The Daily Grind 682

And now I can hear a power supply fan failing. What is this, National Bad Hardware Week?

Software

• Free TV Player 1.8 - The "free" refers not to this software, but to the fact that it can tune in to 800+ streaming TV channels from around the world, assuming you've got the bandwidth. 30-day trial, $29.98.
• ColorPic 4 - Nifty spiffy free color picker for the Web or UI designer.
• NMath Analysis - New .NET library with classes for function minimization, root-finding, and linear programming. I would have killed for this when I was doing my IE degree. Free trial, $295 license.
• NewsGator Enterprise Server - Make NewsGator the backbone of your organization's internal RSS plumbing with this version.
• Microsoft Visual Studio Extensions for WinFX Beta 1 - Bits to make it easier to work with WinFX, XAML, WPF, and WCF using VS2K5 Beta 2. Whew, hope that's as clear to you as it is to me.
• SourceGrid - Open Source C# Grid Control - As in "written in C#". Quite flexible for a free control.

Information

• Surprise - E. W. Bachtal takes a good look at the SpreadsheetGear component that I mentioned a couple of days ago, and compares it to some of the other spreadsheet components out there. I love it when something I post triggers this sort of in-depth look by someone who knows the field.
• 101 Samples for Visual Studio 2005 - VB and C# samples showing off lots of new features. Despite the name there are only 50 samples so far, but Microsoft promises the other 51 are coming.
• Microsoft Appoints Kevin Turner as Chief Operating Officer - Microsoft hires a new COO away from Wal-Mart. Brace yourself for a wave of jokes involving poor quality and sending jobs to China.
• How-To-Select an Obfuscation Tool for .NET - Remember the How-To-Select Guides project that I'm the Executive Editor for? We've had some production teething pains, but I'm happy to announce that our second Guide is now available for reading online. A PDF version will be along presently.
• The Thrill and Agony of Working From Home - Christopher Hawkins offers some advice on maintaining a viable business from home. I definitely don't agree with some of his advice - I work from home because I want to spend the day with my family, not so I can shut myself up away from them - but many people will find his point of view useful.
• Integrating vil Code Metrics Into An NAnt / CruiseControl.NET Build - Robin Curry continues his series on Code Metrics and .NET builds.

Community

• The Power and Impact of Blogging - Sam Gentile spends the night reading blogs and comes away with the realization that books and conferences are increasingly superfluous.
• Communities and Blogs - eicar comes up with a big list of blogging sites. You could spend your life reading this stuff now.
• Project FAZR - The folks at Project FAZR (the democratically self-organizing ISV) now have their own community blog server.
• The Audience loves to applaud itself - James Robertson casts a jaundiced eye at some of the self-backpatting of the open source movement.

Sponsor

• This edition of The Daily Grind is sponsored by .netCHARTING, who offers a fully functional free developer version of their high end .NET charting control for testing and development. Click here to download (WinForms and WebForms, no timeout)

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

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