There are a number of add-on's for Fiddler, and every time I have to install Fiddler on a new machine I am always surprised when I go to use an inspector only to find out it is not there.

The best source of information for Fiddler Add-On's is the Fiddler Web Site itself. There is an Add-On link from the home page.

My favorites are:

The Syntax View Inspector

This add-on shows you syntax colored views of the captured session traffic.

The Web View Inspector

This inspector shows you the session data as it would be rendered via IE's rendering engine.

These are only two of the many available add-on's for Fiddler. But they give you a feel for what is available, and of course if there is a feature you want or need that is not already available, you can always write your own inspector!

Step by step instructions on building your own inspector are available here. Fiddler can be extended with .NET code or by using it's own built in Fiddler Script engine.

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

Like most of us I use a number of FTP sites in the course of my daily work. I use FileZilla, I have a U3 compatible version on my USB Thumbdrive, and the "regular" client installed just about everywhere else.

FileZilla like most clients, has an address book that you can store connection information, including usernames and (optionally) passwords in. And on my thumb drive and home clients I do store the passwords, and I typically also create a SplashID entry in my primary password keeper. I sync SplashID to my phone, or I used to, until a combination of Vista, Windows Mobile 6, and Vista's new replacement for ActiveSync now called Windows Mobile Device Center, rendered syncing unworkable. (Story for another post!)

I recently had need to communicate the username and password for an FTP login to someone else, and without access to my stored passwords and due to my inability to remember 38,359 passwords off the top of my head I was out of luck. Until I remembered Microsoft Network Monitor!

I fired up NetMon and created a new Capture Tab as shown: (Click on the image for a full size view)

Then in the Display Filter I entered a filter expression that consisted of the destination address I wanted to capture traffic going to, and the protocol I was interested in, in this case FTP.

(The latest versions of NetMon have intellisense for filters built in which makes writing filters much easier. Not using a filter means you would have to wade through several hundred to a few thousand lines of captured traffic on a typical network.)

Then I fired up my FTP client, switched back to Network Monitor, started the capture, switched back to the FTP client and initiated a connection. Once the connection was complete, I switched back to Network Monitor and stopped the capture and there was my password!

Now this works best if it is a non encrypted connection, although having not tried it with an SSH connection I am not sure if it would not work there as well.

There are dozens of good network sniffers and packet capture utilities out there, I use NetMon and WireShark as my two standbys. NetMon I use for day to day captures when I am diagnosing web services traffic, or local network issues, WireShark I bring out when I need the "big guns" looking for intrusion or other wide area issues, like traffic trends etc.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

Do you, like me, have multiple Windows Live ID's? Or old passport accounts? Want to link them? Now you can!

Windows Live now has a service that let's you link multiple ID's together. The site offers the following explanation of the service:

About Linked IDs

If you have a Windows Live ID that you use for work and one that you use at home, you can link them. When you link more than one Windows Live ID, you can sign in to a Windows Live site or service with one account and still have access to information related to the linked accounts.

Basically it allows you to have access to both ID's and their respective contact lists etc, while signed in with one of them.

Click here to explore the Linked ID service.

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

In a word, MsiZap. A great utility I stumbled on while looking for some help getting rid of entries in my Add/Remove programs list that had issues or failures with uninstalling.

Here is the article on the utility and it's usage. It worked well for me, sharing now with you!

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

Microsoft has released the latest version of their Power Pack for Visual Basic 2005. Get your copy while it's still spinning!

Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Power Packs 2.0 - Download

Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Power Packs 2.0 - Information

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

I have recently been experimenting (Again) with adding Unit Testing to several of the side projects I work on. And I have finally settled on the following tool combination.

• TestDriven.Net
• mbUnit
• CrusieControl.Net
• FxCop

I stayed away from NUnit because mbUnit appears to be so much more extensible. And the integration with TestDriven.Net is excellent.

XtUnit has recently come to my attention as well. Check this blog entry on Roy Osherove's blog for more info. This is the approach I hope to take in solving the rather messy issue of cleaning my database out after every test run.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Update: When I got home I reread Roy's post and here is a link to another of his posts that has even more useful info. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________

I have been using CCNet for some time now to do my continuous integration builds, and thought it was time to begin adding tests and code coverage as well as FxCop analysis as several of the projects are within sight of a release window now.

More on that later...

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

One of the things that makes developers passionate is our tools! We would, if left to our own devices, spend the rest of our lives making tools to make our job easier. Luckily some people actually get paid to perform this wonderful activity.

This post is the introductory post in what will be a very intermittent series about tools I use to do my job, what I like and dislike about them, and how they help me do the work that actually generates my income.

There are a number of other blogger's that publish various lists of tools that they use. The best example, IMHO, of this is Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows.

Scott publishes a yearly version of this list, and periodically updates individual entries scattered through the year as well. It's a fantastically valuable starting point for anyone developing in the Windows environment to begin looking for recommendations for tools.

I am going to try and go more in depth on a specific tool, or set of related tools and provide some background on what I needed to accomplish, what my selection criteria were and how my experience has been.

Commercial or Open/Shared Source and everything in between are on my system and in my arsenal. I am, like most of us, sensitive to cost to some degree. I am happy to pay a fair price for a great tool. But I do have a budget (who does not) and so I tend to look for value pretty carefully.

My primary criteria tend to be results oriented, meaning I want tools that tend to do something very very well and that do not require a steep learning curve to use them effectively.

So, with all the above in mind, my next post will be on ORM tools and persistence layers, stay tuned!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

If you have used Visual Studio 2005 for any length of time, particularly if you have installed the .NET 3.0 bits in either Beta or Release form, you may have suddenly seen some or all of your project templates in the New Project dialog disappear!

I wrote about this and a related issue before but this time around the fix was not so simple. I had installed the WWF and WCF bits along with the .NET 3.0 SDK. Somewhere in the process I lost the Windows Application template for VB.NET.

This lead me to try a number of potential fixes outlined in this blog post on Eric Hammersley's blog. None of the fixes outlined there helped. Neither did uninstalling and reinstalling Visual Studio itself. I also uninstalled the 3.0 bits, all add-ins, etc.

So I started doing some digging, the way the templates, at least the stock ones, seem to work is that there is a series of directories in this folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE

The ones of interest are: ProjectTemplates, ProjectTemplatesCache, ItemTemplates, ItemTemplatesCache.

The Templates directories contain the "Master" copies, the Cache versions of the folders contain the copies that are displayed in the New Project or Add Item dialog boxes. They are normally identical.

The command devenv /InstallVSTemplates run from a Visual Studio command prompt should sync the directories up. But this had not happened on my system. Repeated execution of the command resulted in no change.

Then I began to wonder, after all I am running Vista, even though I had made my account a member of the Administrators group to resolve this issue (not recommended by the way), I remembered that on Vista that was actually only making me an "almost" administrator.

So I logged in as the real administrator account, opened a Visual Studio Command Prompt and executed the devenv /InstallVSTemplates command and this time the hard drive lit up and there was a perceptible delay before the command prompt reappeared.

I logged out, logged back in as my own account and launched Visual Studio and the templates were back again!

Further spelunking in the Application event log showed that about two days before Visual Studio had started to complain that my cache directories were not in sync, and that several templates were missing their templatename.vstemplate files.

Templates are a basically zip files which include a vstemplate file that captures the references and directory structure of the template when it is expanded and created. Something had corrupted the cache copies and apparently I did not have enough rights to copy the originals over top of the cache copies.

More disturbing was that reinstalling Visual Studio did not fix the issue! But whatever the reason the files became damaged, logging in as administrator resolved the issue.

Hope this helps someone else!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

UPDATE: I forgot to mention, don't try just copying the directories from the master copies into the cache folders. There is more involved than a simple copy operation and if you just physically copy the files you will lose ALL of your templates. I know, I tried.

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

Microsoft has release SQL Server 2005 SP2 as of yesterday February 19, 2007. The list of bug fixes contained in SP2 are detailed KB921896. The readme for the service pack is here, and the Service Pack download page is here.

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 is a free download and is fully Vista compatible, as both a quest or host OS. I downloaded and installed it and it ran all my existing 2004 VM's with no problems, I did however update the Virtual Machine Extensions in all the existing VM's.

You can download Virtual PC 2007 here.

Happy downloading!

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

I have given IE7 a fair chance, really… well I have! It started out as my default browser shortly after it was released. Then, after a week of watching it hang, and bring down half my system with it, I demoted it to my not default browser and put Firefox back as my default browser.

Of course various sites still require IE to function so I kept it going and would use it several times a day. But over the weeks it kept getting ever more fragile, and was finally starting to crash just loading Google as my home page.

(Hmmmmm, would Google do… Nah, I am not that much of a conspiracy nut!!!)

Anyway, today was the proverbial last straw and I uninstalled IE7. I am now happily back to IE6 for all things ActiveX and Microsoft specific, and use Firefox 2.0 for most of my day to day browsing. I can’t exist without some flavor of IE installed and 7 was just not working.

I will try it again, maybe when 7.1 comes out?

Cheers,

Robert 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

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

My friend, Ken Spry, sent me a link the other day to a web site that tests your connection (broadband) speeds. I tried both it and BellSouth’s test page today just for comparison sake.

Here are the results from http://www.speedtest.net/: (click the image for a larger view)

The interface for the speedtest.net version is all shiney and nice! It’s fun to use as well.

And here are the results from http://speed.fastaccess.com/:

They appear to agree with each other which is nice, I am never sure if the ISP based speed test is “rigged” to report what they sold you vs. what you are actually getting.

Like most geeks, I like to know as much information as possible about my environment. Over time, and with experience you begin to learn which indicators about your environment are important to you.

In this case, I am speaking about my computers’ environment. And I have determined that for me to feel comfortable about the relative health of my system there are a few key indicators that I like to keep track of.

Windows Management Instrumentation or WMI for short, is a set of API’s, functions and scripts that allow you or a program to determine real time and static indicators about your system, or your entire network for that matter. WMI has allowed me to track either summary data or drill into the depths of my system to determine what exactly is happening.

A simple example that I use daily is a Yahoo Widget called Sys Monitor. Yahoo Widgets are small, typically single purpose, programs that are run by the Yahoo Widget engine. This engine was originally called Konfabulator but renamed when Yahoo bought it. The engine is basically a JavaScript runtime engine.

The Sys Monitor, as I have it configured, displays the current system up time, CPU and Memory load, Swap file usage and size, battery charge level, Wireless signal strength and SSID connected too, as well as the IP address both local and external. And hard drive size information as well as used vs. free.

These metrics are the ones of most interest to me. But the widget can display a number of others as well.

I use a number of other Widgets, but this particular one I use all the time, it’s small and sits quietly on the desktop so that I can tell at a glance how I am doing. It has often saved me from trying to download or copy files to a drive that was almost full, and has warned me when something was eating physical memory, or hogging the CPU.

Recommended.

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?