November 2006 Blog Posts
Custom web controls (both server controls and user controls) in ASP.NET are powerful building blocks. The idea is obvious - reusable chunks of presentation-oriented software that can be used to assemble a user interface for a web app. I've seen fair amount of web application architectures and a variety of approaches to custom web controls. This might be a yawner for some, but I've seen this done poorly so many times... I'm working with an application right now that's jacked in this area. This is a subtle, yet very significant aspect of a web application's architecture. There are several ways to do this,...
FolderShare is a file synchronization and sharing solution originally developed by ByteTaxi until it was acquired by Microsoft in late 2005. It's invaluable to folks with multiple computers and/or constantly traveling. It's a free (after the acquisition), yet still not a widely known offering from Microsoft.
FolderShare gives you three main capabilities:
Synchronize files of your choice across multiple computers transparently.
Share your files with other FolderShare users of your choosing.
Access those same files from any of your computers from any web browser
The number of files you'd like it to synchronize is unlimited - so is the traffic, but it does place a 2GB size...
I've been using a password management tool for the last 5 years that meets all of my needs flawlessly. Password Agent from Moon Software is perfect software in my book - small, simple, cheap, to the point, and does exactly what it's supposed to do - and nothing else. I'm surprised how many people don't use password management tools - a password protected Excel Spreadsheet doesn't count! Everyone should have some kind of password management tool in my opinion. There are a lot of out there - Password Agent is one of the best. Here's what it does: Password...
Jeff talks about a number of screencasting apps - I agree with him that visuals are great for communicating info. You might have noticed I've been doing a fair bit of that this week with recent posts. I've used a few of the apps Jeff mentions. I found DemoCharge a while back after Bob mentioned it Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality.
DemoCharge by Yes Software is a no frills screencasting / desktop capture application. If you've used Camtasia Studio before (very popular app in this space), you'll be right at home with DemoCharge.
With DemoCharge you can quickly and easily have it capture a...
Applications (software) running atop of an Operating System (Windows) is what makes a PC useful. An OS with no apps is pretty useless. When you have lots of apps, things get interesting. The potential for good things (productivity) increases, but so does the complexity.
I have a TON of apps on my PC's. I'm jumping in and out of, toggle to and fro countless apps all day long. The efficiency with which I can navigate all that chaos is paramount in my world.
Windows users fall into one of three categories:
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While working together on a project, I made the comment "When are you going to learn to be productive" to a good friend of mine. He didn't appreciate that much, and I don't blame him. I don't remember the exact exchange, but I was working at his laptop showing him something. I seem to remember right-clicking and looking for a "Send to TextPad" option or some equivalent. One could argue "having to execute more than two clicks to open a text file" is an acceptable definition for unproductive. The future holds all kinds of possibilities like voice and gesture recognition technologies...