What is Code Metrics Viewer? – Matthias Friedrich highlights his Visual Studio 2010 Code Metrics Viewer extension which plugs into VS 2010 Professional and uses the Code Metrics Power Tool to provide code metrics information to the IDE. Matthias is blogging a number of posts on this project blog which look at the various features of the viewer and I encourage you to check those other posts out too.
More and more I find that I need to setup some kind of job or scheduled task to accomplish something in .NET on a reoccurring basis. Typically in the past I’ve written Windows Services to accomplish this. While effective, these definitely take longer to write and are harder to debug than say a simple ASP.NET page. What I’ve done lately is started to move these non-critical, non-security sensitive processes into ASP.NET pages that can be called on a specific schedule via Windows Task Scheduler.
When I started moving this way I realized that I wanted to find a small utility that I could run from a command line to initial a web page request. It had to be something I could run from a scheduled task and something that I could use to save or log the results. After doing my due diligence Googling I realized there wasn’t such a utility that I could easily run from within Windows without installing all kinds of libraries and non-Windows based tools. So, like any good programmer, I made my own. Enter CMD HTTP Request.
As I said, this utility is small, light weight and runs on Windows via the .NET Framework. You don’t need any special commercial programs to run it and it will even check your pages for keywords you specify and save the request’s results to disk as a HTML file. This, essentially, is your log of what happened during that request on that date and time.
I won’t go into too much more detail here. I think you get the main idea. You can download the source code or executable from the project page on Codeplex and learn more about it. As always, feel free to leave me any feedback or suggestions either here or via the project page on Codeplex.
CMD Email, the email command line utility I developed (originally discussed here) has been updated to version 2.0.
Here are new features for v2.0:
You can download the latest runtime or source from the project page on CodePlex.
One of my co-workers asked us (the IT department) how she could print a certain page number or range of pages using Microsoft Outlook 2007. Since I was the only one in IT to have Outlook 2007 we looked at things on my system. Honestly, I don’t know if I had tried that before so I wasn’t entirely sure where you would set those options. My first guess would have been in the print options, where else?
Well, after fumbling around for a few minutes we realized that there didn’t seem to be anywhere to actually set these options. Shortly after my other IT co-worker found this Microsoft support article offering up workarounds since they decided to remove this feature.
Why the heck? “Gee, this is a really useful feature, let’s take it out and make them use workarounds.” “Good idea, this should hinder productivity!”
Google has finally released a version of their Picasa desktop application for Mac. I have been waiting for this for a while and it couldn’t come a minute sooner.
Our iPhoto library here at home is over 63GB and has almost 16,000 items (photos and movies) and gave me a big scare a few weeks ago when the library wouldn’t show any pictures except for the ones that I had imported from my camera in December 2008 (this was still in December). Luckily I was able to copy the library off to another hard drive, open the backup copy and do some maintenance to get it working. But we did lost the pictures that had worked from that December upload.
I think what I would need to do with iPhoto is break our 1 big library into smaller libraries, maybe by year to keep that running more smoothly. I think I’m going to work on pulling everything out of iPhoto and moving it into Picasa. This is also because our Flickr service is up for renewal and I don’t think I want to continue with it. I have been putting pictures on Picasa’s Web Albums lately and I like that much more than Flickr.
Between Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Picasa, I really must say that I’ve been very impressed with all of the Google products that are now a part of my daily life.
If you looking for a great program for managing your personal finances, you should check out Mint. Not only does it have great tools to help you understand where you’re spending your money it offers you ways that it can help you save money. It syncs up with pretty much all financial institutions and can pull in transactions from your banks, credit cards, investment accounts and even loans (auto, mortgage, etc).
I’ve had pretty good luck with it keeping in sync with all of my accounts. The only ones that it has had problems with are with my Emigrant direct savings account and my Maryland College Savings accounts. With options to handle pretty much every security question that each institution deals with, you only have to setup your accounts with them once and it syncs automatically from there on out.
Here’s what I really like about Mint:
Honestly, I could go on and on. And to top it all off, they just released an iPhone app that’s free too! Considering that I will be swapping out my Blackberry at work for an iPhone in the next few days I couldn’t be more excited (that’s a whole separate post in itself).
Mint’s been around for maybe a year and a half now and seems to have worked out all of the issues I encountered back in September 2007 when I was using the Beta version. To be honest, it had a bunch of quirks back then and lacked the ability to add custom categories. I didn’t stick with the Beta long and closed my account. But a few months ago they came out of their Beta and had a bunch of new features available compared to when I had been a user before, so I decided to give it another whirl. I’m glad that I did because I use it almost daily now and I couldn’t be happier.
I’ve tried Quicken Online (which used to be like $2.95 a month but is free now), Quicken for the Mac, Microsoft Money, Mvelopes (not free) and a few others that I don’t even remember now and when it was all said and done Mint seemed to have the most to offer and the obvious right price. If you’re looking for a way to get started with wrangling your spending, sticking to a budget, or even just trying to figure out where your money is going you should definitely give it a try.
The email command line utility I wrote (and discussed here), CMD Email, has been updated. The latest release supports email attachments.
You can download the latest runtime or source from the project page on CodePlex.
I’ve completed my first open source project. I have been wanting to put something out on Codeplex for a while and finally got around to it. The project I released is a small little command line email utility that uses the .NET 2.0 framework. I wrote a more simple version of this years ago to email me when Windows scheduled tasks (batch files) completed. The released version accepts many more options and allows you to store certain data into an application configuration file.
As this post title states, the utility is called CmdEmail and can be found here on codeplex. From the project page you can download the latest (initial) release, see usage information and access the source code too. Here’s a blurb on the usage from the project’s home page:
CmdEmail -f nobody@nowhere.com -t you@domain.com -s Subject -b Body
CmdEmail -f "nobody@nowhere.com" -t "you@domain.com" -s "Subject" -b "Body"
CmdEmail -f nobody@nowhere.com -t you@domain.com,me@domain.com -s Subject -b Body
t, to Required. Recipient (To) f, from Required. Sender (From) b, body Required. Email Body s, subject Required. Email Subject h, host SMTP Server - Optional only if provided in app config p, port SMTP Port - Optional, can also be provided in app config u, username Username - Optional, can also be provided in app config p, password Password - Optional, can also be provided in app config help
Use FxCop to write better code. I’ve been using it for a little while now and it definitely has helped me out.
This article tells you how and why!
While bragging to my buddy Bill about how cool this new open source remote desktop app Terminals was, he showed me an even better tool, visionApp Remote Desktop (vRD), that he uses for the same thing. After a quick 5 minute install and configuration I clearly liked vRD over Terminals and any other RDP tool I had used.
Here’s a blurb from the vendor’s website about the program:
vRD is a tool which allows the management of RDP connections to servers. vRD is ideal for administrators who need to maintain simultaneous connections to multiple servers. Connection-specific settings and login credentials can be organized in folders and subfolders for quick access.The new version 1.5 further extends the ease of use. Coming, amongst others, with support for Microsoft Vista, support for multi-monitor environments, support for setting the color depth and support for setting various performance options, vRD 1.5 offers many new features for hassle-free handling of multiple RDP connections.
I definitely suggest checking out this freeware app if you’re a frequent user of numerous RDP connections.
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