Software/tools Archives - Page 3 of 7

Finds of the Week – June 9, 2008

June 9, 2008
Chinh Do
Dotnet/.NET - C#, Programming, Software/tools
1 Comment

.NET/C#

Microsoft project code named “Velocity” is a distributed in-memory caching platform that provides .NET applications with high-speed access, scaling, and high availability to application data. Download the Community Preview here.
Danny Simmons enumerated various reasons for using Entity Framework.
If your netMsmq WCF service shows signs of a handles leak, you may want to make sure you have .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1 installed.
Bryan wrote a timely article on TDD Tips: Test Naming Conventions & Guidelines.
Microsoft announced the release of Microsoft Source Analysis for C#.
“Source Analysis is similar in many ways to Microsoft Code Analysis (specifically FxCop), but there are some important distinctions. FxCop performs its analysis on compiled binaries, while Source Analysis analyzes the source code directly. For this reason, Code Analysis focuses more on the design of the code, while Source Analysis focuses on layout, readability and documentation. Most of that information is stripped away during the compilation process, and thus cannot be analyzed by FxCop.”

General Programming

Warn the User when Caps Lock is On in web apps. By Scott Mitchell.
Denis Gobo put together a very good and extensive list of SQL Server Programming Hacks. Many of the tips are not really “hacks” but still good to know nonetheless.
Not sure how useful this is with most networks blocking everything these days, but it’s cool anyway: you can now access the Sysinternals tools on a fileshare directly at \\live.sysinternals.com\tools.
Damien Guard released a new version of his Envy Code R monospaced font designed for programmers.

Tools

The Query command line utility displays active Terminal Service/Remote Desktop sessions, among other things. This replaces the qwinsta utility.

Something Different

10 Amazing Chemical Reactions.

Finds of the Week – May 31, 2008

June 1, 2008
Chinh Do
Dotnet/.NET - C#, Gadgets, Programming, Software/tools, Technology, Tips
1 Comment

Programming

Borland Turbo Pascal was my favorite language in my early days of hobby programming. I feel a little sad to hear that Borland recently sold their CodeGear division to Embarcadero.
Day-to-day with Subversion is a good and detailed write-up on procedures most developers need to perform daily. By Bil Simser.

.NET/C#

The evil sou file – fighting and winning with Visual Studio. By Brian Noyes.
Joshua Flanagan had an interesting idea on a Readable Regular Expressions framework.
Derik Whittaker posted a tip on how to share config files between projects.
Jon Galloway: //TODONT: Use a Windows Service just to run a scheduled process.
You can throw away your own TitleCase method now. Because there’s one in the framework. Via ASP.NET FAQ.
Operator~ and BinarySearch. By Shahar Y.
Steven Harman detailed a hack to get Visual Studio to use more than 2GB of RAM.
Frank-Leonardo Quednau: Lazy instantiation one-liner of instance fields with the coalesce operator.

Software and Tools

Google Maps Street View is in Richmond.
Goo
It looks like the Street View images were taken around September 2007 because according to IMDB, the movie Game Plan was playing in the US starting 9/23/2007:
Google Maps adds user-created photos, videos, maps. Via CNET.
Goog

Something Different

Top 50 soccer goals (video).

Finds of the Week – March 30, 2008

March 31, 2008
Chinh Do
Dotnet/.NET - C#, PowerShell, Programming, Software/tools
2 Comments

Programming

Lighten up, you’re having fun. Says Kyle Baley.
Sergio Pereira shares tips on how to get more work done: Automation FTW.
Green tests != proven code. By Derik Whittaker.
"k" explains deadlocking with The Parable of the Bathroom.

.NET/C#

ASP.NET MVC Source Code Now Available. By Scott Guthrie.
Patrick Smacchia: I want non-nullable types in C#4.
Why Convert.ToInt32 Might be dangerous. DevMuse.
FormatWith 2.0 – String formatting with named variables. By James Newton.
How to: Optimize the memory usage with strings. Dot Net Facts.
Dan Rigsby demonstrates a technique to grayout an image in .Net.
Discover Mighty Instance Management Techniques For Developing WCF Apps. By Juval Lowy.
Good introduction to ASP.NET MVC from Chris Tavares: Building Web Apps without Web Forms.

PowerShell

PowerShell 2.0 has script debugging! Bart de Smet has more on his article: Windows PowerShell 2.0 Feature Focus – Script Debugging.

Installing Windows Vista without CD/DVD Drive

Just in case anyone else needs to do this out there…

I recently got myself a nice ThinkPad X60 Tablet PC. It doesn’t come with a DVD-Drive and although I have an external DVD drive, I just can’t seem to find its power adapter. Argg!

In order to do this, you must have the following:

Windows XP installed on the PC you want to install Vista to.

Procedure

Log in into Windows XP on the PC you want to install Vista to.
Use Partition Magic or another partitioning tool and create a second partition for Vista. Make it a Primary Partition (don’t know if this is required but this is what I did). Format the second partition with NTFS. Your Windows XP installation will be left alone and you will be able to dual boot to it.
Create a folder (let’s called it "c:\VistaInstall") and copy all files from the Vista DVD / ISO there (either extract the files from an ISO image using a Virtual CD/DVD emulator like Daemon Tools, or copy the files from another PC with a DVD drive over the network).
Run Setup.exe from c:\VistaInstall.
Choose Custom Install and follow the prompts to select the second partition you created.
Follow the rest of the on-screen instructions.

As part of the installation, Vista Setup will copy the installation files to the new partition. After it reboots, it’ll have all the files there to continue.

After you are done with the install, you can delete the temporary folder c:\VistaInstall that you created.

Finds of the Week, March 9, 2008

March 10, 2008
Chinh Do
Dotnet/.NET - C#, Programming, Software/tools, Technology
3 Comments

Programming

6 Ways to Increase Your Confidence As You Code. By Ben Watson.
Hugo Vidal Teiseira gives Ten UI Lessons from the Real World. With pictures.
Koen Witters writes about something basic to all computer games: The Game Loop.
Microsoft Excel: Revolutionary 3D Game Engine? by Peter Rakos.
The Diminishing Return on Code Uniformity. by Max Pool ({codesqueeze}).
9 Practical Ways to Enhance your Web Development Using the Firefox Web Developer Extension. by Jacob Gube.
Rick Strahl writes about improvements in IE8 script debugging features: Sensible Debugging in IE 8.

C#/.NET

Turn any class into a Singleton with the Singleton Factory. Via cognitive Coding. Nice!
Read it for the comments: Are .NET Developers the American Tourists of the Software Industry? Also check out the Reddit comments. Article by Russell Ball.

Software and Tools

Daniel Spiewak talks about the "Wow" Factor in Firefox 3.0.
Mini Review of Internet Explorer 8 by Joe Walker.

Something a Little Different

Machines ‘to match man by 2029’