When I was in college, I learned quite a few things about Computer Science – the C++ STL, data structures, base components of an operating system, programming languages, compilers…the list goes on. One thing that I didn’t even really think about much until I had a summer internship doing software development was source control – in fact, I don’t think that I even knew it existed until I had to use it at my job. Eric Sink, a software developer at SourceGear, and works on source control tools for Windows developers. He’s noticed that a lot of people don’t really know how to use source control, or why they should, Read more »

If you’re a software developer, you know that when your product is in beta, tough decisions have to be made. You always want to make your product better and fix all of the bugs found by your customers, but there just isn’t always time for that. However, since your app is in beta, you can’t just go and make sweeping changes to your code that would potentially destabilize it – it does need to ship some day, you know. It appears as if the WinForms team is in the same situation. The most notable features which got the cut (for me, anyway) was the ability to host Office documents in Read more »

Hot on the heals of the release of OneNote SP1, two new utilities taking advantage of OneNote’s new object model have been released. These utilities allow you to easily copy text from either IE or Outlook into new OneNote notes. Currently, I’m using Outlook 2003′s flag ability to keep track of mail that I need to respond to, or news items that I’d like to post (I use NewsGator as my news aggregator, which pulls feed items directly into Outlook). Now, however, I’m thinking about using OneNote to keep track of those items – just use the Outlook to OneNote plugin, and I can easily get those interesting posts stored Read more »

While I have heard of all of the tools from this article before, it never hurts to make sure that you know about (and use) as many tools as you can. It never hurts to be too productive. Of the tools listed in the article, CodeSmith, SnippetCompiler, and Reflector are my favorites. Since I’ve been doing quite a bit of .NET development at work as of late, I can’t think of a day that went by without using either the SnippetCompiler or Reflector. Both are invaluable tools that any .NET developer really should have in their toolbox. If you don’t, you’re just hurting yourself. As for CodeSmith, I haven’t used Read more »

If any of you develop web pages using Mozilla or Mozilla FireFox, I’m sure that you’ve come to rely on its DOMInspector, which gives you a ton of information about each element on a given page, and how the element relates to those around it. I know that it’s helped me to fix a few problems on many occassions, which I would have had a hard time fixing otherwise. Of course, once I’ve gotten the page looking perfect in FireFox, I also have to make sure that it looks equally good in IE6. Sadly, IE6 doesn’t have a built-in DOMInspector (among many other things, but that’s another story), which would Read more »

As you have probably heard by now, Microsoft has bought Lookout Software. Lookout has written an add-in for Outlook which allows you to easily search your PST files, much faster than Outlook’s built in search allows you to do (see my previous post for more infomration on it). Since that time, Lookout has released a v1.0 version, and is currently up to 1.2. As I recall, Lookout was free while in Beta, but once it was released it was for-pay software. Now, however, since Microsoft has bought it, it’s a free download from their web site. Very cool. I just had it index all three of my PST files (mail, Read more »

I’m sure that everyone reading this has seen Star Wars at one time or another, and know just how great of a movie it is. Another popular movie favorite of mine is Office Space, which is so true to real life that it’s scary. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you combined the two? Well, wonder no longer – just watch this movie (Windows Media Video format), and find out for yourself! Via Tosh Meston. Read more »

My current project at work has me writing a small utility application in C#. I have the functionality all working, so I’m currently trying to get it to have better performance. When I noticed that it was using a ton of memory, my first thought was that garbage collections weren’t happening correctly, or else my objects were living too long. For the past few days, I’ve tried figuring out the problem using various utilities, with some (although limited) success. Thankfully, I stumbled across Maoni’s blog today, which looks like it will be a great resource. He not only explains (in detail) how to use some of the .NET Memory Performance Read more »

If you liked the two sets of Clone Wars animated shorts which aired earlier this year and late last year, you’re in for a treat. It’s been anounced that there will be five new episodes which will air in March 2005. Even better, instead of being three minutes long as before, each of these episodes will not be twelve minutes long. Sweet! :) While they make it sound like something that was decided upon due to the popularity of the first set of episodes, it doesn’t really surprise me that they’re making more episodes. Given the cliffhanger ending of the last episode, it wouldn’t really make sense, in my opinion, Read more »

Debugging DataSets in Visual Studio just got easier. Whiel something like this will most likely be available out of the box with Visual Studio 2005, current users of Visual Studio 2003 have no easy way of figuring out what exactly is in a DataSet while debugging their code. Sure, you can expand all of the little branches in the watch window, but what fun is that? Wouldn’t it be cooler if you had something like a context menu item which creates a window containing your DataSet? Yeah, I think so to. That’s why I’m going to be using this tool all the time while debugging code that uses a DataSet. Read more »