The Daily Grind 947 by Mike Gunderloy Monday, August 14, 2006

I had a fun weekend ramping up budget estimates and trying to recruit a team for a new project (any .NET help authors out there available on short notice?). Hope yours was more relaxing.

• Taglocity 1.0 - Tagging add-in for Microsoft Outlook 2003. Trial download is here, Personal Edition is free, Professional Edition $39. You can read my review of their beta version here.
• Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider - Improved integration for Team Foundation Server with products that don't support Team Explorer.
• Axure RP Pro 4 - Software for creating wireframes, HTML prototypes, and Word specifications during the design process. 30-day trial is here, pricing from $589.
• RSS 2 PDF (Beta) - Convert RSS, Atom, or OPML feeds to PDF online. (via Arno Nel)
• ajaxload.info - Online generator for cute "loading" graphics for your AJAXy sites. (via Agile Ajax)
• InstallPad - App to help ease the pain of loading up a new box by taking a list of URLs, automatically downloading and installing your standard set of applications.
• Introducing Windows Live Writer - Offline blogging tool from the Windows Live team. Scott Hanselman has a good first review.
• Fortify and Watchfire are announcing today the integration of their respective solutions, Source Code Analysis Suite and AppScan. This means that if you've got a really big .NET or J2EE Web application, you can now correlate black box security testing with white box source code analysis for better assurance that you've found problems, as well as pinpointing faults found by one tool or the other. This will especially be a win for QA departments and developers already familiar with both products.

• Environment in a Box - Alex Parker writes about his setup for using VMware together with some base servers on the host PC to optimize development of stuff depending on network services such as Active Directory, Exchange, and SQL Server.
• SpeedTest.Net Beta - There are lots of sites out there to let you test your Internet connection speed. This one is prettier than most. (via Arno Nel)
• SQL Server 2000 (including MSDE) on Windows Vista FAQ and Running SQL Server on "Microsoft Windows Server Longhorn" or Microsoft Windows Vista - You weren't really planning to run last-generation databases on next-generation servers, were you?
• Tubes Not Found - A nice 404 notice with a nod to Ted Stevens.. (via Alex Barnett)

• I want my Groups! - Kim Greenlee laments the loss of the Groups link from its prominent Google frontpage status. Amen. Dennis Gurock has a way to get it back if you're a FireFox user, with a Chickenfoot script.

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Mike Gunderloy is the editor of Larkware, the daily .NET newspaper of record.