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. Read more »

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. Read more »

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 Read more »

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. Read more »

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 Read more »

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 Read more »

You know the search bar in the Firefox toolbar? While it is one of the best of Firefox’s features (aside from tabbed browsing, of course), the biggest complaint with it is probably that it’s just too small to be able to type search queries into it that are longer than one word. Well, now you can do just that, thanks to Digital Media Minute. The process is a bit complicated, involving editing some of Firefox’s Chrome files (thankfully, if you download the recommended extension, it makes the process very much simpler). The recommended width is 400 (pixels, I would assume), but for my monitor and resolution at least, 300 is Read more »

Have you ever wanted to display a certain dialog just by clicking on a shortcut? Maybe you wanted to have a shortcut to open the Mouse Control Panel, and display the Buttons page by default (so that you can easily reconfigure your mouse buttons to work for playing games or something). Well, using rundll32.exe, you can do just that, among many other things. While I always knew that you could do a couple of things with rundll32, I never knew just how much until I stumpled across this page. There are a ton of different things that you can do, it’s really quite amazing. Read more »

If you’re using Win2k or XP (or, dare I say it, NT4), you’re probably used to using the Task Manager to see what’s currently going on in your system, and killing any processes that have run amok. I know that I have, and I greatly appreciate all of its additional functionality that makes it worlds better than its Win9x counterpart. I must say that ProcessExplorer even blows Task Manager out of the water. It’s basically Task Manager on information overload – aside from the typical info, it also gives you a descriptionp of each process, and the processes are laid out in a tree like manner (so you can see Read more »

While there isn’t much there yet, there is now a blog for Visual Studio .NET PowerToys. The utilities that are currently posted look very interesting – a better .NET resource editor, a new tool window containing a filterable list of all the open windows, and a code snippet editor that works with VS 2005. That’s good stuff right there, and I’m sure that more cool utilities will be posted in the future. Via Josh Ledgard. Read more »