The Daily Grind 501

Thanks for all the kinds e-mail and comments on the occasion of #500, and don't forget to enter the contest! Now on to a batch of new stuff for a Monday morning.

Software

• Sun to Give Out Solaris OS for Free - A story available in many media this morning; here's the CRN link. They can give it away, but will any new customers use it? I remember the last time I tried to get the free-for-testing version of Solaris running on X86; that was enough to convince me not to try it again.
• FNGraph - I had need last week to take some screenshots of simple functions graphed on the XY plane. This bit of free software filled the need nicely.
• Office 2003 Tool: WordprocessingML Transform Inference Tool - This one looks useful. Based on a sort of monkey-see, monkey-do approach, this one builds the XSLT needed to transform arbitrary XML to WordprocessingML (and thus Word documents).
• Visual Studio 2005 as a WSDL Editor - Don Box provides some code snippets to make WSDL editing in VS2K5 slightly less painful.
• Wing IDE 2.0 - IDE for Python developers. $35 personal edition (non-commercial use), $179 full edition.
• GMail-style labels in Outlook - Just in case you like the way GMail organizes things, you can start making your desktop client the same way. Early beta build.
• Resource Wrapper - Utility to take a .NET resource file and produce a strongly-typed class to wrap the resources in the file.

Information

• Introducing ...uFract - Russ Clarke shows off some teaser screenshots of a Mandelbrot set generator running on a Smartphone. Boy, that brings back memories of laboriously programming it when the very first Scientific American article came out. I wonder how many programmer-hours have been sucked down by such efforts? (And don't forget that you can waste those hours online these days by visiting the Mandelbrot Explorer)
• The Build Master Book - Microsoft's SCM Best Practices - Looks like vincem has an interesting book coming out from Addison-Wesley next year.
• Rural Sourcing, Inc. - Outsource your development to Arkansas instead of India. On the one hand, I don't mind seeing software jobs stay in the US. On the other, I don't think I like this notion that those of us developing in rural areas should be paid less than those in the big blue cities.

Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.

Home