Free
Posts about free stuff (freeware tools, free controls, libraries etc)
I was really surprised that quite a few people started using my… hack that let you post to Twitter using Launchy. Due to popular demand (hey, few people really asked for that) I decided to create an actual Launchy plugin that would let you do that. And so Ty was born. I know it’s not the best name in the world, but all Launchy plugins are required by law to end with y and Twitty was already taken, so I abbreviated it to simply Ty. The word ty means also ‘you’ in Polish. All the...
Every developer, and every shop has a Acme.Commons, or Acme.Core library, where they keep useful helper classes and extensions used in almost every project. Ayende has his Rhino Commons that I’ve seen him blogging about a few times but I never quite got around to actually take a look at the code… …until today, and I’m shocked. In a mostly positive way. There are few good ideas there, that I would like to discuss. The first class I found astonishing was HackExpiredException. My first reaction looked something like this: Then I looked for some...
I wanted to uninstall Google Chrome today, and here’s the window that prompts me if I’m sure I want to uninstall it: It says the usual “Are you sure you want to uninstall Google Chrome” followed by “(We were behaving good, weren’t we?)” I find that hilarious. Technorati Tags: Google, Chrome
I spent few last days at work, trying to create an installer for an application I’ve been working on. There aren’t many free tools to help you with that task: Wix, NSIS or Inno Setup as far as I know. I thought Wix was a reasonable choice. I don’t think that anymore. Wix’s documentation ranges from poor to nonexistent. Many things are done in a very awkward way. And the best (and in many cases only) way to get any help, is the discussion group wix-users. I’ve had my share of wrestling with Wix. Here’s what I learned....
Along with Subversion 1.5 and TortoiseSVN 1.5 a new version of AnkhSVN has been released some time ago. AnkhSVN v1.x used to suffer from many issues. It was instable, used far too much resources, and had many usability bugs, that repelled many people. For version 2.0 many parts of the tool have been rewritten from ground up, and now it’s a very descent tool that you should give second chance if you abandoned it after trying out previous version. I was very pleasantly surprised by it, when I fired up my Visual Studio...
Karl Seguin, has created, and made available for free and ebook, called “Foundation of Programming”. Don’t be fooled by its name however. If you’re thinking, “Foundation? I’m a senior level developer, what possibly could I learn from a foundation book?” and intend to pass by it, think again. The topic range spreads from Domain Driven Development, Persistence, Dependency Injection, Unit Testing, Mocking, Object/Relational Mapping to Memory Management, Exceptions and Proxies. Looks like a solid weekend read. Thanks a lot Karl! Technorati Tags: ebook, ALT.NET, Foundation of Programming, Karl Seguin
[UPDATE2] This tool has been deprecated. I leave the download links as they are, but if you want to interact with Twitter from within Launchy you better check out updated version of this tool here. [UPDATE] I uploaded a binary version of the tool, for those who don’t want/can’t deal with source code. Grab it here. I've been using Twitter for few days now, and I've tried quite a few options to use it. Currently I've settled on three different ways of interaction with the services (excluding browsing its website) When...
ALT.NET discussion group is quite active. There are around 1700, to over 2000 posts per month. It's easy to drown in the flood of information, and if you want to benefit from the group you need to develop a strategy. Here's mine: I use Thunderbird, as my email client, and for the group as well. In its basic form, it's not so well suited for the job of handling threaded discussion, but same as Firefox - you can expand its capabilities with extensions. The first thing to do, even before you go looking for extensions...
Since probably Windows 95 or even earlier (I'm not that old) Desktop did not change. There was Windows 98 and it's active content, Linux with its 4 desktops and more recently Compiz, but they all were just variations around basic idea: 2D space where you put some icons, some background and that would be the end of it. Until... I saw this: And then I installed this. It seems to be some variation of the same idea (much limited compared to what is presented on this YouTube video) but it has one simple advantage: it's available right now....
Carel Lotz has published updated version of his great "Continuous Integration: From Theory to Practice" guide. Updates include: Updated to use VS 2008, .NET 3.5 and MSBuild 3.5 (including new MSBuild features like parallel builds and multi-targeting). All tools (NUnit, NDepend, NCover etc.) are now stored in a separate Tools folder and kept under source control. The only development tools a developer needs to install are VS 2008, SQL Server 2005 and Subversion. The rest of the tools are retrieved form the mainline along with the latest version of the source code. Added the CruiseControl.NET configuration (custom...
As Paulo Morgado brought to my attention, Microsoft published absolutely for free, full pdf e-book version of new Introducing Microsoft LINQ book, by Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo. Its got average Amazon rating, but hey - don't look a gift horse in the mouth. You can get the book (and some free chapters of two other) here. Technorati Tags: ebook, linq, Microsoft
After much waiting (two and a half months!). Rauchy released the new version of his great tool Regionerate. New version brings many changes and bugfixes: You can now choose how you want custom (created by Regionerate) regions to differentiate from other regions, by specifying custom prefix, wrapper, or usage of high ASCII character looking like space (read more here). Older versions of Regionerate were leaving fragments of source code embedded within regions not created by Regionerate (not having Regionerate' prefix to be exact) intact. Now you can make it also look into those regions (and remove them, putting their...
Jeff Atwood in one of his recent posts stated: If you're really using your computer, your desktop should almost never be visible. I think this is an overstatement. If you're really using your computer, your desktop should be your command center. I agree with Jeff, that stuffing your desktop with lots of icons, shortcuts, documents etc is not basically a good idea. It makes your desktop a mess, and its hard to command if you have a mess in your command center. I try, as a rule of thumb, to not exceed the number of 10 files on my...
I've been using Regionerate for some time, and I'm addicted to it. Literally when I have to write some code on a computer that doesn't have Regionerate installed I feel odd. This tool is simply pure honey and nuts. Only thing I would change is it's default keyboard mapping (ctrl+R for running it), because it collides with Visual Studio/ReSharpers "Refactor" shortcut. So every time I install it I have to go to VS settings and change it to something else (alt+3 at the moment).
Main reason for this post however is not to praise Rauchy and his tool, but to...
Today I found (via Roy's post) very nice plugin that works with both Visual Studio and SharpDevelop. It's called Regionerate, is free and is developed by Omer Rauchwerger. As Omer wrote: Regionerate (pronounced ri-jeh-neh-rate) is a new open-source tool for developers and team leaders that allows you to automatically apply layout rules on C# code. I feel very happy to find it, since it does exactly this, what I wanted for a long time, and it's something that neither Refactor! Pro, nor ReSharper allows you to do. At the moment it's in its infancy (current version is 0.6beta) but even...
In his great post about ORMs, EF, eSQL and data access in general, Sahil Malik wrote something about Visual Studio 2005, that I would like to comment on. The VS2005 IDE is stuck in a rather unfortunate monopolistic situation. There is no incentive for any other company to create a better IDE because the IDE costs some serious $$$ to create, and MSFT gives it away for peanuts. It is impossible to compete with such a model, so I don't expect google or adobe to come out with a Visual Studio.NET that is better. And I...
The think that drew attention in last couple of days is the new Visual Studio 2008 Shell. What it is, is basically bare bones core of Visual Studio that Microsoft is going do release (for free I believe) , so that you could build your own VS-like Apps on top of that. Nice idea isn't it? That's something that Eclipse has been allowing for some time now, and as I just learned, Sharp Develop too. I found this, almost one year old post from Sharp Develop dev team, announcing Sharp Develop for Applications, that utilizes the same idea. Technorati tags:...
I've been concerned that CAB since its 1.0 release seemed to be a dead project, although there certainly was a lot to do. P&P team focused on other things like software factories, leaving CAB as it was. I guess we now have the answer why. Microsoft announced (and released 1st CTP of) project Acropolis. It looks like CAB for WPF on steroids, and may be the-hot-thing in desktop development. There's a crappy quality screencast up on this site. Basically project is announced but still I couldn't find many information about it. Is it going to be integrated with Orcas, or...
It seems that I'm not the only one having problems with getting this much praised inline spellchecking to work. As it turned out I was right assuming that the problem is me having non-English windows. Alex, posted nice workaround for this in his comment to Oren's post. I checked - it works. Thanks Alex. Technorati tags: Windows Live Writer, Working around technical limitation, enable spellchecking
Microsoft released 2nd beta of Windows Live Writer yesterday. That's good, I used 1st beta to publish my posts and I tried to publish previous post with the new version but there seems to be some API incompatibility issue between WLW and SubText, since when I tried to publish it, it Subtext threw this exception: Server Error 0 Occurred Illegal Characters Found at Subtext.Framework.Text.HtmlHelper.HasIllegalContent(String s) at Subtext.Framework.Data.DatabaseObjectProvider.FormatEntry(Entry e, Boolean UseKeyWords) at Subtext.Framework.Data.DatabaseObjectProvider.Create(Entry entry, Int32[] categoryIds) at Subtext.Framework.Entries.Create(Entry entry) at Subtext.Framework.XmlRpc.MetaWeblog.newPost(String blogid, String username, String password, Post post, Boolean publish) I guess I'll stick to beta 1 for now....
Well, maybe it's not the best title since I'm going to write not only about extensions I've been using for long long time, but new (for me) as well. Grab and Drag is one of the latter, I've been using it for only several hours and I simply loved it. It does basically what it's name says - enables you to scroll web pages how you would scroll PDF documents in Acrobat Reader. It doesn't block links, you can set hot key for temporary disabling this feature, you can make it switch between 'hand drag' and 'normal' mode after double click and...
Smart Client Software Factory v2 (aka May 2007) is out. You can read more about it in David Hayden's post. Nice new feature is 'Check dependencies'. Basically it allows you to see, whether you have installed all required products, and if you don't it will provide you with a link to download page. Unfortunately I was unable to install this factory. During installation I received following error message: I guess it's because I don't have VB part of my Visual Studio installed. Unfortunately you can't uncheck installing VB support so I'm afraid my only option is to add...
One thing I LOVE about Firefox the most is tons of great extensions. I try to stay on top of things and once a while I dive into Mozilla's extensions repository to see if there have been some good additions. I test those that look promising, and during those few years since I started using Firefox I collected some that I can not imagine surfing without (alphabetic order).
Adblock Plus - a must-have for everyone. With addition of Filters it's my first line of defense against ads. It enables you to filter links, adds, flash and ActiveX from websites using blacklists and...
There is a very interesting discussion going on between two great Israeli blogers: Roy Osherove (a.k.a. ISerializable) and Oren Eini (better known as Ayende). It started with Roy's post, that his company is looking for a developer experienced in VSTS. Then Oren pointed out why he would avoid Visual Studio Team System. In response Roy wrote a post explaining his choice of VSTS. It didn't take long for Oren, to write a response, where he basically said, that all what Roy wrote above (and more) can be accomplished with other - free tools. As a result, Roy wrote a great post about...
Ever since I started reading blogs, I was looking for good news aggregator. First I used the one built into Thunderbird, since I have already been using it as my mail client. Well, Thudnerbird is very good mail client, but they have much work in the area of feed aggregation. Then I switched to to Sage (Firefox extension) - I threw it away after 2 days. Then I used two other FF extensions with similar effect. I tried SharpReader, I tried several others but every single one had something (or was lacking something) that made me remove it. Then I...
Component Factory, makers of free Krypton Toolkit (very nice set of WinForm controls), created several good quickstart screencats showing how to use those controls (here). Worth checking, screencasts as well as Krypton Toolkit