October 2008

You are currently browsing the articles from TechToolBlog written in the month of October 2008.

Written by Tim on October 27th, 2008 with no comments.
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Daily Find #106

Bloglines reliability has gotten worse and worse over the years. I only wish Google reader wasn’t so ugly or I would switch today…

Nice write up on ASP.NET MVC beta

Fiddler on Firefox

Ann Arbor Day of .NET 2008 – Recap

Microsoft Dogfood Developers Conference in Columbus

Tweet what you spend – I see twitter/clones being used more & more for apps

Freeing up disk space on Vista

Written by Tim on October 21st, 2008 with 1 comment.
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Daily Find #105

15 Tools for monitoring website popularity

30 tabs and accordion scripts

You know the economy is down in the programming world…

Restore SQL backup via command line

Preventing CSRF AND XSRF Attacks

Mozilla forming Developer Tools for the Web

Written by Tim on October 16th, 2008 with 1 comment.
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Must Have Software 2008 Edition

Development

FireFox 3 – Extensions have made this my main web development browser. Too bad it feel clunky now compared to Chrome

FireBug – The best toolkit for any web developer out there.

Web Developer Toolkit – I uses this less and less with Firebug getting the job done 90% of the time.

Better Gmail – Makes gmail go over a SSL connection and also replaces attachment images with a nice icon representation. I love the new skin, but at last Gmail is too slow on FF, have to use it on Chrome

ColorZilla – A great tool to quickly find the HEX value of anything on any web page.

Visual Studio 2008 – Visual Studio is still the standard for IDE’s. Of course it could always be faster but it is really nice.

Resharper – Love rescharper, cleans my code as I type.

Microsoft SQL Server – Most .NET projects connect to this so it’s a good idea to have a local copy running

Management Studio – At first I wasn’t a Management Studio fan, give me back the 2000 version of Enterprise Manager and Query Editer. Nevermind. Management Studio is double sweet for the price of one.

Notepad++ – My texteditior and most of the time PHP ide of choice. Fast, simple, customizable, a few nice plugins. Love the custom color schemes, I go dark.

WinSCP – A free opensource SFTP manager for when you have to work on the nix machines. FileZilla now does SFTP so I’m sure this is here anymore except it comes with PUTTY and they have a nice integration going.

FileZilla – Free, open source, clean, simple FTP client. Now does SFTP but doesn’t have way to open a terminal session like WinSCP.

Navicat – My preferred mysql manager of choice, although their query interface needs improvement.

CodeIgniter – Loving this PHP MVC framework. Simpler then cakePHP. I’m building a little something, something in this, more to come on that front.

IE Tester – A must for web developers. Test against IE 5 and up all on the same machine.

Surround SCM – Of course my version control software of choice. Cross platform, really nice GUI, intuitive interface. Plus integrates on almost all IDEs.

TestTrack Pro – Our bug tracking software. Great workflow engine.

QA Wizard Pro – Automated testing tool.

BitNami Wamp Stack – PHP development made much easier on windows.

Code Translator – I use to be a vb.net guy, this tools can be life saver.

System

Chrome – Some how this became my default browser of choice in less then 2 weeks. It’s fast.

iTunes – I use iTunes to manage my podcast listening list. It does a great job at that.

mRemote – Where would I be with out this terminal services manager.

Office 2007 – The biggest upgrade in Microsoft’s office line in some time. The ribbon bar is nice and I love how they brought really useful features to the forefront.

Fireworks – Still better then photoshop for web graphics and cutting

Blackberry Manager – For upgrading your firmware on your crackberry and other crackberry tasks.

TweetDeck – Best twitter client I have found

Windows Live Writer – Who knew Microsoft could put out a nice Web 2.0 , errrr, Windows client. Writing this post in Live writer as we speak…

CCleaner – Free PC crap cleaner.

7Zip – Can handle tar, zip, gz, and other compressed formats,

Foxit – PDF reader software. Runs so much smaller then Adobe.

FreeRam XP Pro – RAM manager

Process Explorer – Free microsoft add on, this should replace task manager.

SlickRun – Launcher program

CleanMem – Runs in the background to release RAM

UltraMon – essential if you have more then 1 monitor.

Safari for Windows – because I have too

Sites

bloglines – nicer interface then Google Reader

gmail – the standard for web based email

Written by Tim on October 14th, 2008 with no comments.
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Export Surround SCM settings

Changing computers is a drag, you have to get your data to the new machine, programs installed, and settings transferred. If you are using Surround SCM (and why wouldn’t you), here is the way you can export and import your settings.

Start –> Run –> “regedit”

Navigate to : HKEY_CURRENT_USER->SOFTWARE->Seapine Software->Surround SCM->SCM Client

Right click the SCM Client folder and click “Export”. Save this file locally and then move the file over to your new PC. After installing Surround SCM on your new machine, click this registry file and install. You should now have settings (including window positions) transferred over.

Written by Tim on October 8th, 2008 with no comments.
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Kill Open Applications Script

I tend to put my laptop to “sleep” at the end of the office day but often fire it back up at home. One bad habit of mine is having too many apps running at the same time (thanks to UltraMon the problem is now worse). Putting a PC into “sleep” tries to commit things to RAM and if it runs out (it does) then to hard disk. “Awakening” causes it to push things off of the hard disk and back into memory. This takes a long time. My solution was a simple VBS script to transverse and kill the most common applications right before “sleep”. I’ve tied this to a slickrun command “kill” to make it easier to run. Script below, enjoy!


strComputer = "." 
dim oKillThese      
oKillThese = Array("firefox.exe", "iexplorer.exe", "safari.exe", "TweetDeck.exe", "OUTLOOK.EXE", "chrome.exe", "notepad++.exe", "iTunes.exe", "javaw.exe", "cmd.exe", "Moe.exe", "Surround SCM Client.exe", "devenv.exe", "SqlWb.exe", "Navicat.exe") 
For Each x in oKillThese 
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _      
    & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")       
Set colProcessList = objWMIService.ExecQuery _       
    ("SELECT * FROM Win32_Process WHERE Name = ‘" & x & "’")       
For Each objProcess in colProcessList       
    objProcess.Terminate()       
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