Color tools for the design impaired
"Michael Moncur has listed a number of color tools in his post Color tools for the design impaired. I particularly like the Color Scheme Generator 2. These really help someone like me, who doesn't know crap about proper color combinations.
Michael also has a post about Web icons for the design impaired."
Oh yeah... I SO need these.
NDepend
"Summary
NDepend analyses .NET assemblies of an application and generates design quality metrics. NDepend allows you to automatically measure the quality of a design in terms of its extensibility, reusability and maintainability to effectively manage and control the assemblies' dependencies of your .NET applications. Moreover, NDepend helps you to get a thorough view of the topology of your application, at component at type and at member level. You can view here a report made by NDepend on itself, and here a report made by NDepend on the NUnit v2.1 application.
14 reasons to use NDepend on your applications Now
NDepend helps you detect which assemblies are potentially painful to maintain (i.e concrete and stable) and which assemblies are potentially useless (i.e abstract and instable).
NDepend provides many metrics, at application level, at assembly level, at type level (LCOM, RFT…) and at IL instruction level (CC, number of instruction).
NDepend detects and yields dependency cycles between your assemblies.
NDepend provides a build order for your assemblies (only if no cycle is detected). This order is also useful when using tools for obfuscation.
NDepend builds the diagram of assemblies’ dependencies.
NDepend enumerates all types that depend on a particular type.
NDepend warns you when an assembly depends on a less stable assembly than itself.
NDepend warns you when the visibility of a type or of a member is not optimal (in the context of the analysed application).
NDepend warns you when a type or a member is not used (in the context of the analysed application).
NDepend is non-intrusive (you don’t have to modify or to recompile your source code to use it).
NDepend is easy to tackle with (it won’t take you more than 10 minutes to tune it to analyse a 50 assemblies application).
NDepend has been optimized for real-world applications (it analyses around 1.000.000 IL instructions per minute).
NDepend stores all its results in some XML files readily exploitable from your build process.
NDepend is free and open source.
...."
Sounds kind of interesting. And I like diagrams ("NDepend builds the diagram of assemblies’ dependencies."). I guess I'm just a visual kind of guy...
(via the always outstanding Larkware - The Daily Grind 565)
Alex Lowe : When Forms Authentication attacks...
"Forms authentication is a good thing. I mean, it definitely lowers the bar for developers in terms of the amount of work required to setup up simple authentication functionality in their ASP.NET applications. By default, forms authentication is setup to both encrypt and perform data validation (ensure the cookie came from the server and that it hasn't been tampered with) on the cookie that is issued at login. This cookie doesn't store a great deal of information but it does have the username and most role based systems key on the username. If, for example, you set the Protection attribute of the Forms element in the web.config to 'None' then you are opening your system up to simple cookie replay attacks. This kind of attack can be particularly easy if someone is using an application where they can run a local instance that is virtually identical to the system they wish to hack (like open source applications for example). In this case, how does this kind of attack work: ...
[Greg: See original post for details]
... The lesson here is that you should all make sure that your Protection attribute is set to 'All' which is the most secure of the options. Thankfully, 'All' is the default for all ASP.NET applications."
Interesting...
Kind of like hacking SourceSafe integrated security. Ever lost your SS "admin" user password? Then you know what I'm talking about...
Alextronic Discovery
"... Native native review is the ability to review electronic data right from its actual source. We aint' talkin' print/scan/ocr here nor are we even talkin' bout tiffin' ... Nope. We're looking at the file via a file viewer or pulling the application up from its bootstraps inside of its own application. Some folks call the review process which utlizes .tiff's produced by the ED vendor a native review, but take tiffs out of the picture and you're sitting pretty with a native native review. That's the kind of review that would make Sitting Bull look like a half breed. ..."
Many of you will care less about this topic, but since this is MY blog... ;)
Native review is becoming an "issue" in my industry. This article highlights some of the problems/questions/issues with it and that fact that no one has really figured out a good solution. The EDD industry is moving fast and is as close to "bleeding edge" as the legal lit support is likely to get.
One thing in this article, and that many in the industry still glom on to... the price of Tiff'ing (i.e. conversion of native files to pages).
I have to be careful here. Since this is what I do, and saying too much might be a CLM (career limiting move). I have strong feelings on this subject, but since I play a role in influencing internal direction on this... well showing all my cards here would probably be bad.
sigh...
Let me just say the per page pricing is a hold over from the boxes of papers world. It's time to think outside of those boxes... (Sorry, had too :)
[tip] Knoppix cheat code for Virtual PC Video
"Knoppix video drivers default to 24 bit color depth, and Virtual PC's emulated S3 Trio video adapter only goes up to 16 bit color depth. As a result, running Knoppix under VPC drops back to 256 color mode. This wouldn't be much of a problem with plain Linux since you can configure your display and reboot, but reboots with a Live CD forget all changes and you're back to square one.
This applies to Knoppix variants like Monoppix (Knoppix with Mono - give it a try!) as well.
You can get by with an ugly 256 color display for some programs (like Konsole and Konqueror), but many are completely unusable (Monodevelop and Mozilla, for instance). I'm guessing the KDE elements were designed for 256 colors, while Gnome / GTK apps require higher color depth, but that's just speculation.
This video problem has been known to reduce grown men like Stefano to tears (if we judge from the emoticon, he's still distraught about it to this day!):
This is the moment to cry... Monodevelop is totally unreadable and unusable under VPC (as you can see on the image ).
Weep no more, Stefano! I finally came up with the Knoppix 'cheat code' to set the color depth correctly under VPC:
knoppix xserver=XFree86 xmodule=s3 depth=16"
VERY COOL. I gave up playing with Monoppix/Monodevelop because of this VPC video issue. Time to dust off the ISO.
My RSS subscriptions pay off yet again...
PCWorld.com - Best, Free Back-Up Utilities
"Here are our favorite, free back-up programs--so now there's no excuse for not creating a safe copy of your data.
SyncBack v3.2.4
EZBack-it-up v2.0.1
Back It Up! v5.4.9.125
Cobian Backup v6.1.1.264
Back4Win"
I really need to do some data backups. And now that I have a dual layer DVD burner, I don't have any excuses (well, there is that yard work I have to do... and some house painting... and I DO have to go to the dentist...)
(via Lockergnome - Best Free Backup Utilities)
Microsoft may offer peek at SQL Server code | CNET News.com
"Will the software industry's wave of open-source databases spill onto Microsoft's turf?
Perhaps. The software giant is considering making the source code for its SQL Server database available to customers, according to Tom Rizzo, director of product management in Microsoft's SQL Server unit.
In an interview with CNET News.com, Rizzo said that the company is thinking about including the forthcoming SQL Server 2005 in Microsoft's shared-source program for disclosing product source code to customers. ..."
While that might be cool, personally I really could care less. I have so much business, let's make some money so we can pay the bills and your salary, related code to write that there's just no way I could ever think of looking at the SQL Server source (even if I had it).
Man, I just want use it. I just want it to work. Kind of like hotdogs. I just want to eat them. I don't need or want to know how they are made...
Well back to that work... ;)
JPL.NASA.GOV: Cassini Wallpapers
Some very cool JPL wallpaper.
These are even cooler than the Hubble ones, http://hubblesite.org/gallery/wallpaper/
The Code Project - DotLucene: Full-Text Search for Your Intranet or Website using 37 Lines of Code - C# Programming
"Can be a full-text search coded on 37 lines? Well, I am going to cheat a bit and use DotLucene for the dirty work. DotLucene is a .NET port of Jakarta Lucene search engine maintained by George Aroush et al. Here is a quick list of features:
It can be used in ASP.NET, WinForms or console applications.
Very good performance
Ranked search results
Search query highlighting in results
Searches structured and unstructured data
Metadata searching (query by date, search custom fields...)
Index size approximately 30% of the indexed text
Can store also full indexed documents
Pure managed .NET in a single assembly (244 kB)
Very friendly licensing (Apache Software License 2.0)
Localizable (support for Brazilian, Czech, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, Japanese, Korean and Russian included)
Extensible (source code included) ..."
I've blogged about DotLucene before... One of the issues with it can be its learning curve. This article will help you a great deal on that curve.
It makes it look easy to use DotLucene (and makes me feel like a dummy for thinking there's a curve.. sigh)
RsWebParts 1.3
"Just finished uploading the RsWebParts 1.3 package to the project site. I added in a quick fix for the parameters issue. The fix is that you can now include the standard Reporting Services toolbar and parameters which should fix the problem. It isn't as flexible and it takes up some of the report view space, but it works until I come up with something better.
Thanks to everyone for all the great feedback, especially David Korn for testing out the new version."
The very cool RSWebParts has been rev'ed to 1.3. I've so been meaning to play with this.
For more details check out the outstanding posts from Bryant Likes such as
Reporting Services WebParts - Part I.
RSS Popper: Home - RSS aggregator for Outlook
"RSS Popper is a news aggregator add-in for Outlook. News items delivered directly to Outlook as e-mails. No need to use a separate program for reading RSS anymore. All RSS/RDF/Atom formats are supported.
Just download, install, set you favorite news feeds, and you're ready to go."
Very cool! Just the kind of thing (i.e. Free and integrated with Outlook) for internal RSS usage. I think RSS is a perfect fit for many information needs at my place.
I've been wanting to push for internal RSS usage (for reports, our SharePoint portal, etc, etc), but could not justify buying anything nor asking our end users to run another app. And I've been too busy to write my own...
This looks like what I've been waiting for.
Now to download and play with this and then being creating feeds for people... Life is good. (I just wish I had one :)
(via Larkware - The Daily Grind 565)
NBC 4 - News - Loose Tiger Shot To Death In Moorpark
"Tuesday, officials said a new photo indicated the cat whose prints had previously been found in the Moorpark/Simi Valley area may have also been roaming around Thousand Oaks and Camarillo."
Glad that it's no longer roaming around, but I'm kind of sad that they had to kill it. I can understand it though... Check out the SIZE of the tiger in the pictures. Man I'd hate to be facing THAT thing down.
I guess I can let my cat back inside again. (um...err... I mean let it out again... yeah... that's what I meant.) :|
U.S. Department of State's Web Chat
"Thanks for taking part in what is fast becoming an important and effective tool of interaction between the Department and the American people.
The U.S. Department of State plans to hold 'web chats' in the future on a variety of topics of interest for the American people, such as U.S. relations with other countries, trade, counterterrorism, human rights, environmental issues, etc. To find out when the next chat will take place and what will be the topic of the chat for that month, please visit the Public Liaison website http://www.state.gov/r/pa/pil/. You can also subscribe to our listserv to get automated notices of upcoming chats. Visit http://www.state.gov/www/listservs_cms.html
..."
From http://www.state.gov/index.htm?docid=42596
"Chat with a Diplomat!
Join an online webchat with State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher today [Greg:2/23/2005] at 3 pm [Greg: Time zone appears to be EST] and learn about America's role in the world. To register, visit www.chats.state.gov."
Um... cool?
I mean I think it's very cool my government is using technology to reach out, but this... I don't know.
If I have a chance, I'm going to check this out, just to see if it's cool or not. The UI (flash based) they are using is kind of cool, but I don't think that counts... ;)
Suing101.com Offers Advice to Dog Bite Victims
"Suing101.com is a website that provides information on how to sue, class action lawsuits, settlements and anything having to do with suing, legal cases, and litigation. Suing101.com has introduced new site content that is exclusively geared to dog bite victims and provides information on how to sue dog owners.
(PRWEB) February 23, 2005 -- Suing101.com (http://www.suing101.com) has introduced new site content that is exclusively geared to dog bite victims and provides information on how to sue dog owners.
Man and woman's best friend bites more than 4.7 million people a year. Each year, 800,000 Americans seek medical attention for dog bites. Half of these are children. Of those injured, 386,000 require treatment in an emergency department and about a dozen die.
If you are bitten by a dog, you can pursue a personal injury suit against the dog owner and you will likely win if you can prove the owner's negligence. Complete information on how to sue dog owners is available at http://www.suing101.com/Suing-Dog-Owners.asp.
..."
My first through was, COME ON... Isn't our legal system under enough pressure already? But I guess it's all a matter of degree.
If the bite is bad enough and/or the dog's owner is unwilling to take responsibility, then I guess suing is the only legal recourse? I mean if my son was bit and the dog's owner said, "Oh well, too bad... it's his fault he was in his own front yard..." etc, etc, then I guess the only thing I could do legally is sue?
Still in my mind this site seems like ambulance chasing...
And I guess there's not much money in this area since the site has Google Ad-sense adertising...? :|
LOL, but at least they have RSS feeds! Double :|
Direct access to virtual floppy disk files
"I'm sure that, from time to time, many Virtual PC users would find the ability to mount a virtual floppy disk (.VFD) file and directly access its contents (create, view, edit, rename or delete files, format the disk, or launch a program) useful. Well you can - using Ken Kato's virtual floppy driver. ..."
That's kind of cool...
I've used WinImage in the past to create/access my VFD's, but still this virtual floppy driver might come in handy (maybe).
The C source is also freely available, which elevates this to very cool (not that I would be able to DO anything with C source for a device driver... but still).
A little hello goes a long way
This is a nice article from a solder stationed in Iraq about how by just being nice and polite they were able to connect with a couple boys. Kids who went out of their way, and against local sediment, to probably save a good number of lives...
Sysinternals Freeware - Utilities for Windows NT and Windows 2000 - RootkitRevealer
"RootkitRevealer is an advanced root kit detection utility. It runs on Windows NT 4 and higher and its output lists Registry and file system API discrepancies that may indicate the presence of a user-mode or kernel-mode rootkit. RootkitRevealer successfully detects all rootkits published at www.rootkit.com, including AFX, Vanquish and HackerDefender. ..."
Another uber-cool utility from SysInternals. Man those guys ROCK! Good timing given the recent hype about rootkits ...
Downloaded and scanning now...
Howto: Display list or document library data from a parent site within a different site
"I get asked this one a lot, and thought I had blogged it but it looks like I didn't. The general user scenario is where you have a parent site (http://myserver) that contains a list of information that is relevant to a bunch of subsites (http://myserver/subsite) and you want to display the data from the parent inside the children.
..."
Step by step instructions for displaying a SharePoint list from a Parent site on a subsite...
Now I wonder if it would work reverse? Displaying a SubSite's list on a Parent site? I guess when I have a few minutes now I'll have to give it a try...
(via The Boiler Room - SharePoint - FrontPoint: Howto - Display list or document library data from a parent site within a different site)
ninetyninezeros: the hungry thing
"i've now subscribed to approximately 40 feeds, including a few pubsubs, and the number is growing steadily - needless to say, i'm an rss/atom addict.
a few years ago when i first heard about this technology, i gave a typical response: "so what?" at the time of course, i had no idea what this whole blogging phenomenon was all about and i was happy hitting news.com and slashdot daily through my browser to catch up on tech news. going around hitting a few pages each day isn't too bad, but when you start to explore the blogosphere and want to keep up on tens if not hundreds or thousands of blogs, you really start to appreciate feeds.
..."
I'm sure you're all sick of hear me preach about RSS and how it has changed my web life, well here's the same message, but from someone else... :)
System.IO.Compression: "The Compression namespace contains classes that provide basic compression and decompression services for streams. "
While reading Introducing Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 for Developers I came across a mention (short one) about the new System.IO.Compression namespace.
I find that namespace/functionality VERY cool. Sure 3rd party compression assemblies/code samples have been available since about .Net day -2. But the fact that it's now part of the framework, that I can be assured that it will always be available is what I find pretty darn cool.
There are a number of places where I can see that I might be using it. Mostly to save space in my databases by compressing the data prior to posting it... I deal with a good bit of data (tens of millions of rows), so saving some bytes here and there could make a big difference. As much in the network utilization as in the DB.
Also I'm thinking security. Compress THEN encrypt... :)
Parabolic Template
"Advantages over other antennas such as the Pringles Can Antenna
No Pigtail Required
No Modification to AP (No voiding of warranty)
No Matching (SWR) Problems
No Purchased Parts
Trivially Easy Construction
Very Low Probability of Error
As Good As or BETTER Performance than the Pringles Can Antenna
Superior Front to Back/Front to Rear Ratio
Improves Wireless LAN Privacy
Reduces Interference
Basically this antenna is so easy to make, tune, and install, and it performs so well that it is foolish not to try one before electing to purchase a commercial antenna, if for no other reason than you can check to see if you are purchasing enough commercial antenna to make the link you want to make."
I wonder if it's too late to return the "booster" I bought for my D-Link? (Which didn't help a darn bit).
Now this, THIS might help. Plus it looks cool... (in a geek like way).
Have to dust off my radio wave propagation training I got in the Army. (That as you'd expect, I never really used in the Field.
"SGT Duncan, damn it my commo is down again!... Okay sir, here's your new handmic... you know sir, it's best to not throw it at the radio when you are... well... um... they just don't like that..." ;)
(via www.hackaday.com - a better wifi antenna - hack a day
FxCop Rules as a download
A number of cool FxCop rules for download from David Kean.
Here's a list of the rules...
"AssembliesHaveTheSameAssemblyVersion
AssembliesShouldBeAssemblyCompanyAttributed
AvoidComplicatedMethods
ConsiderMovingPInvokeMethodsToInteropMethods
EnumerationsAreMarkedSerializable
EnumeratorsShouldBeSealed
InternalNamespacesDoNotExposePublicApi
NamespaceHaveCompanyNameRoot
NotImplementedExceptionShouldNotBeThrown
PInvokeMethodsDoNotHavePublicAccessLevel
PrivateFieldNamesHaveUnderscorePrefixArePascalCased
PrivateOrAssemblyMemberNamesDoNotHaveUnderscores
UseEnvironmentNewLineInsteadOfNewLineLiteral"
For details on them, check out this post.
I've not used FxCop half as much as I should (err... um... okay, not at all yet...), but I have a .Net project in design now where I'll be using it as a standard part of the project. And while I may or may not use the above rules, they are still great examples of how to write custom rules to extend FxCop.
Marquee de Sells: Chris's insight outlet - Windows Forms Threading Techniques
"Give Your .NET-based Application a Fast and Responsive UI with Multiple Threads, Ian Griffiths
A number of Ted Pattison's Basic Instincts column pieces cover threading
Safe, Simple Multithreading in Windows Forms 1.x (part 1, part 2 and part 3), Chris Sells
Safe, Even Simpler Multithreading in Windows Forms 2.0, Mike Weinhardt
Asynchronous Windows Forms Programming, Juval Lwy (provides a BackgroundWorker component for Windows Forms 1.x)
Making windows forms thread safe, Rudiger Klaehn (generates a proxy class to do synchronization)
The Daemon Inside and When to go async?, Matthew Adams"
A cool list of multi-threading in WinForms links from Chris Sells.
If you haven't checked out his site, then you're missing a great resource. Not only does he have an outstanding blog, but his tools page/category is filled with a number of very nice tools.
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