Two of my favorite bloggers/authors and fellow developers are combining to create what I hope will become one of the greatest developer resources on the web.

Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software fame and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame are partnering to create stackoverflow.com which from their respective announcements sounds like a combination of Google and Experts Exchange on steroids!

Joel’s announcement

Jeff’s announcement

Go read them yourself, but I am excited! I can’t wait to see how this plays out, hopefully I will be able to get involved. The site itself is also available, albeit in a very “startup” mode at stackoverflow.com.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

I recently re-paved my Vista Laptop. Something we all have to do on occasion, especially if you happen to be a developer. It always leaves me with mixed feelings.

Dread of actually having to spend the better part of a whole day getting the base system back, and another 1 -2 days to get my environment, tools, and settings the way I like them.

This is followed by that “New Computer” feel, when the system is freshly installed, it starts faster, actually shuts down, and in general is more responsive and clean feeling.

As part of the process I usually take the time to re-evaluate the tools and utilities I load. And this time was like most, I ended up not installing some old favorites in favor of new finds, or better solutions, or free as opposed to cost based, or sometimes the other way around.

A very partial list of some of the tools I installed and what they replaced and why follows. I usually start with Scott Hanselman’s (Year) Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows as my starting point and reference. If you have not seen this before you owe it to yourself to have a look. Scott updates it yearly and he puts a great deal of thought into the contents.

My own much abbreviated version follows.

Notepad Replacement

I have used and loved TextPad for years, but recently I have switched to Notepad++ which is free, and supports all the features of Textpad and then some. Syntax highlighting, Regular Expression Search/Replace etc.

CD/DVD Burning

I used Nero for many years but recently replaced it with a free alternative called InfraRecorder which offers pretty much all the features I need, as well as being a lot lighter on disk space, works well with Vista and did I mention it’s free?

Screen Shot Image Capture

Again I switched from a commercial to an open source product. (Do you sense a trend here?) A long time SnagIt user, I finally found an acceptable alternative called MWSnap. Although nowhere near as feature rich as SnagIt, for what I need it works just fine, and again, very light on disk space and memory and works well with Vista.

Disk and File Encryption

I have used and loved PGP for many years but I finally gave up on the program because of restrictive licensing and painful install issues. I have switched to, wait for it, a free open source product called TrueCrypt!

Blogging Software

Ok, don’t faint, this time I replaced a free utility, Windows Live Writer, with a commercial one, BlogJet. I have used BlogJet in the past but WLW just seemed to be better for awhile. Now however WLW crashes when I try to run it on Vista and nothing I have been able to do will fix it, so back to BlogJet.

Thats it for now, of course there are lots more tools and utilities that I use but they are covered in much better detail in Scott’s list.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

I have stumbled on, been emailed about, or otherwise notified of several interesting new resources of interest primarily for Microsoft Developers. So I thought I would share them here.

MSDN Code Gallery

The newest addition to the ever growing collection of MSDN resources is the MSDN Code Gallery. The code gallery contains code of course, along with video tutorials, sample applications and lots of other resources. It supports user uploads as well, so count on the gallery growing over time. From a rather quick look see on my part it does seem to contain some worthwhile resources.

MSDN Reader

If you have used or seen the New York Times reader then you will instantly recognize the new MSDN Reader. It is a WPF based application that allows you to read MSDN Magazine online. It appears that you do not have to have a subscription to use this, however I am unsure if that will remain true. But it is certainly worth a look.

MSDN Windows Vista Developer Center

This site has recently been overhauled significantly and (to me) seems easier to navigate and find information on. The Windows Vista Developer Center is full of resources related to developing applications that run on Vista and take advantage of features available in Vista as well as the recently launched Windows Server 2008. Of interest on this site was the announcement that SP1 for Vista has been released to manufacturing. Most folks don't consider an operating system or application as truly viable until at least the first service pack. So if you have been waiting for SP1 to look at Vista, your wait is over.

Hopefully one or more of these resources will prove useful to you!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

Ray Ozzie proposed his concept of Simple Sharing Extensions back in 2005, and then more or less went silent. Until now!

Another Live Labs technology preview release arrived this week. It's called FeedSync and it is the current incarnation of the concept Ozzie developed to allow data sharing over web protocols like RSS.

The initial specification is available as version 1.0 at the time of this writing. It extends both the Atom and RSS specifications to incorporate item sharing which Microsoft defines as "bi-directional, asynchronous synchronization of new and changed items amongst two or more cross-subscribed feeds".

(Hmmm, calendar sharing anyone?)

The samples in the specification deal with a fictional task list example. Here is the code (emphasis added) for the sample RSS feed.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:sx="http://feedsync.org/2007/feedsync">
 <channel>
  <title>To Do List</title>
  <description>A list of items to do</description>
  <link> http://example.com/partial.xml </link>
  <sx:sharing since="2005-02-13T18:30:02Z"
    until="2005-05-23T18:30:02Z" >
   <sx:related link="http://example.com/all.xml" type="complete" />
   <sx:related link="http://example.com/B.xml" type="aggregated" 
    title="To Do List (Jacks Copy)" />
  </sx:sharing>
  <item>
   <title>Buy groceries</title>
   <description>Get milk, eggs, butter and bread</description>
   <sx:sync id="item_1_myapp_2005-05-21T11:43:33Z" updates="3">
    <sx:history sequence="3" when="2005-05-21T11:43:33Z" by="JEO2000"/>
    <sx:history sequence="2" when="2005-05-21T10:43:33Z" by="REO1750"/>
    <sx:history sequence="1" when="2005-05-21T09:43:33Z" by="REO1750"/>
   </sx:sync>
  </item>
 </channel>
</rss>

Notice the namespace reference sx=http://feedsync.org/2007/feedsync the "sx" prefix is the one designated in the spec.

FeedSync supports multi-master topologies which means it can be used to send and receive data to multiple clients. An example topology is shown below, (image from Microsoft's web site.), as you can see clients can be bi-directional or pull only.

The possibilities are many, I am already thinking about using this technology to allow calendar syncing between Google Calendar, and Outlook. Another thought that jumped to mind would be to allow sharing appointment data for a centralized calendar among a group of subscribers on a project I am working on.

Best of all, the technology has been released and licensed under a Creative Commons license which means the technology is likely to be extended.

The best place to start looking for developers is the FeedSync For Developers page.

Have fun! Share with me your observations and ideas!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

Microsoft has released a Live Lab's (Microsoft Research and Live Services) preview technology package called Volta.

Volta is a framework that allows a developer to potentially build a multi tier application initially as an client application, and then use a technique called "declarative tier-splitting" to identify which pieces of the application run on a server and which pieces run on the client.

This is accomplished by using and XML like declarative markup within the code. With this approach a developer can focus on getting the application designed and functional and then let Volta split the tiers and create the communications "glue" that lets the applications tiers work together.

How this is accomplished is rather interesting, Microsoft decided to go with an MSIL based approach, mostly accomplished in the post compilation area. MSIL code is rewritten to run in Javascript for the client, and ASP.NET for the server side, typically as a web service.

Since Volta works it's magic at the MSIL level, any CLR targeted language is supported, C#, VB.NET, IronPython and others. Visual Studio 2008 is required at this stage, 2005 is not supported and it is unclear if it will ever be.

So show me some code already!

The code shown below is from the Volta Recipe's page. It shows the [RunAtOrigin] custom attribute in use.

namespace VEMashup.Weather
{
    [RunAtOrigin]
    public class WeatherSvcProxy
    {
        public string GetJsonWeatherInfoFor(double lat, double lng)
        {
            var baseUri = @"http://ws.geonames.org/weatherIcaoJSON";
            var uri = baseUri + "?lat=" + lat.ToString() + "&lng=" + lng.ToString();
            var xhr = new Microsoft.LiveLabs.Volta.Xml.XMLHttpRequest();
            xhr.Open("GET", uri);
            xhr.Send();
            if (xhr.Status == 200)
                return xhr.ResponseText;
            else
                return null;
        }  
    }
}

This is an example of "tier splitting" via markup. This tells the Volta framework that this code is destined to run on the server. Code not marked will continue to run on the client. This means that as a developer you can postpone deciding how and where to partition your application until the last minute.

The agile developer in me seriously enjoys this particular aspect! Volta technology is seriously early in the life cycle however, so bear in mind that this will change before it gets released.

There is a handy list of known issues you should review before you start playing with the framework.

You could think of Volta as architecture refactoring on steroids. As shown below Microsoft has designed it explicitly with that in mind. (Image from Volta Web Site.)

Bear in mind that you are not limited to 2 tiers, you can retarget portions of your application to as many tiers as you want!

All in all I think this bears some watching!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

By now everyone knows that Visual Studio 2008 has launched, along with the .NET Framework 3.5. This version, previously known as 'Orcas', brings some significant new capabilities with it.

But first things first, installation and out of the box impressions.

I installed 2008 on a system that was clean in the sense that it had never had any of the pre-release versions of Orcas installed on it. I used the Virtual Machines that Microsoft provided to play with the pre-release versions. Wonderful idea judging by all the recent blog posts on how to uninstall the beta's before installing the final release.

If you do need help uninstalling the beta's in order to get the final production version installed, ScottGu has an excellent post on the topic.

Microsoft's official 2008 site has a great deal of good information, tutorials and other examples to peruse, I strongly recommend you check it out.

Anyway, I installed, from a DVD image I burned from the ISO file I downloaded from MSDN. I installed the Professional edition as I do not have access to a Team Foundation Server.

Installation was NOT smooth, the install kept crashing trying to install the .NET Framework 3.5 which was one of the very first steps. So I tried downloading and installing the Framework directly, which also failed.

Looking at the log files I was surprised to see that it was complaining that the 3.0 Framework SP1 was not present and that 3.5 considered that a pre-requisite for installation. Since I was running Vista which came with 3.0 pre-installed I was surprised as I check Microsoft Update weekly and I was sure the SP1 patch had already been installed.

I finally rebooted and logged in as Administrator and re-installed the standalone version of 3.5 again, this time it worked fine. Then I installed 2008 still logged in as Administrator and again everything went fine. The install, including the new MSDN library took slightly over 2 hours.

Once everything was installed I fired up the IDE which took another 10 minutes to configure itself based on my environment selections. Once it was finally up I was able to begin playing around a bit.

The IDE is very similar in appearance to 2005, in fact it is identical, at least initially. The first time I noticed a significant difference was when I opened a project. Visual Studio now uses the native file dialogs as opposed to it's own custom versions. (This is true on XP as well.)

This is a welcome change especially on Vista as it allows all the functionality of the file dialogs that Windows provides.

There are numerous changes under the hood of course, and many many changes and new features in the languages and Framework which I hope to touch on in a future post.

One other thing I noticed was the fact that Visual Studio now seemed to be a lot faster to load. This is of course a welcome change!

One of those buried features is very welcome and much talked about, multi-targeting! As you can see from the screen shot below this allows you to target an application at the following frameworks:

2.0, 3.0 or 3.5

This means you can continue working on your 2.0 or 3.0 projects using the newer IDE. Rick Strahl has a great post on moving projects between 2005 and 2008 and back. Basically the project format has NOT changed, and the Solution file changes are minor. This means that you can work on 2.0 targeted applications in either 2005 or 2008 with no particular problems.

I was able to open several 2005 projects, work on them, compile them, run and debug them with no issues. I opened WinForms, ASP and Class library projects with no issues.

One annoyance I did notice was that the help library was much slower to open and seems prone to hanging. The MSDN library is fine when launched standalone, but when launched from within the IDE it is slow to actually show up.

More to come in the next post! Stay tuned.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

I just came across this site and the resources contained for the first time today! Thanks to post by Robert C. Cain better know (at least by me) as Arcane Code.

Take a peek at the .Net University web site and materials, it is well worth the visit!

The available courseware is freely downloadable and they allow it to be "re-delivered" to technical audiences.

Their mission statement gives a pretty good idea what they are all about:

Welcome to .NET University! Our mission is very simple. We want to give you a good developer-oriented overview of new and emerging Microsoft technologies.

This site has been added to the bookmarks!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

For the last two years I have had a UTStarcom PPC 6700 Smartphone. It was great, I enjoyed it and I would recommend it to anyone. Mine finally developed terminal touch screen failure. Certain parts of the screen would no longer react to being touched no matter how hard.

It came with Windows Mobile 5 and I had added a half dozen or so must have utilities that I always seem to find. AIRoboForm for PPC, SplashID for PPC and Battery Pack Pro were on top of the list, as well as Windows Live Search. The phone happily sync'd with Outlook and other programs keeping my appointments, tasks and contacts in order.

I was also able to use the Spring EV-DO network, or any handy WiFi access point to surf the web or send and receive email when away from my office. All in all I was pretty satisfied with the phone. So I was sad when I realized that the screen failure was rendering it less than useful.

Off to Sprint I went, after all I was paying 7 bucks a month for the "Total Equipment Protection" plan right? Well much to my surprise the Sprint rep took one look, said yep, "It's broken", and "we don't sell those anymore, is it okay to give you a PPC 6800?"

"Of course!" says I, with a grin from ear to ear! So now I am the proud owner of an HTC Mogul PPC 6800 with Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional, all Vista looking and shiny! A quick zap of my data off the old PPC

6700 and a sync with my 6800 and I was right back in action!

The new phone sports a few other improvements, like WiFi G and B instead of just B, my home router is now happily set to "G Only" and pumping much faster connections than when it was running in mixed mode. The form factor is nicer too, no more stubby antenna to worry about. And the keyboard slide is spring loaded so when it opens it does so with a satisfying "thunk"!

It came with Windows Live out of the box, and had a newer version of Messenger as well. So now I can happily IM whenever I want again! And lo! The screen works! Everywhere! It, like the 6700 has Windows Media Player, and can play music just fine. But I mostly use it to listen to podcasts. The audio quality is fine for me, and it paired easily with my Bluetooth headset.

All in all, the 6800 is the 6700 done right in my opinion! A great device that combines the best PDA features with a decent phone. And as a bonus I can easily write my own programs for it so it is a geek toy all the way. Oh yeah, it came with Java pre-installed as well and I still have over a Gig of RAM/ROM left counting the storage card, so plenty of room to add programs in!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

I would have to say that I have become a convert to TDD concepts. I have used NUnit, and mbUnit testing frameworks to varying degrees for some time. Now I use them daily and am working to increase my coverage in all my projects.

Since I primarily develop in the .NET Framework I have particular interest in the unit testing frameworks available in that environment. As I mentioned in a previous post I have currently settled on mbUnit as my unit testing framework.

xUnit is a new framework developed by, among others, James Newkirk and Brad Wilson. James was one of the original authors of NUnit and is now a Microsoft employee. Brad Wilson also works for Microsoft. Together they have created what looks to be a very well thought out testing framework.

xUnit is currently being hosted on CodePlex and is distributed under Microsofts Permissive License (The borgs version of Open Source).

The framework has already been integrated with TestDriven.NET, and has it's own console runner, but no GUI runner yet.

Roy Osherove has a series of posts about his view on xUnit, and both James and Brad have blogged about it as well. The first post of interest to me was this one, then check this one.

After reading all the various points of view on this topic here is what my take away is so far. xUnit is a conscious choice to re-invent a testing framework that is not just another port and extension of JUnit. It features design changes to bring it more in line with where the .NET Framework is, and is heading. Examples of this are the use of Generics and Anonymous Delegates in Asserts.

They have also removed a great number of what they consider extraneous attributes see the quote from James post below:

• [TestFixture] was removed entirely, so tests can be anywhere.
• [Ignore] is expressed using the Skip= parameter on [Test].
• [SetUp] and [TearDown] are removed.
• [ExpectedException] was replaced with Assert.Throws.
• [TestFixtureSetup] and [TestFixtureTearDown] are instead expressed as implementations of an interface (ITestFixture).
• Support for IDisposable was added for tests.

This kind of thinking and approach is long overdue in my own opinion. It will be interesting to watch as the project matures. I have begun playing with it myself and so far I find it a lot more intuitive than any of the JUnit derivatives I have used in the past.

While I like mbUnit I have always had to think harder than I feel I should in order to use it. I get results that are often exactly opposite what I was expecting, which means that I am obviously not understanding something. It is also difficult to get help with mbUnit, while it is not abandonware it does not have a very active community, posts to their list server often go unanswered for long periods of time. And the Google Group discussion forums are none to active either.

Time will tell if xUnit suffers from the same lack of community or not, but so far it looks promising! 

Cheers,

Robert Porter

At the office I was recently exposed to a tool called SQL Delta. Tools like this have been around for quite awhile, but this has to be the slickest and easiest to use interface I have seen.

The description of the tool from the products web page is:

"SQL Delta is a database compare and synchronization tool that performs both structure and data comparisons of SQL Server 2005, 2000 and 7 databases."

We use it here to sync up data and structure between the various build/test/uat/dev instances of our database back ends. It generates scripts, can run inside transactions, all the things you would expect. A little expensive for the home user but very affordable for a team.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

This looks to be an interesting offering from the folks at Microsoft Live Services. SharedView is a collaboration system for small groups. Currently appears to be limited to 15 concurrent users, which should be enough for most uses.

Take a look here, and see what you think!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

Hmmm, I got some interesting feedback on my previous post which is going to force me to have another look at NHibernate, and Subsonic!

SubSonic is new to me, I had not found it until Mike Kelly blogged about it awhile back, and I honestly have not given it a lot of time.

So that being said, I will include Subsonic and a fresh look at NHibernate and Active Record in the upcoming posts!

Stay tuned...

Cheers,

Robert Porter

I am going to insert this post ahead of the next ORM post because it plays a role in how I use ORM tools. And because my friend Mike Kelly blogged about it and it's add-ins recently here.

Lutz Roeder graciously created a program call Reflector which he gives away free of charge. He actively supports and maintains it as well. More importantly he had the forethought to make it extensible via a documented plug-in/add-in interface and the community has responded with a slew of add-ins for the product.

So what is Reflector? According to it's author it is:

Reflector is the class browser, explorer, analyzer and documentation viewer for .NET. Reflector allows to easily view, navigate, search, decompile and analyze .NET assemblies in C#, Visual Basic and IL.

And that does about sum it up, but does not do it justice. If you hail from pre .NET VB then think of it as Object Explorer on steroids. In short it is a tool that lets you spelunk into the bowels of the CLR as well as any other CLS based assembly.

You can decompile the code of any call in either C# or VB.NET and I believe some of the add-ins allow you to decompile to other languages as well.

It's small, fast, you can run it from a USB Key, (provided the .NET Framework is on the system) and it is fantastically stable and fast.

Run to your browser and add this to your toolkit. It truly is a "no brainer" addition.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

One area most developers tend to spend a lot of time "re-inventing the wheel" in is Database Access Code. DAL (Data Access Layer) code tends to be rather painful to write and is a pain to maintain when the underlying database structure changes.

The code generators I am focusing on for this post are specifically geared towards minimizing this particular pain point. They all support multiple databases, typically MS SQL, MySQL, VistaDB and Oracle at a minimum.

Most of them also give you a choice of Frameworks, or templates, to choose from which dictate how the data access code is generated. Template driven generators offer the most flexibility, at the cost of complexity. You can use the predefined templates for most jobs but you have the ability to choose to edit or create new templates.

This way you have the maximum amount of control. There are 4 tools that I have personally used that generally fit this category. But in the interest of at least semi completeness here are a couple of lists I used as starting points when I was investigating this topic

Christopher Shain at TheServerSide.NET has this list. And Richard Hundhausen  has this list as well. Beware, at some point in the past CodeSmith was apparently freeware. That is no longer true. But a lot of web resources still list it as freeware. (If I am wrong and it is still freeware please let me know!)

The tools I have personally used or evaluated are:

• CodeSmith
• MyGeneration
• NHibernate
• LLBLGen Pro

At this writing, Codesmith and LLBLGen Pro are not freeware, while MyGeneration and NHibernate are. Update: NHibernate is not a code generator, it is an ORM utility. This blog post title is inaccurate since I am evaluating these tools as ORM utilities not as code generators. So I have updated the post title.

Of the 4, Codesmith and MyGeneration are my favorites. They are both template based code generators and both offer a large library of templates, both free and fee based, to select from.

NHibernate is a .NET port of the Java ORM tool called Hibernate, and is the least flexible of the tools I tried, not to mention unnecessarily (IMHO) complicated to use.

LLBLGen Pro is powerful, but I found it cumbersome and difficult to understand. And I resent paying money for things that are difficult to use, especially when they are supposed to simplify my life!

So, my choice is CodeSmith and MyGeneration, next post we will take an in depth look at each!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

A great friend of mine has started blogging, let me revise that, he has started publicly blogging. He has been blogging behind the firewall for sometime I believe.

Mike Kelly, whom I have known for many years now, has a blog at The Eniac Papers, his premise is the ability to share "Tribal" knowledge among the community. A phrase he may not have coined but I first heard from him!

We met and first worked together at what was then First Union Bank in Raleigh North Carolina. I still recall the first time I heard Mike mention his concept of Tribal Knowledge. He had come to ask about some arcane data in a monster lookup table. When I explained what the particular data he needed was and what to use for a where clause to retrieve it he was a little non-plussed.

He looked at me with his trademark "frown of BS happening here" look. And said as near as I can recall something along the lines of "And I was supposed to know this how? Should I wait for some tribal drum signal or did someone think it might be nice to actually document this somewhere?"

Mike has always been a share the news kind of guy. We have exchanged countless emails that contain nothing more than a link to something we think the other should see or know about. I am glad to see he is blogging now and a wider audience will benefit from his experience and considerable insight.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

I have been a user of AvantGo for several years, and until recently I was a paid user. Meaning I had paid ~$20.00 a year to extend the free subscription channel size of 2000K to 8000K.

For those of you that have not heard of AvantGo it is a web based service that allows you to subscribe to "channels" that it provides of web based content. This content is specially rendered to be easily readable on mobile devices like Palm hand held's, Windows Mobile devices and some cell phones. You download a special client onto your mobile device, select the channels you want from a list of many hundred, sync your device and Bob's your Uncle, there you go, content to go!

The custom browser they provide allows for on or off line use. So you can read content offline (my favorite time to use it was in the bathroom for those extended sit down appointments), or online if you have connectivity for your device.

At the time I first subscribed to AvantGo it was about the only game in town. RSS had not really hit the mainstream yet, and offline content browsers were in their infancy. But now with RSS readers available for just about every device made, and with content now available via RSS for everything under the sun, AvantGo is decidedly not the only game in town anymore.

And it is showing it's age. 3 of 4 sync attempts lately ended with errors requiring me to re-sync and sometimes re-enter my credentials. And they removed the ability for Windows Mobile devices using ActiveSync from syncing automatically.

Their lame reason was that ActiveSync syncs almost non-stop, (it does), and the devices were swamping their bandwidth. So rather than figure out a way to have the client software account for this behavior they decided to make all Windows Mobile users manually sync.

This time around when it came time to renew I elected not to. I let my membership revert back to the standard 2000K channel limitation. Interestingly enough the email I received from them informing me my subscription was about to expire required me to visit their web page and make the choice there. Otherwise I would not be able to sync with the service.

I thought hey, this is a great way for them to collect feedback from users that are either renewing their subscription or not! But instead all I could do was select renew, or push a button that said I was acknowledging that I was no longer a "Power User".

So rather than even attempt to ask why I had not elected to renew they just let me not renew. Fairly short sighted customer retention policy if you ask me. It would have been nice to have at least had the option to explain why I was not renewing and if I had any suggestions for improvement etc.

I did take the extra step of going to their Contact Us page on their web site. That is pretty much useless as well. I saw no contact option for customer service or feedback. Just a fairly terse couple of sales contacts and support contact options.

Ah well, if that's how they take care of their customer base then they deserve to die a slow death of attrition.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

Well, as I mentioned in an earlier post Vista, Typed Datasets and Other Stuff, I was hesitant to adopt Vista due to known incompatibilities with some of the tools I use. Well that was before I had access to someone at Microsoft that had all the answers!

I am now happily running Vista Business Edition on my laptop and all of my development tools work just fine!  I took the rather extreme pre-caution of moving my previous laptop OS and all into a Virtual Machine first!

However my experience to date has been wonderful! I love the new Aero interface, and my system is actually more responsive then before I upgraded. Of course that's probably as much a function or essentially re-paving my laptop as anything inherently faster about Vista.

There are still some issues. Visual Studio 2003 is officially not supported, however Visual Studio 2005 and of all things Visual Basic 6.0 are supported! There is even a CTP release of a Visual Studio Service Pack specifically for Vista.

The release notes for the service pack are here and the service pack itself can be downloaded from here. This is meant to be applied after the standard SP1 has been applied to Visual Studio.

In order to be able to continue to work with Visual Studio 2003 and in order to avoid installing VB6 on my primary development system I created a new Virtual Machine using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. This VM runs Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and is kept current with all Microsoft Service Packs and Updates and has it's own copy of Anti-virus and other tools and utilities. Additionally I installed Visual Studio 2003 and VB6 and all the associated add-ons and documentation and tools and utilities I normally use.

Now I have a complete fully functional (and peppy!) development environment in a box! Complete with Internet access, Source Control, and all the rest of the things we all take for granted in a development environment.

The result is I have two, segregated, development environments, one for legacy app's and support and one for all my current work! Each environment is cleaner and leaner than if I had everything installed on one system.

And the learning curve for Vista was not all that great I was pleased to discover, it actually is more intuitive in many ways, and things were where they "should" be. The only application I could not get working in Vista (but it is working fine in the XP based VM) was PGP Desktop.

In conclusion I am very happy with my system and the performance and stability of Vista in general. And the eye candy of Aero is just frosting on the cake!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

I have and love a PPC phone. It's a PPC6700 and runs Windows Mobile 5. Microsoft recently released a new tool that makes me love my phone even more!

Windows Live Search for Mobile just added a whole new dimension to my mobile experience. In and of itself it has justified the data package I have bought!

It brings localized search to your hand held! It works for either Java or WM powered devices so it's not an Microsoft only offering.

It supports scrollable, zoomable maps, driving directions, address look ups, business lookups, SMS capabilities pretty much everything search related.

But it gets better! I recently had need to meet a friend after work and was not familiar with the establishment or it's location.

A quick search yielded me the address and phone number (linked so I could click on it to make the call) and a map and driving directions!

This is the default starting page on my phone. I had already selected Raleigh, NC as my local area. Then I typed "playmakers" without the quotes, into the search bar and received the following listings. The first listing was the correct one.

Notice that the phone number is a clickable link! Clicking it dialed the number for me!

Also notice that it showed me a rough distance estimate. 3.36 miles.

I decided that I wanted the map and selected map from the menu and voila!

Here is the map I received, in just 2 -3 seconds!

 I could (and did) zoom in, click and drag the map around with my stylus, and switch to turn by turn text directions.

All in all a wonderful enabling technology! Run, don't walk, to your mobile browser and download this small application now!

The direct download link for your mobile phone is:

http://wls.live.com

The JME2 version for both the US and UK is also available there.

The application is GPS aware and works with some built in GPS's and almost all external GPS devices provided they can be configured to talk on a COM port.

Happy Mobile Searching!

Bob Porter

Over the years I have used a number of tools to read and keep track of my RSS subscriptions. Until very recently I was using FeedReader which is a free software application. I really liked it’s clean interface and overall capabilities. However it did not handle Podcasts and other enclosures very well. And lately, I noticed a number of feeds that it just could not display correctly.

Being free, I could not complain, however I did send several of the links that it had trouble with to Toomas Toots, the CEO and apparently also the programmer. Never did get a reply. Ah well, onwards…

Prior to FeedReader I had used SharpReader by Luke Hutteman, it too was a great, clean RSS reader, but it is showing it’s age now. It has not been updated since August, and most of the releases since July were bug fixes and minor tweaks. It also does not have any support for enclosures and was having a tough time with several feeds that I regularly read.

SharpReader was and remains donateware, so in a sense it is free but the author does ask for a donation and I imagine if a few more people would donate he might be motivated to continue development and add features. (I have not donated, and I should have, just wanted to make that clear.)

I have also used on and off Attensa and IntraVNews two readers that support direct integration with Outlook. I really do want to have my feeds integrated with Outlook, and yes I have tried the new integrated support built into Outlook 2007. But so far none of them are very compatible with the variety of feeds and formats out there.

Attensa and IntraVNews are both free, and both do a fairly good job of integrating into Outlook. But both suffer from the same problems of difficulty displaying feeds correctly, and they both had issues where I was trying to create a River of News format within Outlook, in Attensa this feature is supposedly built in, however I could not get it working in Outlook 2007.

I have also experimented with NewsGator and a number of other readers including the web based ones, Firefox’s reader, and a number of others.

Then, I found FeedDemon! I had looked at it before but had not wanted to pay $30.00 for an RSS reader when so many free choices are available. I also was clinging to the hope that I could get an integrated reader working in Outlook the way I wanted. FeedDemon is a Newsgator product, but it is standalone and mostly independent of the rest of their product line.

Aside from the fact that it does not integrate directly into Outlook, it has become my favorite RSS reader! It just works! And it handles Podcasts, integrates with either iTunes or Microsoft Media Player, supports playlists etc!!!!

I love it! I have moved all my subscriptions over to it and it runs when I start my system, I can’t say enough good things about the product. Everytime I think, “I wish it did XYZ”, I look and find the feature! For $29.95 you can’t go wrong! Every feed I have displays correctly  and crisply, it syncronizes my read/unread counts across my systems, it’s wonderful!

Highly recommended!!!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

Ted Demopoulos has just published his second book. He co-authored “Blogging for Business” which is a great resource if you are interested in blogging.

His new book is a different approach entirely, but still must read material for anyone blogging or interested in blogging. The book is a series of 101 interviews with real world bloggers and podcasters. -disclaimer time, I was one of the 101 he interviewed in the book. However I was interviewed on how I use blogs, not on my blogging skills.

You may have heard of Robert Scoble, he was a breakthrough blogger at Microsoft, and introduced a degree of transparency at Microsoft through his blogging. Indeed Microsoft now has probably the largest stable of company bloggers of any company.

Ted interviewed Jeff Foster of Symantec about Microsoft’s use of blogs, and Foster offered the opinion that blogging by Microsoft employees had changed his opinion of Microsoft positively. That’s a striking observation in my book, and it shows what a powerful tool blogging can be.

One of the more colorful interviews in the book is with Andre The Splogger, whom Ted met in a bar in Khanty-Maniysk in Central Siberia. (Is there no limit to where Ted will go for an interview?) Andre is a self described “cab driver, reindeer breeder, and Internet entrepreneur” that happens to run a Spam Blog, or Splog.

There are also chapters on Monetising blogs and podcasts, (yes Virginia, you can make money by blogging!), and even chapters on Military blogging. He covers the entire spectrum of blogging and podcasting including areas I never would have known about. (Student Loan blogs anyone? How about Mommy Casts?)

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in blogging or podcasting, or just generally interested in what all the fuss is about. The book does not require a technical degree to read, its written in a conversational style with lots of humor and clearly explained concepts. However, if you are technical, you will also bring away a great deal of information to help you evangalize and improve your own efforts.

And while you are at it, check out Ted’s own blog at Blogging for Business for even more resources and information.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

I downloaded and installed IE7 on the day it was released. And have been fairly pleased with it overall. I still tend to use Firefox as my default and main browser, but that may change.

One thing I have noticed of late, as soon as I get 4 – 6 tabs open in IE the CPU usage pegs, Memory use skyrockets and then the browser becomes non-responsive.

This was not the case following the initial installation, and I have added some toolbars, including the beta version of Yahoo’s new toolbar, so I suspect that the issue is a conflict.

If anyone knows of anything that could be causing this behavior please do let me know. And if I solve it I will post an update here.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

I own two Vonage phone adapters. The first is one of the Linksys 2 line adapters, the other is a VTech wireless adapter.

The Linksys system was and remains associated with my business Vonage account, which I pay for and use.

The VTech unit I also purchased, but associated it with an account owned by someone else as I was using it to work with them. I paid for the hardware, but not the account.

Now, here is the beware part. I wanted to move the wireless VTech onto my account to replace the older Linksys adapter and gain the flexibility to use the wireless phones.

No can do, apparently there is a balance owing on the other account, and even though I bought and paid for the hardware, I can no longer use it until the balance on the other account is paid up.

I cannot even pay the outstanding balance myself and close the account. So in essence I am out $100.00 for the hardware.

Something to think about before you do business with Vonage.

Robert Porter

Updated

I have recently read two books. One of which is not new, but which I now wish I had bought years ago.

Both books are exceptional, both kept me reading, both gave me equal shares of good dreams and some real nightmares.

I am probably the last person in the country to have read “The World is Flat” by New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman. But if I am not the last and you have not yet read this powerful book, then RUN to the bookstore and buy a copy!

There has been more discussion and regurgitation of this book than any other I have seen in recent times, so I won’t add any more, other than to say, go buy it, but more importantly READ it.

The other book that I have recently read and also could not put down was “Micro ISV – From Vision to Reality” by Bob Walsh. This book is much more than yet another “How to start a business and be the next Bill Gates” type of book that bookstores are way to full of.

This book looks at the factors driving a whole new type of business, and how to grab hold of a piece of that for yourself.

I would describe myself as “Marketing Challenged”, I have plenty of idea’s even a few ready to go products, but I am terrible when it comes to marketing.

This book has taught me more in one sitting than years of reading other books and talking to professionals.

No, it won’t replace true marketing help, but it sure does an excellent job helping you understand how to look for and find what you need, and how to at least get your business to the point where you can attract and afford marketing help.

Check out http://mymicroisv.com it is a “Blog+resources” site maintained/run by the author, Bob Walsh. It does not have a forum system, by design, but it does offer a wealth of resources for anyone considering becoming a Micro-ISV. The “missing” forums? You can find those here at Joel on Software!

Go get ‘em, read ‘em, then repeat!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

As you may recall in a previous blog post I mentioned I had changed from a Linksys to a Netgear router following a failure.

Well one of the un-looked for benefits of doing so was that the Netgear router appears to do a better job of handling data. I also recently upgraded my DSL to the fastest non business option that Bellsouth offered. This is their FastAccess DSL Xtreme 6.0 which is still anemic when compared to Europe and Asia but pretty fast for the US. Connected directly to the DSL modem I ran several speed tests.

The advertised speed for my brand of DSL was 6.0 Mbps down and 512 Kbps up. With the computer directly attached to the modem I was able to achieve these speeds.

I then bridged the modem and added the Linksys router to the equation. The best I was able to achieve then was 4.5 Mbps down and 380 Kbps up. The router overhead was significant.

On a whim I decided to re-run the speed tests now that I have the Netgear router in place.

This was amazing! After running the tests a number of times it is apparent that the Netgear router does not add as much “overhead” as the Linksys router. Now this is all very unscientific, I did not track the time of day, or day of week I ran the previous tests, and to be fair I should have run a number of tests over a longer period of time and from multiple locations etc. However, it is encouraging!

I know that the Linksys routers firmware source code is available, I wonder if the same is true of Netgear? And if so I wonder has anyone made any comparisons in efficiency and overall ability between the two?

Cheers,

Robert Porter

I have gone through 3 Linksys Wireless Routers in under 2 years. All were some variant of the WRTG54G. I tried numerous firmware versions including 3rd party firmware with the first 2, the last one I left vanilla other than one upgrade just after purchase to the latest available firmware from Linksys’s web site.

The first 2 turned into semi bricks. Meaning lights were on but no one was home. The first one allowed wireless connections, but no longer allowed wired connections, even though the link lights showed normal for connected ports on the front panel. I reset, repowered, and reflashed the first one, all without error, all without success.

The second one lost the wan port. After the second one I began to suspect power transients or possible spikes on the network itself. However I placed a small hub between the router and the modem (for network sniffing) and it had no issues, nor did the DSL modem. The router is powered by a DC transformer, I checked for voltage levels and they were where they should be etc.

The third one lost the wireless lan, computers could see the AP, and sometimes even connect, but they never remained connected longer than 10 seconds, and the dang thing would never connect more than once. I tried 3 different computers and my PPC phone that has Wifi, all to no avail.

So this time I bought a Netgear Wireless router. I have used Linksys since their very first broadband router came out, but after going through 3 routers in less than 2 years I decided it might be time for a change. I have had numerous clients that used both Linksys and Netgear (as well as other brands), and could not remember hearing of any difficulties with Netgear, so I plunked down 39.99 for a brand new Wireless G 4 port router.

Installation was straight forward, I connected the router directly to my laptop, ignored the insert CD first warnings, and fired up IE. Got to the setup screens, configured the router for my PPoE connection and let it suck down the DNS and static IP from my ISP. (Bellsouth recently offered me a static IP address for no charge!).

Blamo, everything was up and running, I reconfigured the wireless settings, changed the SSID, and setup WPA security, also changed the admin password etc. All my wireless clients connected no problem, on the same channel (6) that the Linksys had been running.

We shall see what happens now, but so far the Netgear had performed flawlessly. One thing I did notice, the DDNS offerings on Netgear do not include TZO, so I downloaded and setup the software client to run as a service on one of my desktops so not a show stopper but I wonder why it was not an option?