Alone In The Database

IDF Babes vs Hesbollah Babes

First up, the IDF:

Next, the Terrorists:

Whew! Kind of makes you understand all of the suicide bombings eh?

posted by Travis  # 10:26 AM 0 Comments

Tonight, I'm giving a talk at our local .NET user group - Philly.NET. Below are links to the topics discussed.

Topic: Cool Sites, Software, and Add-Ins of Interest to .NET Developers



The first, most important tool that any developer, indeed anyone using the web, and certainly any web developer, is Firefox.


Why is Firefox so essential? I'm not going to spout off about security, web standards, or speed. The real reason you need Firefox is for the extensions. Firefox has an awsomely open architecture that allows developers to create extensions easily, which add a LOT of functionality. Honestly, I can't imagine myself browsing the web without my Firefox extensions ever again. This race is over.

Extensions:

First Extension Discussed: Web Developer Toolbar.
A feature list can be found here. If you've ever found yourself stuck in the cycle of coding, viewing your output, re-coding, re-viewing, etc.. You'll love this toolbar. Also, if you've ever wanted to reverse engineer a website, this tool is for you.

Next Extension Discussed: Clipmarks.
The Clipmarks site is an awesome place you should definitely get to know. This is social bookmarking done right. It has a great community of users and is under constant development, run by an awesome group of developers. With the Clipmarks Toolbar, you can easily create your own clips and navigate the site. If you would like to subscribe to my clippings, use this url.

Next Extension Discussed: Scrapbook.
This is absolutely the most essential tool I have, (outside of Visual Studio of course). This is offline storage done right. It allows you to capture any web page you visit to local storage, which is then indexed and searchable etc from within Firefox. Have you ever bookmarked a page with some great source code that you knew you'd want in the future? Have you ever gone back to the bookmark and found it's no longer available? Then you've gone to Google and seen the ugly cached version? Kiss that problem goodbye with this extension!

Next Extension Discussed: Aardvark.
In the demo I only showed using this extension to remove elements from a page prior to clipping it or scrapbooking it, (or printing it!), but it does much more than that. You should really check it out.

Next Extension Discussed: IETab.
Unfortunately, not all developers build sites that worth with both IE and the rest of the world. Especially those pesky Windows Genuine Download guys. With this extension, you can open a page in IE, but still in a tab of Firefox. And many of your Firefox extensions can then still work on that page. You can also configure it so that certain sites always load in an IETab. Amazing.

Next Extension Discussed: Selenium IDE.
This extension lets you record and play back web sessions. Then of course you can edit the scripts as needed. This is a very effective web testing mechanism. It is very flexible and easy to learn and use. And it's just a free Firefox extension.


Software:


Next I presented the software tool: DebugView.
This free utility allows you to view and capture debug and trace information from running processes. So, if you normally use Trace statements in your code during development time, and then deploy your app without any mechanism to listen to those traces in release mode, this tool allows you to capture them anyway, just like the output window in Visual Studio. Great stuff.

Next I presented the Visual Studio Add-In: ExceptionHelper.
This add-in lets you click on a method call and automatically wrap the statement in a Try..Catch block, with catch blocks pre-defined for each known exception this method may generate. There is even a video you can watch to see it in action. It is a great time saver!

Next I presented the Visual Studio Add-In: Refactor.
C# comes with this tool, and there is a free download from Microsoft for the VB.NET version. There is also a professional version. This tool makes it amazingly simple to perform refactoring operations on your code.

Next I presented the Visual Studio Add-In: CodeSMART.
I've been using this tool for a couple of years now, and I absolutely love it. It has too many features to mention them all here, but I demonstrated sorting procedures, spell checking, and template based code creation. There are versions for VB6, .NET 2003, and .NET 2005. I use all of them.

Next I presented the Visual Studio Add-In: CodeRush.
Sadly, I couldn't do justice to this amazing add-in. It has so many features, and is so all-encompassing to the IDE, that it would require it's own session. To top that off, I don't like this one so much, and most of it's features that I use are already included in CodeSMART. Still, lots of developers swear by this so it had to be presented.

Next I presented the Visual Studio Add-In: XPathMania.
This add-in gives you a new window within Visual Studio which allows you to view an XML document interactively with your XPath queries. Personally, I'm pretty slow to come up with the right XPath query sometimes, and this add-in saves me a TON of time.


Sites:


During the course of the presentation, I visited the following sites, to show off the functionality of the various Firefox extensions:

15Seconds. This is a great site for ASP.NET articles. I used this site to show off the Web Developer Toolbar.

4GuysFromRolla. Another excellent site for ASP.NET articles. I used this site to demonstrate the Clipmarks toolbar for making quick clips.

Informit. Another great site for articles of all types. I used this site to demonstrate the Clipmarks toolbar's ability to clip content from multiple pages into one clip.

DevLife. Julia Lerman's blog. I used this site to demonstrate the Scrapbook extension, and then the Aardvark extension.

XPath Examples on W3Schools.com. I used this to get the sample XML and XPath queries for the demo.


That's it! Feel free to contact me with questions or comments via the website at: DataDeluxe.