Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day: 08/29/2010

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Daddy, tell me that story about the “big brown bear, who loved to write software" again (because I don’t want to be THAT bear, he’s a bad bear!)…

JCooney.NET - "Once there was a big brown bear, who loved to write software"

“Thus begins my re-telling of the classic children's story "The Big Brown Bear" as a software development parable. I've always self-identified a lot with the big brown bear, and his errant ways have often reminded me of the way software development projects run.

Download my modified version of this classic story here …” [GD: Click through for the download link]

This had be laughing (in that shared pain kind of way). Who’s your “Big Brown Bear?” (And if you can’t spot him, you know what they say… ;)

Fifth Annual Simi Valley Freedom Walk - See you there…

Newsblaze - Program Announced for 5th Annual 9-11 Freedom Walk

“WHAT:
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is joining forces with MilitaryConnection.com to bring to our city the fifth annual Simi Valley Freedom Walk on Saturday, September 11th. Please join us as we remember the victims of September 11th, and honor our troops who continue to fight for freedom.

PROGRAM:
4:15 p.m. Pre-program musical entertainment
5:00 p.m. Program begins, which includes:

Captain James J. McHugh, Commanding Officer, Naval Base Ventura County

Gary Sinise, actor and founder of the Gary Sinise Charitable Foundation

Scott Strauss, former Chief of the Mineola Volunteer Fire Department. Scott was a New York City Police Officer assigned to the Emergency Services Unit on September 11, 2001. Due to the successful efforts of Scott and his fellow rescue workers, the lives of Port Authority Police Officers Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin were saved that day. Scott and his team were featured in Oliver Stone's 2006 movie "World Trade Center."

5:30 p.m. Walk begins - The 1.8 mile route will begin in the Reagan Library's courtyard and will conclude at
Rancho Madera Community Park off of Wood Ranch Parkway.

6:00 p.m. Walk concludes - …”

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library - Annual America Supports You Freedom Walk

“The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and MilitaryConnection.com are proud to bring to our city the Fifth Annual Simi Valley America Supports You Freedom Walk on Saturday, September 11, 2010. Event begins at 5:00 p.m.. Please join us as we remember the victims of 9/11 and honor our troops who continue to fight for freedom. The program includes patriotic music by a military band and brief remarks by actor Gary Sinise, Captain James McHugh, Commander Naval Base Ventura County, and Scott Strauss, former Chief of the Mineola Volunteer Fire Department. The program concludes with a 1.8 mile walk from the Library’s main courtyard down to Rancho Madera Community Park where light refreshments will be served. Complementary shuttle service will return you to your cars at the Reagan Library. For more information, please call 805-522-2977.

Also, from September 1 through September 30 the Reagan Library will be collecting donations for U.S. Soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan in the Library’s main lobby. Items must be unwrapped and in original packaging, including: packets of trail mix, peanuts, gum, hard candy and beef jerky; snacks that are not heat sensitive and will not melt in hot temperatures; individual packets of lemonade or Crystal Light for water bottles; CDs and DVDs; used video games; AA batteries; stationery; and pre-paid phone cards. Only miniature hygiene items will be accepted.

About the America Supports You Freedom Walk
The America Supports You Freedom Walk was created in 2005 to establish a national tradition of remembrance of the lives lost on September 11, 2001, to renew our commitment to freedom and the values of our country, and to honor our veterans, past and present. For more information, visit www.americasupportsyou.mil.

Click here to register.” [GD: Page leached in full]

Let’s not forget how we as a country pulled together after 9/11. Remember how “together” we were? Besides the fear in the air, remember how it broke us out of our day-to-day grinds and shells? How we seemed to care about our community, society and country? Let’s not wait for another like tragedy to make us feel this same way. Let’s now wait for an event like that to remember how proud we are to be American. That it’s okay to be a patriot. That it’s okay to be involved in our community, country and military. That we’re in this together…

WE are America. Me, you, your family, the guy who lives across the street, that person you just cut in front of and flipped off, all of us. Let’s stand together and remember this…

The family and I will be there… You?

Posters, posters, and many more posters. More than enough to cover your cube walls (and more)

Tampa Technology Strategist for Microsoft - Listing of the Microsoft Visual Technology Posters

Okay, yeah, that’s allot of posters…

(via IT Strategery - Great Resources for Visual Learners)

Windows Live Writer Twitter Notify Plugin updated to work with the Twitter OAuth rollout

Aaron's Live Writer Blog - I can’t Log in to Twitter with Twitter Notify

“Today Twitter changed the way that you sign into Twitter. Over the last few months you might not have even know that your favorite Twitter application had been updated with this change. You were prompted to take a new version and you just updated. In the case of the Windows Live Writer plug-in Twitter Notify there was no way to notify that you needed to update. What you would see is that you tried to log in with your user name and password and you would just see a dialog that your user name or password was incorrect as you went to post your blog post.

Have no fear there is a new version of Twitter Notify in the Live Writer plug-in gallery that works with the changes that Twitter has made. You just need to install it from the gallery. Here is a link.

…”

Glad I saw Aaron’s post. I didn’t even think about checking for an update for this plugin (which I use with every post).

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Adding =rand(X,Y) & =rand.old(X,Y) to your =lorem(X,Y), because you can’t have enough filler text choices…

TechNet Magazine - Tip: Automatically Generate and Insert Filler Text in Word 2010

“Sometime you need filler text when you’re working on the layout of a document. It may be for all the text or just for certain spot elements, such as captions.

Word offers an easy way to quickly insert text into a document. You can opt for the classic lorem ipsum in Latin, the popular “quick brown fox” text, or a passage from the Word documentation.
If you want to insert a block of lorem ipsum text, simply type =lorem(X,Y) …

…

For the quick brown fox filler text, type =rand.old(X,Y) at the beginning of a new paragraph and hit enter. And for text taken from the Word documentation, type =rand(X,Y) at the beginning of a new paragraph and hit enter. …

…”

I think I’m going to use =rand(x,y) as an email reply macro… I wonder how long it will be before someone actually replies asking what the heck I ‘m talking about? LOL

(via TechNet Magazine Blog - Automatically Generate and Insert Filler Text in Word 2010)

Some .Net 4 System.IO.Path static methods you might not know about…

Hajan's Blog - Working with System.IO.Path static class

“Hello everyone.

Today, I was exploring the System.IO namespace in .NET 4.0 on an ASP.NET web application where I came to few changes, comparing with the previous versions of .NET, related to the System.IO.Path static class. The Path class contains the same method names in .NET 2.0, 3.5 as well as 4.0, only (in .NET 4.0) new overloads are added to System.IO.Path.Combine() method.

In the following blog post, I will show the usage of few methods belonging to the System.IO.Path static class, as well as, the changes in Combine() method added in .NET 4.0.

Besides the first method that is available in the previous versions for combining two string paths, now in .NET 4.0 you can combine unlimited strings to the path.

…

string path3 = System.IO.Path.Combine(Server.MapPath("Files"), "SubFolder", "SubSubFolder", "text3.txt"); //this will give the path to %WEBAPP_ROOT%/Files/SubFolder/SubSubFolder/text3.text

…

System.IO.Path.ChangeExtension() -…

…

System.IO.Path.GetRandomFileName() & System.IO.Path.GetTempFileName() - are both used to create random file name. The difference is that using GetRandomFileName() method, the file is created virtually and only the fileName is returned as string, whereas the GetTempFileName() method created zero-byte temporary file on disk and returns full path to the filename

…

- System.IO.Path.IsPathRooted() –

…

…”

So much to learn… sigh. I love seeing little updates that will make my life easier. For example, seems like I play the ChangeExtension quite often. And now I can replace my custom code with this call. Man, I LOVE deleting code! lol

And Path.Combine? I use that ALL the time. This .Net 4 tweak to it will save me a number of lines of code. Man, I LOVE deleting code… :)

BTW, If you’re interested in seeing a little more about GetRandomFileName check out this recent DevCurry post, Random File Names using .NET

Sharing WEIShare - See how WEIShare was built (and get the code too)

Coding4Fun - Building the Windows Experience Index Share Site – WEIshare.net

“By now you’ve probably seen Larry’s video in which he explores the WEI Share (“We” share) project and what it does. Now we’re going to show you what went in to creating it, from building the desktop portion to grab the score to compiling the data to setting it up on Azure.

Lincoln Anderson, Web Designer

Peter Brownstein, Web Programmer

Peter Juchniewicz, Web Programmer

Peter VanRysdam, CMO 352 Media Group

Source Code: Download
Difficulty: Intermediate
Time Required: 30 hours (Website Programming), 50 hours (desktop programming), 20 hours (graphics/WPF design)
Software Needed: Microsoft Expression Blend, Visual Basic or Visual C# Express, SQL Server Management Studio
Hardware: PC with Windows Vista or higher (need access to a WinSAT XML file from Windows 7)

Creating the Silverlight App and Web Service – Peter B.

We originally set out to create a Silverlight Application that would display uploaded Windows Experience Index (WEI) Scores via a Web Service and Desktop Application. At the time, we created the application in Silverlight 3 and used a WCF Service to integrate with not only the desktop application but also the Silverlight application. Since we weren’t sure exactly where the WCF Service was being hosted in relation to the Web Site, one of the things we did was make it so the location of the WCF Service can be fairly easily changed. We ended up going with Silverlight Parameters to pass in the location of the WCF Service. Doing this was fairly easy, but it took some set up. The first step involved modifying App.xaml.cs to the following:

…

…”

The Coding4Fun group is one of my favorite MS groups. Not only do they do cool stuff (like t-shirt cannon robots and the DrinkTender) but even better they release the code they do it with. WEIShare is cool project that lets you share your Windows Experience Index (WEI) and see just how lame your system is when compared to others (err… um… I mean… how much room there is to improve your system… yeah… that… ;)

What I really liked about WEIShare was seeing the other scores for people with my same hardware. For example, the “PDC Acer 1420p’s” have two sets of numbers and it looks like the only difference is an older video driver is actually faster. See that is officially cool…

Monday, August 30, 2010

I find you “Ultra!” - Ultra Find VS2010 Add-in (Think “Find in Files++”)

Visual Studio Gallery - Ultra Find

“Ultra Find is a Find in Files substitute for Visual Studio 2010. Take advantage of Windows Search and sift through millions of lines of code in seconds. Ultra Find also enables you to:

Search for classes and methods

Exclude file patterns

Zoom in Find Results

Highlight matches

Configure presets

Maintain an unlimited number of Find Results windows

Using Windows Search is not required, but is highly recommended when searching across large code bases. Ultra Find is multi-instance friendly and keeps its settings and search history synchronized between multiple instances of Visual Studio in real time.

…

…”

If you didn’t catch these posts in the Gallery entry, you’ll want to review them too, Ultra Find (Getting Started) & Ultra Find (Setting Up Windows Search)

Also depending on your VS Settings you may or may not see Ultra Find items. I’m using the VB Settings and that seems to be an “issue”. The expected submenu isn’t there, and so I can access Ultra Find. sigh… I’m now looking for a way to manually add it (or am thinking of finally leaving the VB Settings behind. I’ve run into issues with it in the past and I’m not sure I need its “help” anymore… but that’s a bit much for a Monday). Worse case, the hotkey DOES work in with my VB Settings, CTRL+`

Anyway, this looks cool and I dig how it hooks into Windows Search.