illdata.com

Here is a great page to bookmark…

http://sourcemaking.com/design-patterns-and-tips

It contains an assortment/reference of design patterns, refactorings and other useful programming tips.

What I’ve been listening to lately….

FileZilla is a free, open source FTP
server (there is also a client) with SSL/TLS support.

I wanted to use my real SSL Certificate that I had for my website to secure the communication
to my FTP Server and couldn’t find any instructions on how to do so. After a little
searching and some trial and error this is the solution I have come up with, I hope
someone finds this useful. Read the rest of this entry »

Blingo
is a Google-powered search engine where each search is a chance to win a prize. No
registration is required. Invite your friends to use Blingo, and if someone you invited
wins a prize by searching, we’ll send you the same prize. Just use it as you would
use google.

I made a version of the Blingo toolbar for Firefox.

The current version is .1:

• Blingo
  Firefox Toolbar

I will be looking to add new features so suggestions are welcome.

Tech Ed 2006 in Boston is in full swing and I am getting some good info on all the stuff MS has in the pipeline.

All of the WinFX technologies have been announced as being renamed as the .NET Framework
3.0 (still based on the 2.0 CLR), this includes:

• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
• Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
• Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)
• Windows CardSpace (WCS) (previously known as InfoCard)

A few things I’ve picked up:

• Team System is looking more and more interesting. The newly released Visual
  Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals also looks very cool.
• Mark Russinovich and David Solomon
  from sysinternals are funny as hell and
  Filemon and Regmon are much handier than I thought. They will be merged into one utlity
  (Filemon and Regmon not Mark and Dave) and released for free in two weeks.
• Windows Workflow Foundation (i mean .Net 3?) is really, really cool stuff and I need
  to get deep with it right away.
• Click once (or 2 or 3 times in reality) is pretty limited and can get messy pretty
  quickly when you try do do anything slighlty complex.
• The memory managment and profiling tools provided in Visual Studio are ok, and combined
  with a few of the SDK utilities can tackle most of your common problems. I would still
  take MemProfiler any day.
• The Enterprise Patterns team really like pair programming as part of their overall
  Agile methodology.

I posted a few pics.

You would think that Microsoft would have considered including all of the “Ten
Essential Tools - Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now”
into Visual Studio 2005. One that I am suffering withdrwal from right
now is the VSMouseBindings powertoy. It allowed me to bind my forward and back buttons
on my Intellimouse explorer to the View.NavigateFroward and View.NavigateBackward
in Visual Studio. Made jumping around in your code as easy as surfing the web.

If anyone knows of a way to get this to happen in VS2005 (aside from coderush) please
let me know. Until then, I will continue my quest.

So far this has been a good read.

“Waterfalls are wonderful tourist attractions. They are spectacularly
bad strategies for organizing software development projects.” —Scott Ambler

Refactoring
Databases : Evolutionary Database Design
By Scott W. Ambler, Pramod J. Sadalage

iTunes won’t automatically bookmark your video files playback postiton so you can resume where you left off. You need to right click on the track, select “get info” and check “remember playback postion” under the options tab. Unfortunately there is no way to do multiple tracks at once. Here is a c# code snippet that takes the selected items in the itunes browser window and sets the “remember playback position” to true. You will need to add a reference to the iTunes type COM library.

Read the rest of this entry »

ReSharper by JetBrians integrates
directly into Visual Studio and provides coding assistance, real-time
error highlighting, and refactoring. Don’t know how I used to work without it.

Apex SQL Edit is a nice alternative
to Query Analyser with integration with source safe, Intellisenseand
Sql formatting.

Borland Together for Visual
Studio .NET has proved to be very useful providing audits for C# projects and UML
modeling that is always in sync with your code.

devMetrics is
a free tool that among other things provides metrics on various aspects of your code.
Useful for measuring the cyclomatic code complexity of your members, and flagging
potential areas that need some refactoring.
Gemini is an ASP.NET based issue
tracking program which I have been evaluating. Free for < 10 users or for Open
Source projects.