Podcasts

Generally computer geeky:

IT Conversations - Stack Overflow be here.

Software Engineering Radio - An extra shot of geek.

Dvorakish:

Cranky Geeks - Yeah, I'm cranky too.

No Agenda - Crackpot and Buzzkill IN THE MORNING - Cracks me up.

Microsofty:

.NET Rocks! - Carl rocks too. He's a REAL musician.

Hanselminutes - Scott IS THE Hanselman!

RunAs Radio - IT is geeky2.

Deep Fried Bytes - Microsouth.

Ubuntu LAMP

Installing Apache MySQL PHP on Ubuntu.

PHPSecInfo

PHP Security Consortium: PHPSecInfo:

"PhpSecInfo provides an equivalent to the phpinfo() function that reports security information about the PHP environment, and offers suggestions for improvement."

CakePHP

CakePHP: the rapid development php framework:

"CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications."

Ubuntu 8.10 Freezes After Login Screen

Ubuntu 8.10 Freezes After Login Screen - Benaiah’s Computer Experiences

This fixed problem with Ubuntu 9.04 on my ancient Dell Optiplex GX110 where, on reboot, after changing the screen resolution, GNOME would freeze with a faux pointillism version of the desktop.

Jinzora

Jinzora:

"Jinzora is a web based media streaming and management system, written in PHP."

UltraVnc Single Click

UltraVnc Single Click:

"UltraVNC SC is a mini (166k) UltraVNC Server that can be customized and preconfigured for download by a Customer. UltraVNC SC does not require installation and does not make use of the registry."

Sounds interesting. Check it out.

Selenium with Python

Trying the Selenium web application testing system with Python.

Started by installing Selenium IDE in Firefox. That lets you record and playback interaction with the web site under test. It also formats the test script in a number of languages you can use to automate the tests using Selenium RC. I'm using Python.

The Selenium RC Server is written in Java so the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) must be installed on the system hosting the tests.

Selenium RC documentation

Selenium Python Client Driver Configuration

Python unit testing framework

Python HTMLTestRunner

Python — Unit testing framework

26.3. unittest — Unit testing framework — Python v2.6.2 documentation:

"The Python unit testing framework, sometimes referred to as “PyUnit,” is a Python language version of JUnit, by Kent Beck and Erich Gamma. JUnit is, in turn, a Java version of Kent’s Smalltalk testing framework. Each is the de facto standard unit testing framework for its respective language."

Watir

Watir - Overview:

"Watir is an open-source library for automating web browsers. It allows you to write tests that are easy to read and maintain. It is simple and flexible."

"...support for Firefox also requires a plugin."

Selenium

Selenium web application testing system

iMacros for Firefox

iMacros for Firefox - Script your Firefox Web Browser

Windows Forms to Windows Presentation Foundation Converter

Windows Forms to Windows Presentation Foundation Converter:

"This project is intended to help developers learn how their Windows Forms knowledge can be translated into Windows Presentation Foundation. It does so by taking Windows Forms projects and performing a basic translation of the source code and project file into a corresponding WPF Project."

Firefox Extension Development Tutorial

Firefox Extension Development Tutorial :: Overview

Lifehacker - How to build a Firefox extension

Lifehacker - How to build a Firefox extension

The Levelator

The Levelator from The Conversations Network:

"Do you believe in magic? You will after using The Levelator to enhance your podcast. And you'll be amazed that it's free, now even for commercial use."

Firefox Add-ons - Send Tab URLs

Just installed Send Tab URLs Firefox Add-on:

"Send a list of browser tab URLs to email, Web mail, or the clipboard"

ArtistX

ArtistX - eXtra ordinary art tools:

"ArtistX is a free live GNU/Linux DVD which turns a common computer into a full multimedia production studio.
It is based on Ubuntu GNU/Linux and contains nearly all the available free audio, 2D and 3D graphics, and video software for the GNU/Linux computing platform."

The site has a big list of free graphics, audio, and video software packages.

PowerShell - Cmdlet Development Guidelines

Cmdlet Development Guidelines

Coding4Fun : Twitterlight: A Silverlight Twitter client

Coding4Fun : Twitterlight: A Silverlight Twitter client

electric-guitar.co.uk - Guitar lessons and dictionary of guitar chords

electric-guitar.co.uk - Guitar lessons and dictionary of guitar chords:

"electric-guitar.co.uk offers a coherent course of introductory guitar lessons that is free, simple to follow and effective."

Silk Icons

famfamfam.com: Silk Icons:

"...a smooth, free icon set, containing over 700 16-by-16 pixel icons in strokably-soft PNG format."

Windows Sysinternals

Windows Sysinternals: Documentation, downloads and additional resources:

"The Sysinternals web site was created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to host their advanced system utilities and technical information. Microsoft acquired Sysinternals in July, 2006. Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications."

ICECAP

ICECAP:

"ICECAP, International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, is the portal to all things climate for elected officials and staffers, journalists, scientists, educators and the public."

ADOdb Database Abstraction Library for PHP

ADOdb Database Abstraction Library for PHP (and Python) for MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Firebird, Interbase, LDAP, Access, VFP, DB2 and many other databases:

"ADOdb is a database abstraction library for PHP. There is also a Python version"

Java Anti-Patterns

Java Anti-Patterns

Build your own solar-powered water pumping station

Build your own solar-powered water pumping station by Jeffrey Yago:

"There are many remote applications where a solar-powered water pump is more cost effective than installing a conventional grid-connected AC pump."

Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar, Vol. 1-3

Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar, Vol. 1-3

"Many electronics enthusiasts have fond memories of Steve Ciarcia’s first run of Circuit Cellar articles in BYTE magazine. Since Circuit Cellar headquarters still gets inundated with requests for these columns and subsequent Circuit Cellar books (all out of print), Steve has agreed to make these books available online."

Fire And Motion - Joel on Software

Yes, this is an ancient article written way back in 2002. Still applies today and I might want to read it again, hence this post.

Fire And Motion - Joel on Software:

"Maybe this is the key to productivity: just getting started. Maybe when pair programming works it works because when you schedule a pair programming session with your buddy, you force each other to get started."

This American Life - The Giant Pool of Money

This American Life - The Giant Pool of Money

Hanselminutes 158 - Joel Spolsky

Hanselminutes: "Visiting Fog Creek Software and Joel Spolsky"

Joel on How Microsoft Lost the API War

Joel on Unicode

spolsky on Twitter

Raymond Chen - The Old New Thing

Michael Kaplan - Sorting it all Out

Long Zheng - I Started Something

Jeff Atwood - Has Joel Spolsky Jumped the Shark?

Video: Channel 9 - Hanselminutes Tour of Fog Creek Software

New release of n-Track Studio

Version 6.0.4 of n-Track Studio Multitrack Audio Recording and Editing Software was released on 2009-04-17.

Stoicism 101

Stoicism 101: A Practical Guide for Entrepreneurs

G-Scripts

Nautilus File Manager Scripts: Welcome to G-Scripts

nautilus-open-terminal

I figured there'd be something like this available:

Ubuntu Tutorials : nautilus-open-terminal : terminal quick launch

Just installed on a couple Ubuntu boxes. Looks like it'll be handy.

100 Must Have Cheat Sheets For Web Designers & Developers

AntsMagazine: 100 Must Have Cheat Sheets For Web Designers & Developers:

"Cheat sheets are really helpful and easy way to remember things. In this list we have got the most used cheat sheets for web designers and developers, this list covers all areas of designing and developing."

SoX - Sound eXchange

SoX - Sound eXchange:

"SoX is a cross-platform (Windows, Linux, MacOS X, etc.) command line utility that can convert various formats of computer audio files in to other formats. It can also apply various effects to these sound files, and, as an added bonus, SoX can play and record audio files on most platforms."

Sox on Wikipedia.

Linux Journal article about Sox.

Gag me with a SYS-CON

I suppose there are some good tech articles at the SYS-CON MEDIA site. I'm not sure because every time I go there the distracting animated advertising and annoying pop-ups cause a gag reflex and I just leave. Maybe it's just me.

Kicked by the XAML

Been meaning to dig into WPF but that hadn't made it to front of the queue, which means when it comes to XAML I don't have a clue. Well, while checking out the samples for the Windows Speech API, I ran into an exception when starting a C# sample. The error message told me as much as "there's something wrong with this whole wad of XAML but I'm not going to say exactly what and where."

This sort of error is discussed here:

WPF trick: Debugging the XamlParseException

WPF: Debugging the XAML (continued) / Expression Blend training

Might as well start digging into this WPF/XAML stuff now.

Just Talk It Out

From Practical eCommerce: Voice Recognition Software: Just "Talk It Out":

"If you have Windows Vista, you already have some of the best voice recognition technology in existence just waiting for you to take advantage of it. Why not harness that software (perhaps the best and coolest part of the dreaded Vista operating system) to speak your blog post rather than type it?"

Cory Doctorow: You shouldn't have to sell your soul just to download some music

From the Guardian: Cory Doctorow: You shouldn't have to sell your soul just to download some music:

"The same companies that spent decades telling lawmakers that they were explicitly not the guardians of the morality of the young – that they couldn't be held accountable for sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, for gangsta rap, for drug-fuelled dance-parties – did a complete reversal and began to beat their chests about the corrupting influence of downloading on the poor kiddies."

Sphinx

Overview — Sphinx v0.6 documentation:

"Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation, written by Georg Brandl and licensed under the BSD license. It was originally created to translate the new Python documentation, and it has excellent support for the documentation of Python projects, but other documents can be written with it too."

The Access Web - The Evils of Lookup Fields in Tables

The Access Web - The Evils of Lookup Fields in Tables

Yes, they are evil.

I don't know JACK

But I hope to get to know JACK, as I work on a few audio projects, as time permits.

JACK : connecting a world of audio:

"JACK is system for handling real-time, low latency audio (and MIDI). It runs on GNU/Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, OS X and Windows (and can be ported to other POSIX-conformant platforms). It can connect a number of different applications to an audio device, as well as allowing them to share audio between themselves. Its clients can run in their own processes (ie. as normal applications), or can they can run within the JACK server (ie. as a 'plugin'). JACK also has support for distributing audio processing across a network, both fast & reliable LANs as well as slower, less reliable WANs."

List of applications supporting JACK.

QjackCtl - JACK Audio Connection Kit - Qt GUI.

The Jack Rack project.

JAMin - JACK audio mastering.

Also, a couple digital audio tools that work with JACK:

ReZound graphical audio file editor.

Ardour digital audio workstation.

Note to self: check 'em out.

Open Source Project Management Systems

]project-open[ - Open-Source Project Management Software

Onepoint Project

Sed for Windows

Sometimes all you need is a little text stream pattern matching and substitution. Maybe I don't need to write another one-off utility in C# or Delphi for Win32. Maybe I just need a little Sed for Windows.

Ubuntu Live CD Customization

LiveCDCustomization - Community Ubuntu Documentation

VHD Mount without Virtual Server

VMblog.com: VHD Mount without Virtual Server

VirtualBox

This weekend I'm going to check out VirtualBox:

"VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL)."

I'll probably start with these simple instructions: Using VirtualBox to run Linux from within Windows.

I also plan to check out the VMKnoppix live CD.

(As if I need more stuff to do;)

---

I've been using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 and notice a lot of similarities between it and VirtualBox. Maybe that's because they share a common ancestry. Virtual PC was originally developed by Connectix and was later sold to Microsoft (see Microsoft Virtual PC: Version History). VirtualBox came from Innotek which, before being acquired by Sun Microsystems, worked with Connectix on Virtual PC technology.

---

Rich Green: On Snowglobes, xVM and Freedom

Virtual Steve: Weblog: This Isn't Your Dad's Desktop Virtualization

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1

Notes from updating Virtual PC 2007 to SP1:

Download: VPC 2007 SP1

Q: Which version is installed?

A: Product version shows in Virtual PC Console / Help / About Virtual PC...

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007: 6.0.156.0

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1: 6.0.192.0

psake

Introducing psake - James Kovacs:

"psake is a build automation tool written in PowerShell. It avoids the angle-bracket tax associated with executable XML by leveraging the PowerShell syntax in your build scripts. psake has a syntax inspired by rake (aka make in Ruby) and bake (aka make in Boo), but is easier to script because it leverages your existent command-line knowledge."

The PowerShell Guy : PowerTab

The PowerShell Guy : PowerTab:

"You will find the overviewpage for PowerTab here,and you can find the link to the latest version of the PowerTab scripts here."

PowerShell Community Extensions

PowerShell Community Extensions:

"PowerShell Community Extensions (PSCX) is aimed at providing a widely useful set of additional cmdlets, providers, aliases, filters, functions and scripts for Windows PowerShell that members of the community have expressed interest in."

Windows PowerShell Blog

The Windows PowerShell Blog also has a downloads page that links to downloads for the different versions of PowerShell.

EclipseNSIS

EclipseNSIS - Home:

"EclipseNSIS is a plugin for the Eclipse platform which enables editing, compiling and testing Nullsoft Installer (NSIS) scripts. The EclipseNSIS InstallOptions Editor plugin is an add-on to EclipseNSIS which enables editing of InstallOptions scripts."

NSIS

Main Page - NSIS:

"NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) is a professional open source system to create Windows installers. It is designed to be as small and flexible as possible and is therefore very suitable for internet distribution."

How We Found the Missing Memristor

IEEE Spectrum: How We Found the Missing Memristor:

"Memristor is a contraction of “memory resistor,” because that is exactly its function: to remember its history. A memristor is a two-terminal device whose resistance depends on the magnitude and polarity of the voltage applied to it and the length of time that voltage has been applied."

Anders Hejlsberg Video on C# Dynamic

Charlie Calvert's Community Blog : Anders Hejlsberg Video on C# Dynamic

Query: How to Cut Styrofoam

How to Cut Styrofoam | eHow.com - Brief list of various methods

Hot wire foam cutter - Instructables.com: Step by step design using yardsticks for frame.

Foam Cutter - A more polished design using a nicely built spring loaded frame and a custom power supply.

Rocket Team Vatsaas Hot Wire Foam Cutter - PVC frame and a model railroad transformer.

YouTube - DIY hotwire cutter for styrofoam shaping - Using a car battery charger. Not pretty, but it works in the video.

Your Single Best Action For Saving Money

The Simple Dollar - Your Single Best Action For Saving Money:

I like the quote from Mary in comment #21:

"...the best way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket!"

It's a reminder that, no mater how good the price, if you buy something you're not saving money.

Windows Vista Secret #10: Open an Elevated Command Prompt in Six Keystrokes

Tim Sneath : Windows Vista Secret #10: Open an Elevated Command Prompt in Six Keystrokes

Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits

Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits—By Wendell Berry (Harper's Magazine):

"The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning."

Kaxaml

Kaxaml:

"Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a 'split view' so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content (kind of like XamlPad but without the gigabyte of SDK)."

The 62.5% Solution

How to size text using ems | Clagnut : Typography : CSS techniques

body {font-size: 62.5%; /* Resets 1em to 10px */

Saw this technique used in the CSS for a WordPress theme but didn't know just how it was setting 1em to 10px. This explains it.

24 ways

24 ways - web design and development articles and tutorials for advent

Hadn't thought of celebrating Advent with web design, but why not? It's a geek thing.

PNG8 - The Clear Winner

SitePoint Blogs: PNG8 - The Clear Winner: "While there still may be times when full transparency control in all browsers will demand the PNG32 hacks, personally I think PNG8 should become the default choice for web transparency effects."

Amanda Ripley - Attitude: More Important than Exercise

Amanda Ripley - Attitude: More Important than Exercise:

This all reminds me of a fantastic quote by the theologian Charles Swindoll...

"The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill. It will make or break a company, a church, a home."

Free CSS Templates

Download free CSS templates - Free CSS Templates:

"All of my templates are free for any type of personal or commercial use (provided you follow the license) so you do not have to pay me anything to use them. All I ask is that you link back to my website in some way. I also update my site with new templates regularly so check back for even more free CSS templates."

PDFsharp

PDFsharp:

"PDFsharp is the Open Source library that easily creates PDF documents from any .NET language."

pyPdf

pyPdf:

"A Pure-Python library built as a PDF toolkit."

NolaPro

Accounting & Business Software | Free Web-Based NolaPro

NOTEPAD++

NOTEPAD++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages.

I have been using Notepad++ for several months. It works well for editing XML as well as source code and plain text. Looks like it can go well beyond basic editing too. There are many features and plug-ins that I have not explored.

Note-to-self: Hold Alt+Shift to enable column selection mode.

PCRE - Perl Compatible Regular Expressions

PCRE - Perl Compatible Regular Expressions:

"The PCRE library is a set of functions that implement regular expression pattern matching using the same syntax and semantics as Perl 5. PCRE has its own native API, as well as a set of wrapper functions that correspond to the POSIX regular expression API. The PCRE library is free, even for building commercial software."

RingCentral CAPTCHA Strikeout

I tried to sign up for a ringcentral.com account today but either I am dyslexic and still can't see the mismatch or their challenge-response system is broken. I did call the number and spoke with a gentleman (from his accent I assume he is in a foreign call center - but I only assume that) who offered to sign me up but didn't seem concerned that there may be a problem with the web site. I didn't pursue it further and I didn't sign up. If their web sign up system is broken I'm not sure I can trust the web-based tools they provide to manage account features.

I had TimeSnapper running at the time so I went back and looked at my attempts. These are screen clips from three different attempts to submit the form:



This is the dialog I got each time:



This was disappointing because it looks like they have a decent service. I may try again later. Maybe I am wasting time clipping screen shots and writing about this but I think this is something businesses need to be careful of. A poor challenge-response system kills confidence. I think the worst part is that this happens at a point where the customer has already decided to buy. Do you really want your web site to change their mind?

Stack Overflow

Jeff and Joel have Stack Overflow up and running. I haven't used the site yet, just looked at it briefly, but I plan to check it out as development questions come up.

Bad Finance 101

Bad Finance 101 - A Programmer's Guide - O'Reilly Broadcast:

"O'Reilly's focus has long been on programming issues (or programmer issues) and that focus remains very much in place. However, it is worth understanding how the grief playing out on Wall Street will have a very significant impact upon the IT industry within the next four to six months, even despite the fact that up until now the contagion seems largely to have remained contained in the financial sector."

XSV

Current Status of XSV:

"XSV (XML Schema Validator) is an open source (GPLed) work-in-progress attempt at a conformant schema-aware processor, as defined by XML Schema Part 1: Structures, Second Edition of 28 October 2004. It has been developed at the Language Technology Group of the Human Communication Research Centre in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, with support for one of us (Thompson) from the World Wide Web Consortium."

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats

Download details: Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats: If you have Office 2003 but people are sending you files from Office 2007 (such as Word .DOCX files) then you might find this useful. Just installed it. Only used it to open one document so far but that one worked.

Sound & MIDI Software For Linux

Sound & MIDI Software For Linux is a site maintained by Dave Phillips who sometimes writes for Linux Journal. Dave's most recent article in the October 2008 Linux Journal (which, I believe, won't be available online for a couple months) points out a number of resources for Linux audio and sound. I don't know if the old boxes I have running Linux will be up to the task but I'd like to check out these audio tools as time permits.

jEdit

jEdit - Programmer's Text Editor - overview:

"jEdit is a mature programmer's text editor with hundreds (counting the time developing plugins) of person-years of development behind it."

Validator

Validator:

"Validator easily checks one file or a thousand. It efficiently assures all your XML is ready for your workflow."

XML Schemas: Best Practices

XML Schemas: Best Practices

Asteroid animations

Watch Mercury's master mapper's asteroid animations - Astronomy.com blog:

"In Dan Pendick's blog, 'Mercury's master mapper,' he told you we were converting two high-resolution animations from Robert Gaskell, a participating scientist in the MESSENGER mission to Mercury, of the asteroids Eros and Itokawa. Well, we're done converting them to Flash, and you can now view them."

Snoop

Snoop:

"A random utility made to simplify visual debugging of WPF applications at runtime. It's basically a collection of things that may have seemed useful at one time or another with the common goal of making it easier to track down bugs in WPF applications."

Query: VR8 WAV

I was curious if there is a program available that can convert the files (with a VR8 extension) used internally by the Roland VS-880 digital audio workstation to standard WAV files. I have a VS-880 (now quite "legacy") that I used to record the Shack Monks album. I don't really need a converter since I have already archived the audio (two tracks at a time through the S/PDIF port into CoolEdit with the help of MIDI sync).

The search for "VR8 WAV" revealed a forum thread on VS-Planet discussing a RDAC to WAV converter utility. There were also references to a plug-in for a PC digital audio workstation program named REAPER.

I've never heard of REAPER before so I explored that a bit. The company that makes it is Cockos Inc. which was founded by Justin Frankel who created WinAmp years ago. I may give REAPER a try later.

Also found a VStudio Utility Portal page but there's not much on it.

CONDG Meeting - August 2008

Links from the August 2008 Central Ohio .NET Developers Group meeting:

The presenters were from Exceptional Innovation. They discussed the use of Devices Profile for Web Services in their home automation products. After the presentation we were given a tour of their office which includes a model living area where they can demonstrate many parts of the system.

Also, I was not aware that there are different kinds of twilight: Civil Twilight, Nautical Twilight, and Astronomical Twilight. This came up in the discussion on programming their Life|ware system. I can't recall now if their system included Nautical Twilight. It should, for the yacht automation market, you know.

And thanks for the pizza.

PowerGUI

PowerGUI.org - Open Source Windows Powershell Community

PowerShell Code Repository

PowerShell Code Repository:

"PoshCode is a collection of PowerShell functions, scripts and modules that are free for public use."

RELAX NG home page

RELAX NG home page:

"RELAX NG is a schema language for XML."

Amaya Home Page

Amaya Home Page:

"Amaya started as an HTML CSS style sheets editor. Since that time it was extended to support XML and an increasing number of XML applications such as the XHTML family, MathML, and SVG. It allows all those vocabularies to be edited simultaneously in compound documents"

Vervet Logic

Vervet Logic:

"Vervet's flagship product is XML Pro, one of the first shipping visual XML Editors. Geared towards making XML accessible to all user levels, XML Pro has an easy too use Graphical User Inerface, and support full validation."

ThinkGeek :: Kill-A-Watt

ThinkGeek :: Kill-A-Watt:

"The Kill-A-Watt allows you to connect your appliances and assess how efficient they are. A large LCD display counts consumption by the Kilowatt-hour, just like utility companies. You can figure out your electrical expenses by the hour, day, week, month, even an entire year. Monitor the quality of your power by displaying Voltage, Line Frequency, and Power Factor."

LessWatts.org - Saving Power on Intel systems with Linux

LessWatts.org - Saving Power on Intel systems with Linux:

"PowerTOP combines various sources of information from the kernel into one convenient screen so that you can see how well your system is doing at saving power, and which components are the biggest problems."

Fiddler

Fiddler Web Debugger - A free web debugging tool:

"Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and 'fiddle' with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language."

moq

moq - Google Code: "The simplest mocking library for .NET 3.5 with deep C# 3.0 integration"

CONDG Meeting - May 2008

Links from the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group May 2008 meeting:

The presentation was given by Jeff Hunsaker who works for Cardinal Solitions (thanks for the pizza) and is also one of the founders of the Central Ohio Application Lifecycle Management Group. Slides from the meeting are available on his blog.

The presentation was on Microsoft's (ADO.NET) Entity Framework. Jeff asked the audience about Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) and what tools they were using. The most common response was NHibernate. Jeff mentioned Subsonic and gave a brief demo. He also did a demo showing LINQ to SQL.

Also mentioned at the meeting was the upcoming Lansing - Day of .NET on June 21, 2008.

CI Server: Redefine Your Build Process with Continuous Integration

CI Server: Redefine Your Build Process with Continuous Integration:

It is a bad practice to perform dirty builds. It is even worse to perform a "sourdough" build. This is where you require a previous build be present in order to successfully build.

LOL! ...but I totally get it. Just never heard that before. Now I want some pancakes.

CONDG Meeting - April 2008

At this month's Central Ohio .NET Developers Group meeting Scott Walker and Bryan Demuth, who work at TDCI, gave a presentation on debugging production applications. The presentation had a few bugs, some intentional (it was a debugging demo) and some not. In spite of the unintentional bugs I thought Scott did an excellent job of introducing some debugging techniques that are more hard-core than stepping through code in Visual Studio. Bryan was good at the Man in Black thing and from the entry on his blog I take it some in the audience didn't know who Johnny Cash was. What's that got to do with debugging? Nothing really.

Scott's blog has a link to download the slides from the presentation (and the slides include relevant links). Here are a few links related to the debugging tools discussed at the meeting:

Troubleshooting ASP.NET using WinDbg and the SOS extension

How to use ADPlus to troubleshoot hangs and crashes

ADPlus

A blog by Tess that has some detailed debugging info.

Also mentioned at the meeting:

COSPUG: Central Ohio SharePoint Users Group.

COALMG: Central Ohio Application Lifecycle Management Group.

NClass - Free UML Class Designer

NClass - Free UML Class Designer: "NClass is a free, UML-based class diagram editor with full C# and Java language support."

Groovy

When I get a break from my current plunge into C#, Windows Forms Data Binding, and SQL Server I want to dig into Groovy. I was considering checking out Scala which is also a language that runs on a Java Virtual Machine. Groovy just sounds more... (what's the word I'm looking for?)