The Daily Grind 855

by Mike Gunderloy
Thursday, April 6, 2006

Ten things you can do to support Larkware.

Software
  • Windows RSS Platform Screensaver Sample - C# sample from Microsoft putting together the new RSS platform bits, IE 7 Beta 2 preview, and VS2005. The application itself is sort of ho-hum, but the plumbing could be of interest.
  • Boot Camp Public Beta - If you've got an Intel-based Mac, Apple will now give you software to boot Windows XP on it. Of course, you have to bring your own XP CD, and Boot Camp itself isn't especially supported, but so much for the underground hacker types feeling so proud of themselves for figuring out how to do this.
  • TeamPlain Web Access - Add-on product to let you get to Visual Studio Team System features from a Web browser. Download is here, pricing from $99 per user.
  • Tarma ExpertInstall - Windows installation builder that supports its own native format and MSI. They boast of being small, fast, and have extensive checks for potential problems before you ship. Trial download is here, pricing from $249.
  • Microsoft XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack Version 1.0 - Beta version of Microsoft's tools for viewing, searching, and organizing XPS documents, their attempt to set up a rival to Adobe's Acrobat format.
  • SlickEdit v11 - New release of this programmer's editor feature code templates, regex evaluations, vim evaluation, more refactorings, and more. Here's my review of version 10, trial download is here, pricing from $299. There are also additional packages for integration directly with Visual Studio 2005 and Eclipse.
  • Introducing Microsoft Speech Server 2007 Beta - Just in case you're not too busy for another beta program.
  • View Rendered Source Chart - Nifty Firefox extension for seeing the structure of complex HTML pages. I can tell this is going to come in handy as we screw around in ASP.NET ever more deeply. (via Digg)
  • VSSConverter GUI - Pretty wrapper around the command-line tool for converting a VSS repository to the new Team System format. (via Rob Caron)
  • HanDBase Professional 3.5 - New version of one of the nicer databases out there for Pocket PC and other tiny devices. Demo downloads available, pricing from $29.99.
  • VS 2005 Web Application Project Release Candidate Now Available - And Scott Guthrie has all the details. Very spiffy stuff.
Information
  • Inside Deep Thought (Why the UI, Part 6) - Jensen Harris explains how the Office 12 UI is based on average customer usage. I believe this relentless pursuit of the average goes a long way towards explaining why the new UI is so painfully unusable for many existing Office power users.
  • Using Atlas with PHP - OK, this is completely nuts. I'm not sure how big a market there is for people committed to Microsoft programming for the Web who want to use PHP servers, but hey, if you're out there you'll love this.
  • ALE: Ajax Linking and Embedding - Remember how well editing embedded OLE documents worked in Office 4.3? I could reliably and repeatedly crash a Windows NT Workstation demo box by showing off those gosh-wow features. I suspect using Ajax to do the same over the Web will make me pine for those long-lost days of stability. (via Jason Haley)
  • .NET System.IO.Compression and zip files - Code to extend this .NET 2.0 namespace to handle Zip files.
Community
  • Contract Changes - Keith Casey has some suggestions about writing consulting contracts to protect yourself from non-paying clients. Of course, this sort of thing only works when you have a glut of work. (via Yaakov Ellis)
  • IPswap - Community site for buying, selling, and auctioning software development and other intellectual property.

Rants

  • Yeah, I know that FeedBurner provides all sorts of wonderful services for RSS and Atom feed publishers. But you know what? Nine times out of ten when I try to subscribe to a new feed using FeedBurner these days, I get: "Error when subscribing to feed for http://feeds.feedburner.com/XXXXX/: Timeout when downloading feed". I've reached the point where I largely don't even bother trying to subscribe if you go through FeedBurner. Their inability to deliver is hurting your readership. UPDATE: This was not FeedBurner's fault, but a bad beta aggregator build. My apologies to the Feedburner team.

Sponsors


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

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