| Larkware |
| We get up early so that you don't have to. |
By Mike Gunderloy
Friday, November 07, 2003Total eclipse time tomorrow night. Maybe if it's not too darned cold I'll go out and see it. But for right now, I'm inside with the hatches battened and too many browser windows open.
- Multiple IE's in Windows - This one's all over the blogosphere this morning: a hack to run multiple versions of IE side-by-side. I'm much less impressed with this as a practical technique than some other people are. If you really need to QA a design in multiple versions of IE, use multiple machines, multiple partitions, VMWare or Virtual PC. Or don't blame Microsoft when some chunk doesn't work the same in a standalone browser because your hack broke something.
- Microsoft Solutions for Management: Patch Management Using Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 and Microsoft Solutions for Management: Patch Management Using Microsoft Software Update Services - If you're trying to keep a network up to date, you should probably read at least one of these.
- Polyphonic C# - Microsoft Research project to add new and wonderful asynchronous structures to C#.
- Google Deskbar - Taskbar Google searching straight from the horse's mouth. I'll stick with Dave's Quick Search Deskbar, which offers a lot more features for the same (free) price.
- Hello, World in XAML (for real) - Don Box shows quite clearly why writing XAML by hand is an utter waste of time. This is the sort of repetitive crud that tools were invented to build for us.
- SharpReader 0.93 is out, with more support for comments and lower memory consumption.
- Comparing Vault to GotDotNet Workspaces - Eric Sink explains why $49 Vault is more appealing that free GotDotNet to at least some developers. (I think it's a no-brainer myself; watching all the service changes without notice on Microsoft Web properties over the years, I would never trust them to keep my critical data and keep it available to me in the future). Also note the correlation (with two data points), between developers who prefer Vault and developers who own big pickup trucks.
- Office 2003 Research Service SDK - Dunno why this needs an SDK; building Web services that hook into the Office 2003 Research Task Pane is pretty trivial. But here it is anyhow.
- ProFont for Windows, Mac, Linux - A variety of teeny-tiny fonts for those of you desperate to see more on the screen at one time. (via Joel on Software)
- SysInternals has done significant updates to some of its free utilities, including Autoruns, Process Explorer, and Streams. (via Sam Gentile)
Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.