December 2007
You are currently browsing the articles from TechToolBlog written in the month of December 2007.
So a friend of mine was given a title of "webmaster" recently to help manage his companies website. Not a true programmer but a pretty smart guy none the less. He had some issues come up and wanted some "expert" advice, after not finding any experts he turned to me ;). So my first question is what is the platform: Windows 2003 server, IIS 6, SQL 2k5, this was all sounding warm and fuzzy to me, but then he dropped the Adobe Coldfusion MX 8 Server. Memories flashed in my head, ala 2001ish, working with the nightmare that is/was Coldfusion. No, say it ain’t so, Coldfusion couldn’t have survived in the almost year 2008, could it?
Why Coldfusion Sucks, not my cup of tea
- It’s slower then other languages
- It uses markup tags similar to html for server side programming
- Doing basic OOP is hard, MVC is even harder.
- Expensive, even Microsoft doesn’t charge for ASP.NET
- Not Open Source, compared to Ruby or PHP or even .NET’s new view source license.
- Turned POST, GET, & FORM upside down. They use these keywords in the complete opposite of anyone else.
What’s nice about Coldfusion
- A bridge between .NET and Java. I can’t believe many are doing it but in v8 you are suppose to be able to reference .NET assemblies and java classes in the same file.
- Create PDF via markup.
Yeah that’s about it I can see. If anyone out there is part of an organization thinking about deploying a new project in Coldfusion, get out now. Web platforms that aren’t going anywhere in the next 10 years and don’t suck: ASP.NET, Java, PHP, Perl, and maybe Ruby/Python (they don’t suck, but not completely sold they are are going to be around in 10 years) . Pick one of these and thank me later.
Written by Tim on December 28th, 2007 with 12 comments.
Read more articles on tools.
I’ve been in search of a good PHP editor for almost 3 years. In the end I always go back to using Notepad++ or good old Homesite. I really think I prefer C# to PHP overall because of Visual Studio. I tried PhpED a while back and although it looked promising back then it wasn’t enough to compel me use full time or spend any money on. I decided recently to give it another try.
Likes:
- Right click a include-> Got To File. Brings up the function calls, class definition files etc… This worked 75% of the time. When it didn’t work I wasn’t told why.
- Speed, so far this thing is fast which is great, a couple hang ups but nothing major.
- File Explorer is really fast.
- Recognizes mono fonts differently, gives you a separate list of these. A nice extra touch.
- Highlight parts of variable is smart enough to automatically highlight the rest of the variable.
- Intellisense picks up on dynamic variables.
- Code Templates, they have the standard templates built in but also a way for you to add your own as needed.
Dislikes:
- Save a New file, always wants me to put in a project, I prefer to just save it to a file location.
- Project. Maybe I haven’t spent enough time with this program and maybe saving things via projects improves "Go to File", but I prefer to edit files via file explorer.
Overall
This is the best PHP ide I’ve tried by far. It doesn’t seem clunky like Zend Studio. The list price is $299.00 and well worth the investment for you PHP developers.
Written by Tim on December 27th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on tools.
Next week has to be the best time of they year to get work done, no meetings scheduled just you and some code 
Iconfinder - A great site to find those icons for your web applications, lets you search based on size and background color.
LINQ to SQL - Tailoring the mapping at runtime via Steen
High Performance AJAX Applciations - A Yahoo talk about this issue, it starts out slow but there are some really good tips given.
Ext 2.0 & Google Chart - I haven’t used extJS but plan to on my next php/ajax application I write
NicEdit - A WYSIWYG editor for any textarea, no plugins besides one javascript file.
XP SP3 for download
Krypton 2.7.0 Released - Free controls for Windows.Forms
Dissecting ASP.NET Version 3.5’s Web.config File
Written by Tim on December 21st, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Daily Finds.
Moved my feed over to feedburner so hopefully everything is still working ok.
22Books Released - Done is RoR
Running the IT Infrastructure at Microsoft - via Larkware. I work with a bunch of developers but can’t imagine working with thousands on IT infrastructure type of stuff.
Facebook Platform is open - About time
New SubSonic Forums - It needed it badly too
New Google Toolbar (beta) released - Auto Fill is better, take your custom toolbar across computers, that’s about it.
phpBB 3 Gold Released
Written by Tim on December 14th, 2007 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Daily Finds.
Debug Visualizer for SubSonic Collections
PopFly & SharePoint - How many people would really do something like this in a production environment… not me
LINQ to DataSet - I’m currently doing my first LINQ project so this was useful for me
Office 2007 SP 1 Released
Compiz Fusion project - Yeah I do wish my OS did this
Written by Tim on December 12th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Daily Finds.
20 tools for web application development - Most are geared to the OS X developers but that’s ok, right? -Via Avery
Google Chart API Released
Enhancing your Gridview - Another great post from Matt Berseth, this guy needs a MVP award.
Windows Service Installs Itself - Instead of manually using InstallUtil
LINQ to SQL and the Web.Config ConnectionString Value
Written by Tim on December 7th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Daily Finds.
ASP.NET / Web Development
Preview of MVC Toolkit - I’m sure the name will change just to throw is off
Passing ViewDate from Controllers to View
Flot .01 Released - A jquery graph engine
Microsoft Live Labs Volta Released - I’m checking into this, but so far hearing it looks up web browsers and pushes way to much javascript back to the browser
Misc
Finding Icons for your applications - Via Christopher Steen
Written by Tim on December 6th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Daily Finds.
Finally got some snow today in Cincinnati.
Software Development
SubSonic Limitations Part 1
SubSonic Limitations Part 2
Using Regular Expressions in C# vs PHP
Misc
Google Mobile Updated - Specifically for the iPhone but my Blackberry got a new search interface too
Registration for Convergence 2008 Orlando opens - The place to be for Microsoft Dynamics people
Gmail + chat + AIM - AIM now inside of Gmail - Microsoft Live, & Yahoo are so behind the game that only thing that keeps them in it is their "old" customer base.
Written by Tim on December 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Daily Finds.
