available for free in a years time.

While I was tinkering with CodeRush I stumbled across another tool named ReSharper which does the same thing - adds all the IDE sweetness which is found in the VB.NET IDE. ReSharper is still in development and the first release I tried was horribly slow. Today I got an e-mail stating that a new release is available. Not being impressed with the first release I figured I'd give it a whirl just for kicks.

Lo and behold the new version of ReSharper is actually a big improve over build 83 (the first one I tried out). Build 84 addresses the performance issues and also some of the configuration issues. I highly recommend that you try out the new version. Beware though the add-in is still in development and as such can be the subject of changes, breaking stuff, and all that. Consider yourself warned :) Also you should be aware that the performance of previous version decreased as the project size got bigger. I have not yet had a chance to see if this issue is addressed in the new version. If you do try out this build please let me know what you find.

Download latest build of ReSharper (build 84)

I must be a nutter :) I just love getting a new beta release to try out. Here is the first Windows Media Player 10 beta.

Update: Windows Media Player 10 final has been released.

Some time ago Scott Hanselman reported a bug in dasBlog which involved the cache getting corrupted. A hotfix has been released which you should download right away. I have installed this update and as you can see the blog is still running without a hitch :)

Version 0.9.27.68 has seen the light of day. Download it.

Like everybody else I get my (more than) fair share of spam ... and for the record those "50% added size to your penis"-spam mails doesn't produce ANY results ... or so I've heard :)

Anyways I have been trying out a couple of Bayesian filters which I was pretty impressed with seeing that I had only used black-/white list filters in the past.

I only have three things I look for in a spam filter: 1) It needs to support Outlook, 2) It needs to be unobtrusive, and finally 3) it needs to get those pesky spam messages (sort of a given :)).

Here are the filters I have been looking at SpamBayes, Spamfighter, and Spam Bully. The list is by no means complete but I simply stop looking when I find a product which fits the bill.

SpamBayes is free which is always a big plus in my book. It's pretty unobtrusive and does a good (not great) job of filtering incoming e-mail. It does not work that well with Hotmail integration in Outlook. It provides no automatic removal of spam from a Hotmail account. I found a small bug in the software which renders it unuseable if you have your mouse set up for left hand - pretty weird :) It actually fell on this bug as I do all my mousing with left hand when at work because I want to conserve my wrist which has begun acting up.

Spamfighter has a free version out there also which is crippled. I chose to try out Spamfigther for one reason only: It was made by the guys behind a well known dot com business here in Denmark named Jubii.dk. I figurered that they would be able to put together a niece piece of software - man was I wrong :) It does a poor job of filtering the spam, it does not work well with Hotmail (like Spambayes), and the interface is very much in your face. You need 7 (seven!) clicks in order to filter a folder (like Hotmail) which is just bad from a user experience point of view. SpamBayes provides the same functionality with just one click. Lastly when you uninstall Spamfighter it messes up your existing add-ins for Outlook which is just a great way of closing a test of a piece of software don't you think? :)

Finally the test winner or whatever: Spam Bully. I have found my new spam filter - I actually liked this filter so much that I bought it before my trial expired. Spambully does a great job of filtering spam. I have not seen any spam in my inbox since I installed and trained the filter and have only had a couple of false positives. The interface is very configurable and very user friendly.
There are all kinds of neat features - I especially like the Punish feature which goes out to the spammers website and pulls some traffic there which the spammer has to pay for. Always great to hit the spammer where it hurts the most :)
The Hotmail support is great. Spam Bully will automatically keep your Hotmail folder clear of spam. I've always said that the best test of a spam filter is Hotmail where I get tons of spam - lo and behold, no spam enters my inbox anymore. INCREDIBLE! This feature works for Exchange as well, Spam Bully will check a number of folders of your choice and clean them when Outlook starts.
The only downside of this filter is that it isn't free but it does come with a very fair price tag if you ask me. $ 29.95 is very fair for a piece of software which you use every single day.

Go download your trial yesterday! You will not regret it :)

My adventure into the blogging world started with setting up dasBlog as my personal blog and learning how to use the templates.

Now I have reached the point where I am experimenting with blogging tools which allows me to write posts from a more userfriendly environment than the browser, although I must say that the use of the Office 2003 components as editor eases the process a lot. Being a developer I really want an easy way to format a piece of code. This is no easy task using the Office editor so I figured why not try one of these blogs editors.

Having played with W.Bloggar a bit I ruled it out. It doesn't support dasBlog properly, so categories and headline (?!) aren't sent correctly. It boggles my mind that the head lines aren't sent to the blog but hey it may just be me missing something :)

Off to search for some other tool. I am looking into using OneNote 2003 as a posting tool via e-mail posting to dasBlog. Stay tuned ...

Chris Pratley who runs the Office team at Microsoft has put together a really well written post about how Word (and Office) came to be, and how the suite came to rule the planet as the most widely used Office suite.

Like always he does a great job with pulling you in so that you really understand where he is coming from.

I highly recommend his blog - there's lots and lots of info about OneNote in particular and the effort of making and maintaining it.

If you are at all interested in software development I recommend that you read all his posts as they all contain nuggets of useful info, particularly I enjoyed this one about pitfalls in development.

A new version of my favorite IM client has seen the light: MSN Messenger 6.2. Which apparently is a minor update with some small tweaks and a new toolbar for the browser. Now what is up with bundling toolbars with the IM client? IMO these things aren't related at all but on the other hand this is what MS does.

I wonder how long it will be before EU fines MS and makes them take out the IE bar :)

Anyway, you can get this new version at Messenger site and you can also read all about what is new in this version. For you lazy people who just want the goods right away here is a direct download link.