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, and their companies aren’t doing anything to fix this problem (such as giving them training). Sure, you can learn as you go, as you need to on the job as I did – but wouldn’t it be more efficient to know all (or most) of what there is to know about source control going in, instead of after the fact?

Well, Eric attempting to fix that problem by writing a series of articles on source control – what it’s about, and how to use it. He’s written three chapters and the introduction so far, and while I know all that he’s writing about (I have been using source control on the job for over three years now), this would have been great to have when I was first out of school.

Hopefully he’ll continue this series soon, to help other new developers to learn how to use source control effectively.

Via Ian White.

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 a Form, and the simplified printing API. Apparently, the implementation of the Office document hosting just wasn’t as far a long as they’d like it to be, with some pretty big changes that need to be made. It sucks, but we’ll deal with it. Hopefully it’ll be there in the next release.

Read the original entry for the full details.

Via Michael Weinhardt.

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 in a OneNote notebook, instead of my Outlook data file.

Via Chris Pratley.

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 it much yet, but I think that’s only because I haven’t properly integrated it into my workflow. For more on it, see my previous post.

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 help a lot since IE6 naturally must render pages completely differently just because it can.

Well, now there is a DOMInspector for IE6. It runs as an Explorer bar, so you can see both the page in question, and information about its elements at the same time. This should be a great tool to use in order to make pages render correctly in both IE6 and Mozilla Firefox.

Via Just Coding.

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, archived mail, and news, which totals at over 500MB), and it took it about 15 minutes or so. I even used it to dig up some of the links for this article, and it returned the search results nearly instantly. Now that’s sweet.

My only gripe is that you can’t modify any of the items that it finds like you can in normal mail views (mark as read/unread, change category, create a rule, etc.). Hopefully Microsoft will be able to include this in either the next version of Outlook or as a service pack, and improve the integration as well. Now that would be a killer feature for Outlook.

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.

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 Counters and what they mean, but he also has writtne about how to efficiently use the GC in the CLR. That’s just the info that I was looking for, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

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, to resolve that cliffhangar directly in Episode III. It makes much more sense to resolve it in addiitional Clone Wars episodes – which looks like what is going to happen.

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.

The only downside that I can see with this tool is that it only supports DataSets, not DataTables. Although that probably wouldn’t be hard to add, since the code is available in addition to the compiled binary.

Via Roy Osherove.

For all of you MSDN Subscribers, a new version of Visual Studio 2005 has been made available (the same version that TechEd attendees can pick up). Get it while it’s hot. :)

Via Kevin Dente.

With today being the first day of Microsoft’s TechEd 2004 conference, there have been quite a few announcements. To me, the biggest announcement was Visual Studio 2005 Team System.

This appears to be Microsoft’s answer to those customers who want to be able to manage more of their development process using Visual Studio, or other Microsoft apps at least. I haven’t read up on it yet in detail, but it sounds ilke it offers quite a few features. To me, though, the biggest feature must be that this includes a source control app – one that isn’t Visual SourceSafe.

Don’t get me wrong, Visual SourceSafe is a great little tool. I used it at home for personal projects for quite some time before switching over to Subversion. I still use it at work, and with my team of 20 or so developers, it just doesn’t cut it. This new source control app looks to fix all of SourceSafe’s faults, namely using the file system for storeage (the new app uses SQL Server), and there will actually be a server component (imagine that).

For more information on Visual Studio 2005 Team System, see these posts by Kirby Parnell and Chris Sells.

One of Windows’s largest faults, at least as far as geeks and power users are concerned, is its CLI. While the CLI of NT/2k/XP is significantly more powerful than that of Windows 9x (don’t even get me started with that horrible thing), it looks like Longhorn is going to get a significant upgrade in this department.

Sure, you have been able to download tools like Cygwin for years, but it never really felt like it was a part of the OS to me – more like a tacked on app (the fact that it tries to apply a Unix-like file system on top of the Windows file system sure doesn’t help). Now, in Longhorn, users will get the power of a Unix CLI, but native on their Windows OS.

I don’t know if this is in the latest “released” Longhorn build (available to the attendees of the WinHEC conference last month and MSDN Universal subscribers), but it sounds like it’s in some recent Longhorn builds. I’ve downloaded the build from MSDN but haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. If it does contain the new CLI, then that’s quite a bit of incentive for me to installed it in a VM and give it a whirl.

I know that I’ve seen some very pointless code in my day, and I’m always scratching my head trying to figure out what the original author was thinking. It’s never fun to come across code like this.

However, the author of The Daily WTF does an excellent job of making pointless code snippets funny. You can now know what the Batman() function does, and the best way to design a database – using only one table!

Via Matt Berther.

With the release of the WiX, I’m trying to read more about how to make an installer, and what exactly can be done with installers. While I definitely know the typical user experience with an installer, I know next to nothing about creating one. My only experience is with using the installers that can be made with Visual Studio’s tools, and not even much with that.

Thankfully, Aaron Stebner linked a page which contains a description of all the installation tools that are part of the Windows Platform SDK, among which includes the MSI help file (which I’m definitely going to take a look through), along with a ton of other cool tools.

When I backup my blog every few days, I log in to my host’s CPanel, navigate to the right page, and click the links to download the .tar.gz files for each of my MySQL databases. While this does work, to say the least it’s annoying to have to go to the site every couple of days, click the links, and wait for the files to download (hey, what can I say, I’m lazy).

That all changes now that I’ve started using MySQL Backup. Not only will it let you set up profiles to easily backup databases, but you can also schedule database backups at regular intervals. No more manual backing up for me, now it can all be done automatically. Plus, this way I can’t forget, which is even better.

Via Digital Media Minute.