Our dev team has just upgraded all our dev machines to shiny new Dell T5400's running Vista. Very nice, especially with 3 flat-panel monitors attached. There's a little bit of excitement in upgrading computers even though it's a bit of a job. There's always a few little programs that get missed when you upgrade to a fresh computer. I noticed today that there wasn't a way to print to a PDF document. I remember having that on my old computer, but not sure how it got there. Anyway, a quick search turned me on to PrimoPDF. It was quick to install and does a great job on my Vista machine. It's also free which is great.

I've linked to a couple cheat sheets in the past (Powershell and CSS), but I've run across a post that lists a bunch for different languages and frameworks. Most of them are available as PDFs. See webtecker.com.

The image is from a VisiBone advertisement. That company sells some great cheat sheets and cheat books.

I was trying to clean up one of our servers the other day that was running low on memory. There was an old installation of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Beta on it (which included an instance of SQL Server Embedded). It wasn't being used, but the database process was using up memory and I wanted it gone.

Uninstalling was not so easy. The uninstall would fail within a minute. I then read somewhere that you needed to remove the SharePoint Language Packs first, so I tried that.  That just made things worse. After the language packs were removed the SharePoint installer wouldn't run at all, saying it "The language of this installation package is not supported by your system." Now what?

Whenever I run into uninstall issues I turn to a shareware product called MyUninstaller. It gives you a little more control over the uninstall process than the Add/Remove programs does in XP. I'm not totally sure of everything it does, I just usually try it when my uninstalls fail thru traditional methods. In this case it showed 3 install packages for SharePoint and one of them actually worked (as far as I can tell).

Uninstalling SharePoint in this manner failed to uninstall the SQL Server instance. SQL Server was not listed in Add/Remove Programs but was listed in MyUninstaller. Unfortunately the embedded edition does not allow you to uninstall it. Some searching on Google brought me to this website that shows how to uninstall the embedded edition from the command line. You just need to get the uninstall string from the registry (or right from MyUninstaller) and append an argument. That worked.

It was a bit of a hassle to clear that software from the server, and I probably would have given up if I didn't know about MyUninstaller. Great app.

Ran across this desktop program that shows your current song and album cover on your desktop. It works with several media players and its look can be customized using skins (view skin gallery).

The software is free and can be downloaded here.

I don't use MS PowerShell very often, but sometimes it does come in handy for testing .NET components. It seems like every time I want to use it I am Googling for basic commands to use with it. I've run across this handy little cheat sheet that you can print out. PowerShell Cheat Sheet Redux

Microsoft has revamped their Live Folders with some additional functionality and a new look. It's now called SkyDive (in beta). You can embed the folders on your own web pages. It supports an active-x control to easily drag files into your live folders. You can create private or public folders and even create folders that can be shared with only people you specify. It's very simple and easy to use. It's also free (ad supported).

The apps we write typically store user information in databases and configuration information in xml files. When I want to view the contents of an xml file, I just click on it and Windows XP uses Internet Explorer to show a read only view of the file. This is not bad and I've kinda gotten used to it. I recently ran across a program that does a better job though. It only allows you to view, not edit, but it's a quick and simple replacement for the IE xml viewer built-in to XP. It also allows you to search based on XPath expressions which is helpful. You can download source or just install the executables at http://www.codeplex.com/xmlexplorer.

I keep my computer at work running almost always. I usually only restart it when Microsoft comes out with their monthly updates (and then I hold off as long as I can). I keep a lot of windows open on my desktop too, some of the windows are open for as long as my computer has been up (like my main explorer window, my editor and some utilities). After a couple weeks you get used to the locations of those long running apps on the Window's taskbar, but once you close a window and restart it the icon on the taskbar gets moved to the end of the list. To me (and probably not more than a handful of geeks in the world) this throws things off. So here is a little app that allows you to drag and drop your taskbar icons around which is a great feature that I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't already done (at least in XP). It's called Taskbar Shuffle.

Here's a little program that enables you to add tabs to any window. It can help you organize your desktop by grouping your work windows under one main window. http://wintabber.com/

Our team is headed back to good old Lancaster County today. Things will be back to normal on Monday with momentum building for the first SalesWorks release. Until then there are a couple things you can do to help us get SalesWorks out the door.

1. You can download Beta 1 from the Mission Research web site and send us any feedback you have.

2. Read and contribute to the SalesWorks Beta blog.

3. Stay tuned to my Mission Research CTO blog. My team is responsible for building SalesWorks and now that we have a beta launched I will be covering it and the impending release in that blog.

4. Read up on more SalesWorks stuff on Steve Fafel's blog. He is the dev team's head honcho and will most likely show some cool stuff that can be done to extend SalesWorks.

I was forwarded a great writeup on SalesWorks. Jim Forbes writes about "Demo 2007's Tasty Treats" and about a quarter of the way through he talks about the software and the opportunity he sees for it in the small business marketplace.

"Salesworks is a great set of tools that fits tongue and groove with an emerging critical CRM tools for small business professionals"

The SalesWorks demo went well and is now online. Here are some links to the Demo bloggers...

Conferenzablog - Demo07: Opening Morning Session

InfoWorld - Demo update - the tech keeps getting better

InformationWeek - Demo '07 Conference Showcases

PCMag - SalesWorks Could Make Sales Less Work

Here is one quote I liked the best...

"SalesWorks looks like it could be the next-gen Salesforce.com application, bringing a new level of ease – and offline – use."

Right now these are blogs are just reporting on the demo itself. Soon we should have some feedback on the actual beta which can be downloaded now. This is an early beta and will change based on feedback we get. Please try it and let us know what you think.

I have been evaluating WPF/E for add-ins to my company's products. One screen we have been thinking about for a while is a lead pipeline that shows lead stages in a graphical way. Our products leverage IE for the presentation layer and it is tough to do a compelling pipeline with just DHTML.

WPF/E brings a lot to the table. First of all it is very easy to incorporate into our screens, I simply insert the control code and link in the aghost.js file. It also enables us to easily separate the markup from the script. The HTML file orchestrates the screen while the script and XAML reside in separate files. I also like the division of labor. As shown in these screenshots I've coded the pipeline screen as a segmented pipe along the top of the screen. As the developer I just created simple XAML objects that represented the different elements of the pipeline, nothing too fancy. I then hook up my script to control click-thrus and mouse-overs (the second screen shows how the mouse-over affects the pipeline). In production I would then had the XAML source over to a designer and they would take my rudimentary design and create something beautiful from it. They'd send me the updated XAML file and I just insert back into the development tree and everything should still work with changes. In this case I was the designer too, but you should start to see how this should make development easier.

Another thing that I experimented with was trying to use the same XAML objects and provide an entirely different look and feel for the screen. The final screen shot shows how that turned out. This pipeline demo is very simple, but it starts to paint a picture of how WPF and WPF/E can be used in software. I can imagine that things are not quite as simple when more complex functionality is needed. When trying to change the pipeline into a vertical funnel, I did have to adjust some of my code to make it work.

I did try to use Microsoft's new Expression Design application to create the XAML I used in this demo. I designed the circular pipeline segments and exported them as WPF/E XAML code. That sort of worked, but It generated everything as complex paths and was hard to modify by hand. By the time I had finished the demo, I ended up starting from scratch with the XAML objects. Still, the tools are great and they look very promising.  

We're 30 minutes away from the big demo. Our Mission Research/SalesWorks video page has surfaced. They will post a video of the on-stage presentation to that web page when it's available. For us poor soles that were left back at the office, this is our only view of the excitement. I see our JIT marketing team has made some new SalesWorks logos available too.

Today is the big day. At 9:55 PST Charlie and Mary Pat will be going on stage to introduce and demonstrate SalesWorks to an audience of over 700 attendees. We launched our GiftWorks product there a couple years ago and have had a lot of success with it. I think we'll see the same kind of success with SalesWorks.  I will try to summarize some of the press that we get over the next few days.

We've worked with Blodgett Communications for the launch of SalesWorks. Renee Blodgett, the founder of the PR company, has posted an article that illustrates the problem we are trying to solve with SalesWorks...

"Frustrated with the poor user interface and clumsiness of existing contact management solutions like GoldMine and ACT and the fact that I'm not really the right business model to go with a more expensive Salesforce.com online only solution, I'm left without a useful product. Meanwhile, my contacts sit in three apps (Outlook, Filemaker, and GroupMail), since individually, they do not give me the combined functionality I need. Sigh."

I think she's right on with that and it's exactly what we are hearing from the other small businesses we've been talking with.

That's a pretty big statement, but that's what our first SalesWorks article was titled. We'll see how everything pans out with SalesWorks vs. Salesforce.com, but either way I think SalesWorks is going to be a big hit for those small businesses out there that want/need to manage their customer info with ease.

One of the key factors will be cost. From the article...

"The cost is either free or $100 upward, but it's not clear how the cost structure works yet. In any case SalesWorks may well find a niche for businesses who don't want to give up the relative stability and security of a desktop app for contact management, but also want to take advantage of the Web. While Salesforce is a purely browser-based service, SalesWorks is betting on its low cost and desktop app rich interface as ways to differentiate itself."

SalesWorks was launched this morning at Demo '07.

This week our company, Mission Research is launching a cool new product for the SOHO market called SalesWorks. The launch is at DEMO '07 and will be presented on stage. SalesWorks can be easily used to manage contacts and sales leads. It's based on the same platform as our current product GiftWorks which is selling like hotcakes to the small non-profits. More information will be available as the DEMO conference happens so stay tuned. Here's the press release from our web site.

Here are a few links that you may find helpful if you're into web design using CSS. I'm always finding myself searching for the right values for different CSS properties.

http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/cheat-sheets/css-cheat-sheet/ is the one of the two cheat sheets I keep handy. It has a good list of common CSS properties. The other one that I've recently started referring to is http://lesliefranke.com/files/reference/csscheatsheet.html. This one contains both properties and common values.

Visibone also makes a CSS Example Chart that I have yet to find useful, but you may. Visibone actually has a bunch of quick reference sheets for web developers. I have used their JavaScript Quick Reference and that proved to be helpful.

what is amazon S3

Amazon has started to monetize their technology platform as part of their Amazon Web Services (AWS). I know very little about AWS in general, but I have spent some time looking into one of their initial services: Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). This service provides a simple web service interface to store data for a small fee. The storage service is supposed to be highly scalable, reliable and fast. You pay for what you use. They charge $.15 per GB/per month for storage and they also charge you for data transfer at $.20 per GB/per month. The service is tailored towards developers and is not intended to be used as a consumer level backup product.

using S3 for personal backups

I started looking into the service to get familiar with Amazon's services. I wanted to get a feel for their level of quality, ease of use and how practical they would be to leverage from my companies own products. S3 is something that's directly interesting to me. Personally and professionally I manage a bit of data that I never want to lose. I have applications, source code, documentation, customer data and servers that need to be backed up at work. At home I have photos, videos and personal documents that need to be backed up. Ultimately I want to write code that hooks up with Amazon's services, but for this post I want to just talk about my experiences in trying to find already written code to backup my stuff.

my current backup situation

I have a mix of machines that I need to have data backed up on. The majority of the machines are Windows-based, with two that run Linux. In my basement I have one server with half a terabyte of mirrored drive space. That machine is only used as a file server and a backup server. At different intervals throughout the week, I have my other servers and desktops (from multiple locations) sending their backup data to this machine. To make that happen I install OpenSSH and a copy of rsync on each client machine. I then use a scheduled script to securely synchronize specific client folders with the server. This has been working fine for me. It's not the easiest thing to setup, but once it's done for a machine, managing it is fairly simple and restoring is as easy as plucking the files or folders of my backup server. Since SSH and rsync are cross-platform, I can use the same technique from my Linux machines.

how does S3 fit in

To prevent data loss, I depend on the fact that my data is always in two places at one time (except my photos which exist only on the file server) and that one of those places uses a RAID for storage. Ideally, I would also like to have my most sensitive data archived away where I can't accidentally screw it up. I've looked into some commercial offsite backup products but they are fairly expensive for the amount of data I want to secure (ideally close to 200GB). I would be fine with paying the higher prices if it was my only option. Fortunately Amazon S3 seems to be a low cost option. My short term goal is to keep my rsync backups going and just synchronizing my backup server with S3. Maybe at some point I will bypass my rsync step altogether and sync directly to S3.

what am i looking for

For my purposes, I would like to find software that can allow me to automatically synchronize my backup server with S3. Here are my current factors that I'm using to choose a solution:

• The software has to be automate-able, thru scripts or some other method.
• I won't need to access the data very often except to verify everything is working correctly, so the software does not have to have a UI or be very feature-ful.
• I would like to have the data stored on the S3 service in a generic format so I'm not tied to my initial choice of software. If my software is no longer usable, I should be able to retrieve my data using other software.
• The software only has to run on Windows.
• Ideally the software would be open-source.
• Ideally there would be no additional fees on top of what Amazon charges.

what i've found

Unfortunately there are limited sources of information on S3. One of the most helpful was a blog post by Jeremy Zawodny called A List of Amazon S3 Backup Tools. Check out the comments for a good view into what's available. Amazon S3 Tools on elastic8.com. Another resource was Amazon's Solution Catalog. I haven't had much luck in getting everything I want and didn't have much luck in evaluating the ones I've tried. Below are the apps I've tried with my initial findings. I will follow up this post in a couple weeks to after I've done some more research.

• JungleDisk - This service looks very promising and is free. It basically adds S3 as a virtual drive on your computer. You can access it like any other drive (theoretically). It's not open-source and stores data in a proprietary format, but they do have open-source code available to browse and download your data if something ever happens to them. I've tried a couple times but I could not get JungleDisk to work on Windows Server 2003. I've gotten it to work on Windows XP though and that worked fine.
• S3 Backup - A Windows client that allows you to access S3 like in a manner similar to Windows Explorer. The client has jobs built in that allow you to run backups automatically (no scheduling yet). The software is written by one person and has frequent updates. For some reasons the beta downloads have a built-in timeout which is unusual. The author is not sure what portion of the software will be open-sourced (if any) and plans to eventually charge for part of it. I was able to browse and upload some data, but got errors when trying to create backup jobs. I'm sure the job error will be worked out in future releases, but because of it's somewhat undefined future I will have to put this app on the back burner.
• S3Drive - Another virtual drive app like JungleDisk but from an independent developer. The software depends on the .Net Framework 2.0. To optimize the browsing thru Windows Explorer the developer chose to split the files up into chunks when storing them and uses an index file to make his flat S3 file storage appear as a folder structure. It took a couple tries to get the virtual drive to work, but once it was setup it worked very well. I saw that some people were experiencing memory leaks and communication problems with larger files (>300MB) but I have had no problems using smaller files. I've also read somewhere that there is or plans to be source code available.
• NS3 Manager - This is a free Windows client that enables you to manage data on the S3 service. It's limited in its features (upload, download and delete only) but does store data in a generic format. It can also be used to browse the proprietary formats of the other tools mentioned here. I have not been able to find a way to automate it yet and am not sure if there's any development going on. If not something I will use for my backups, it's still a valuable too just to see what's in your data store.
• #Sh3ll - A command shell for S3. I like this app. It's not fancy and has no UI. It's not easy to use. Event the name is hard (pronounced Sharp-Shell). And as you may have guessed from the name, it depends on the 1.1 or 2.0 .Net Framework. It reads and writes to the S3 store in a generic format and can be automated. It's not as straightforward as I would have liked. Since it's actually a shell, you have to pipe commands into it to script it. I guess that is done because calls into the service require a bit of context between calls (for example, you would need to specify the bucket, username and password for each invocation). I've had no problems so far with it. The nice thing is that the source is available (actually comes in the download) and I can change it as I see fit.

conclusions

I have not gone as far as doing my actual backups to S3 since I'm still in the process of evaluating the tools and the service itself. My current thoughts are to use a combination of two tools I mentioned above. For automation I can use #Sh3ll which let's me put my files on S3 in generic form. To browse and download my files with a UI I can use NS3 Manager. It would be nice to get the source of NS3, but since there is no proprietary format I'm not locked into using it. I'll let you know as I discover more.

 When designing and developing screens for our desktop application GiftWorks we design to a window size of 800x600. Oddly enough there isn't an easy way to do this in Windows. I've used some utilities before but have recently stumbled upon a very simepl utlity for doing just that.

Sizer sits quietly in your taskbar tray and subtly modifies every window with options to set the precise size of a window. The specific sizes can be easily configured if the defaults aren't adequate. I really like this program. It's simple and focuses on a single function.

A product of Brian Apps

I occasionally need to post source code to my site for others to read. I have been using a simple web tool for this and it seems to work fairly well. Here is the url: http://manoli.net/csharpformat/. See an example here.

Based on a previous post of mine, I started hunting for a source code repository to use. I found several. The one I liked the best was snipplr.com. There were a few reasons I liked this service. It has a very simple, clean interface. It has a simple, open API for accessing your snippets from other applications. It keeps track of snippet changes. It handles colorizing source code. It provides tagging of my snippets. I've also had no problems reaching it and it seems snappy.

As an experiment, I've added a snippet sidebar to my source code editor, Parachute, which can be downloaded from my website. Just open the options and enter your snipplr API key. Your snippets should show up and can be filtered by the tag bar at the top. Double-click on a snippet to paste it in the editor pane. Please try it out and let me know how you like it.

About a month ago I installed Google's Desktop Search software on my dev computer. I've tried both MSN's and Google's Desktop Search products before but never found them to be very useful and instead of seeing those processes just sitting in my task list, I have always uninstalled them. Maybe because they were never installed on my main pc, I never realized the maximum benefit from them. This last attempt was done so I could check out the desk bar included in Google's product. The desk bar got old really quick, but I did stumble on the CTRL+CTRL trick that has proved quite useful. Hit the CTRL key twice and a little window pops up which let's you type in a search term. The search term can be for something local, like email or chat transcripts or something on the web. It can be a URL, a street address or even a calculation. Using the filetype: macro, it is surprisingly a very good way to search your source code too. I probably use it more than a dozen times a day. Give it a try.

We have been working on some simple site hosting to offer our GiftWorks customers. Something that would enable them to get some integration between GiftWorks and the web--something like online donations, update forms and/or blogs.  Obviously the blog hosting is up and running (the new software is hosting this site), but as far as finding a very nice desktop blog editor for our beta customers to use, I haven't come across anything (the closest thing I could find was Zoundry Blog Writer, which I used to make the previous posts on this site). That is until I tried the new Windows Live Writer from Microsoft. It seems to be working great and is very easy to use. It also has a developer SDK that allows adding some enhancements. I would have no problem recommending this to our customers--and will. 

There are a couple cool features, like showing a preview of the post in your actual website and some cool image properties.

Read the Writer team blog

I've recently started using a program to re-map my Windows key on my keyboard. The name is HotKeys by Qliner Software. There are lots of programs I run during a days work. At this point, most of those programs have slowly floated their way to the top of the Windows Start Menu which is helpful by itself. But now they are one keyboard combination away with HotKeys. This cool little utility makes managing your key combinations a snap using a graphical view of your keyboard. All you need to do is call up the graphical keyboard and right-click on the key you want to map. If you know how to write macros using VBScript or some other language, you can program your keyboard to do almost anything.

A lot of my work is done across multiple computers. I use various tools to work with these computers, like: Remote Desktop for my real machines, the Microsoft VMRC client for virtual machines and a custom version of VNC for our customer’s computers. Remote Desktop is a dream. Combine that with multiple monitor support in XP and my KVMs are collecting dust in the closet. One thing that I’ve had trouble with is copying and pasting information between computers. Remote Desktop usually works, but occasionally it acts weird and doesn’t allow it. I don’t know how to copy and paste between VMRC and VNC sessions. Here is a tool that might help a bit. A web site called http://cl1p.net allows you to create an online clipboard to easily transfer data. Very simple, but it does the trick. Much easier than transfering files or sending email. Give it a try.

I'm not sure where I found this tool, but it would have made my life so much simpler a few years ago when I was working on the proxy team at Sun Microsystems. In short, Fiddler shows HTTP requests and responses from your computer.

From the Fiddler website:

Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler is designed to be much simpler than using NetMon or Achilles, and includes a simple but powerful JScript.NET event-based scripting subsystem.

The tool is fantastic and I would recommend it to anyone that does programming using the HTTP protocol. I am currently using it to debug some XMLRPC web services that we are rolling out.

I've run across a neat little script that makes popping up fullsize images from a thumbnail very simple and elegant. I liked it so much that I've integrated the script into this website framework for any images posted to the blog pages. Here's an example:

Integrating it into your own website is very simple too.

Being a user that keeps around a copy of Adobe Acrobat 5.0 to install on my machines regardless of what new and improved versions Adobe comes out with, I am greatful to finally have an option (and I know of others that feel the same way). Foxit Software has Foxit Reader available for free download which appears promising.

It's not that I am against Adobe software. I use Photoshop, Premiere and Encore to name a few, and while they might take a bit to learn they are very powerful pieces of software. I'm sure Acrobat is powerful as well, but I've had nothing but problems with anything greater than version 5. I swear those newer downloads contain all but the kitchen sink. Anyway.

Thanks to Omar Shahine  for the link.

Here's another interesting Outlook tool created by the research team at Microsoft. It's called the "Social Network and Relationship Finder" but it goes by the name SNARF. It is free to download. SNARF is designed to provide a quick overview of unread mail, organized by its importance. The UI shows a series of different panes with unread mail in them; each pane shows a list of authors of messages. The importance of the unread email is determined by who sent it.

Look at the Outlook Mobile Manager post for another Microsoft Research project for managing email.

Thanks to Mike Swanson for pointing this out. Some of you may also remember Mike has a very cool (and very popular) Macro Wallpaper Collection.

For anyone who has to write regex expressions, this little tool will be quite helpful. I use regular expressions while programming, but I don't use them often enough to be able to just write them off the top of my head. I often find myself popping open a linux command line and testing the out there until I get what I'm looking for.

It's free for personal use. Download and try it out today.

Thanks to C82.net for his great site and "wildy useful web programs". Maybe you'll want to check out his others.

I read a good article this morning by Jeff Sandquist titled How I Get Things Done... which describes how he uses an outlook addin for organizing his email workflow. It is called the 'Getting Things Done In Outlook' addin.

Using a few simple toolbar buttons, the addin allows you to manage your emails in a timely manner. I haven't tried it out yet but I plan on doing so in the next week. Anybody out there have any experience with it? 

I am probably not the norm, but if you are like me you manage your email using an Exchange server. I like Exchange cause it allows me to manage more than emails. I have an archive of emails, events and public folders full of notes dating back to 1999 (I wish there was an easy way to log my chat transcripts -- anyone know of any?).

Exchange also allows me to get at that information from almost anywhere: when I'm at work I use Outlook, when I'm at a friends house I can use OWA through a browser (which is almost as good as Outlook) and when I'm on the road I can sign into OWA with my cell phone. If I was on the road more often, it would make sense for me to invest in a SmartPhone or PocketPC to access Exchange.

Just recently I ran across a video from Channel9 showing an interview with Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research. Eric showed off a research project that has turned into the Outlook Mobile Manager (OMM). OMM sits on your desktop and monitors your incoming email for urgency. When an email comes in that OMM classifies as urgent it will forward the message to your cell phone via SMS. OMM can be taught how to classify your emails as urgent.

I do not get a lot of urgent emails from people. At least what I would call urgent. But if an email comes from someone I know and it has a date/time in it, I do like to know about that immediately. They get sent to my cell. Also, I do have a few servers that I monitor on a regular basis through emails. I have OMM notify me when a failure occurs on any of my servers. That's pretty cool.

Another feature of OMM is the ability to forward you a summary of your days events. I have OMM set to forward me a list of tasks and appointments for the day to my cell phone every morning at 7am. I really like that feature. 

I have tried several projects from Microsoft Research. They are fun to toy around with, but I usually remove them after playing with them for a short period. This one I have had on my computer for a couple weeks now and is very useful. Check out the video and try out the software.

MezerTools - Now here is a very cool utility for screen designers. This free program from Bayden Systems allows you to do screen measurements, screenshots, hex conversions and has a color dropper. All tools function from customizable hotkeys. Thanks to ComputerZen.com for pointing this one out.

IconoMaker - a free utility for creating various-sized icons that support transparency. Thanks to The Daily Grind for this pointer.