AJAX View

John Hrvatin talked about Web Development Tools for Internet Explorer at Microsoft TechEd 2007 in Orlando. There, he introduced a tool called Ajax View, developed by Microsoft Research.

Ajax View is able to profile a site’s JavaScript. It acts as a HTTP proxy that instruments JavaScript as it’s served to the client based on a set of rules defined by plug-ins. More information and first release download here, a good introduction here.

... and ... don't bother me - I know, there is (at least) a smarter browser out there, with an immense and open ecosystem of dev-plugins... :-)

PhotoSynth from Microsoft Live Labs

PhotoSynth is a amazing technology from Microsoft Live Labs that takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.

In the future we will be able to "photosynthesize" our own photos! Stay tuned via the blog @ http://labs.live.com/photosynth/blogs/

Refactor ASP.NET 2.0

Refactor! is freely available to all ASP.NET 2.0 developers and offers a comprehensive suite of tools that enable you and your team to simplify and shape complex code and HTML markup.

Refactor includes the following refactorings (and much more)

• Move Style Attributes to CSS
• Extract Style (Class)
• Add Validator
• Surround with Update Panel (ASP.NET AJAX)
• Extract ContentPlaceHolder (create master page)

Web Online-Desktop

One of the amazing new inventions (thanks to Web 2.0 Hype) are the Online-Desktop services, for example

• http://www.atoolo.com (free, beta, 1 GB Memory, free registration)
• http://www.mygoya.de/ (free, beta, closed user group)

They provide different tools via a browser-desktop:

• Calendar
• Appointments
• Adressbook
• Notes
• Bookmarks
• Players
• Messanger
• Documents
• etc.

And they offer a huge online-diskspace to save the informations and the desktop layout.

Zattoo WebTV - Quality TV live on your laptop

Wow - Live TV for free (even without swiss-local Bilag fee)! Currently 40 Channels available.

Zattoo was founded in US in 2005 by Sugih Jamin, professor for computer science at the University of Michigan, and Beat Knecht, a swiss software product marketing professional and former McKinsey consultant in Silicon Valley.

Zattoo is a Peer-to-Peer IPTV-Service. The main goal is a fast loading, long running Live-Internet-TV for broadband users, broadcaster, content owners and advertisers.

"Advances in broadband, video compression, and multicast streaming technology are rapidly lowering the technical hurdles for Internet and television to merge on a PC. However, there is still the matter of cost. Our streaming network solves that problem by reducing broadcasters' costs by a factor of ten, making it compelling for them to switch to our technology and broaden their service offering," said Sugih Jamin, CTO and co-founder of Zattoo. "Also, Zattoo's proprietary P2P streaming technology ensures a video delivery and smoothness that has until now been impossible to achieve."

Personally, I was impressed by the quality. No interrupt during 30 minutes test and I was surfing throu the web in parallel (Internet-connection: 4000 kb/s download, 400 kb/s upload).

Paint.NET 3.0

Paint.NET is free image editing and photo manipulation software . It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. Paint.NET is written in C#, the Source Code is available.

Change default View Source editor in IE

Do you want to change your default "View Source" editor inside Internet Explorer? - Here is the howto: http://dotnet.org.za/thea/archive/2004/11/25/7933.aspx




If you have configured Notepad2 as Source Code Editor, the following option will set Web Code Syntax Highlighting by default:

DeskTask - MS Oulook Infos on your desktop

Managers, pay attention, watch out! - MS Outlook taks and appointments on your desktop for free with DeskTask - http://www.carthagosoft.net/desktask.htm

XML Notepad - New Release

Nice litte Tool from Microsoft: XML Notepad. A slick and slim alternative to Altova XMLSpy or VS2005 XMLEditor.

It does support:

• Browsing XML
• Instant schema validation
• Intellisense according XSD
• Undo/Redo
• much more

Design is documented, Source Code is included, Tool is written in C# 2.0 and does use intensively System.Xml.

To get the code up and running in VS 2005 Solution, do the following:

• Open XmlNotePad.sln
• Delete Projects not needed (reduce to the max :-)
  - I just use Projects "Application", "Help" and "XMLNotePad"
• Delete reference to not existing *.snk file (thru Project-Properties, Signing, disable "Sign the assembly")
• Add a reference to the libraries XmlDiffPatch.dll and XmlDiffPatch.View.dll to Project "XMLNotepad"
• Set Project "Application" as Startup
• Run

Now, the solution should run without trouble.

HTMLEncoder / -Decoder

HTMLEncoder / HTMLDecoder
There is nothing to say about. Just valuable.

Profile your SQL Express 'User Instance'

In the free SQL Server 2005 Express Edition , you get a new connection string parameter 'User instance=true'.

"data source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Integrated Security=SSPI;
AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|people.mdf;User Instance=true"

When this parameter is specified, SQL Express will create another instance of the sqlservr.exe process on the client. This process is running in the security context of the currently logged on user. The connection object passed back to the client is connected to this new user child instance, running as a client process in the user's security context.

More details about User Instances? Read this excellent article on msdn: Working with User Instances

SQL Profiler

For monitoring purposes (what's going on under the hood, troubleshooting and more), the SQL Server Profiler acts as a big time safer. The Profiler is able to read and display all the traffic between the client (e.g. a custom-application, SQL Management Studio etc.) and the SQL Server. Just attach the Profiler to a running SQL Server instance.

But how to attach to a 'user instance', where you don't have a well known instance name?

First, query the master database from SQL Express as follows:



There you get the named pipes per instance. You get the heart-beat as well: alive or dead (if the Lifetime of a User Instance Connection has timed out; default is 60 minutes).

Second, connect with the pipe (just alive instances can be connected):



Third, get the traffic, sniff, profile...



You get the Profiler together with Workgroup-, Standard- and Enterprise edition.

SQL Server Management Studio / SQL Server Management Express

This solution will work for SQL Server Management Studio as well:



The Management Studio does display all attached Databases(in my case AspNetDB.MDF and People.MDF). - There is the free Version SQL Server Management Studio Express.

Searching for a used string?

... then checkout this page http://www.connectionstrings.com/ ;~)

SQL 2005 Service Manager

With "SQL 2005 Service Manager" you can easily manage different SQL Services.

Local on my dev-machine, I have SQL2k5, SQLExpress nad SQL2k installed and by default, this services are not started when the OS starts. I don't need SQLServer every day, so they shouldn't block memory.



Thanks to this free tool, it's handy and easy to manage (start, pause, stop) the different SQLServices on the different SQLServers.

This Tool and more codes and articles you will find at http://www.sqldbatips.com/

TimeSnapper

Did you ever had problems to remember what you did during the last week? What kind of work you did on your computer? - This kind of stuff you needs to be journalized, especially if you have to write your billing reports ....

By accident, I found TimeSnapper - a free Automatic Screenshot Journal. This Tool does help me a lot.

Try it - it's for free for personal use. - But don't mis-use it as spyware! ;-)

Read articles without registration

You just want to read a free article from the Internet (e.g. http://www.ftponline.com) but you can't until you are "registered for free" to get the text?

Grmpf!! Registering is annoying and boring.

But there is a handy solution to get the free content without additional work:
http://www.bugmenot.com/

IE 6 and IE 7 together

Did you realize the possibility of running e.g. IE6 and IE7 together? - I didn't till today...

I had installed IE7 Beta2 when I realized, that I can't work on Gadgets for Live.com with IE7 on my development-server because of security limitation (do not allow cross-domain XmlHttp requests from trusted sites). - So I started to google, and found a solution which works for me: I installed IE7 stand-alone with some limitation - but still okay for me.... read the following articles for more information:

http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2006/02/02/437196.aspx

http://www.tech-recipes.com/internet_explorer_ie7_tips1188.html

File-Extensions Source

Test yourself! Do you know all exisiting file extensions?

http://filext.com/

This page is a usefull helper, if you get a file without any idea, what kind of file it should be. It was a *.xpi file. Do you know the content?

It was a Mozilla/Firefox Browser Extension Archive.

SQL Prompt - Intellisense for SQL

SQL Intellisense® style word completion for MS Query Analyzer, VS.NET 2003, SQL Server Management Studio and VS 2005:

Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET 2005

if (.NET and Oracle?)
{
The new Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET
(ODT - V 10.2.0.2.10 beta) is a tightly integrated
"Add-in" for Microsoft Visual Studio that brings the power
of the Oracle Database to .NET developers.

--> Download here
}

VS.IDE - Editing Project Files

I some cases, it is necessary (or, at least, more transparent) to edit the project-files (e.g. my.csproj) manually with an text-editor.

Here, you get the info, how to do this without leaving VS.IDE:

https://blogs.msdn.com/shawnfa/archive/2006/04/26/582326.aspx