Feng Shui and the Art of Development

I’m not a big proponent of Feng Shui. For those unfamiliar with it, Feng Shui is a Chinese philosophy that essentially says that the placement of your furniture can have a big affect on your health and prosperity. Like a lot of things, something that starts off as a good idea seems to me to be carried too far. I do however firmly believe that your physical environment can have a dramatic effect on your mental environment. I saw a blog posting by Scott Hanselman describing his new home office layout. It was then that I realized something important: my own home office no longer worked for me.

I’ve been in my house eight years now. Like a lot of folks, I accumulate a lot of things related to my work / hobby. Books, computers, CDs/DVDs, and gadgets galore. It probably doesn’t help that my home office is also my ham radio “shack”, the place that contains all my radios, books and associated gear. For some time now I’ve been pretty unhappy with my basement office, having problems concentrating, etc. It had even gotten to the point where I had no place to even lay a book and reference it while working. After reading Scott’s post I immediately realized what my problem was: my environment.

Unfortunately December and early January were a bit hectic, what with my wife’s health problems and work, I haven’t had much spare time. Well, this weekend good luck finally arrived. My wife is healing very nicely and is much more self sufficient. We had snow, which made going out impractical, so it was the perfect opportunity. I pulled nearly everything out of my office, placed a lot of my “junk” into storage and relaid out the tables I use for working.

I’m typing now from my reconstructed office. A lot of the spare parts I had accumulated are gone, boxed up and placed in the storage area under the stairs. A lot of old catalogs and magazines hit the trash, many of the books I seldom reference were moved to another area of the house that had space. I now have plenty of space for my computer and can finally have all three monitors laid out side by side. I have a workspace now, somewhere to put the book I’m using for learning or reference. In addition, the moving of old books gave me space to put away my new books. I was able to do a little shuffling so the books I currently reference the most were on the lower shelf within arm’s reach, instead of piled on the floor.

Once again my office feels like a safe place to learn. When it comes to your office, whether it be your desk at your employer or your desk at home, don’t overlook your environment. Everyone has their own style. Look around your office right now. Is it comfortable? Quiet? Can you think effectively? Are the tools you need close at hand? If you answered any of these “no”, then start thinking about what you can do to make your home office a refuge, a safe place to work and learn. Then go do it.

Arcane Fun Fridays – Broadcast your Podcast

A little fun tip for today’s post. As long time readers know I love podcasts. They are a great way to capitalize on time, learning while doing other activities. As I was puttering around the house, I wished I had an easy way to listen to my podcasts without having to use my headphones, and also be portable. Then it occurred to me, I did.

When I drive back and forth to work, I use a cassette adapter to plug into my cheapy mp3 player into the my old car’s stereo and listen to my podcasts. Sometimes I travel on business, and these days it’s seldom I get a rental car with a cassette, so I picked up an inexpensive radio transmitter, similar to this one but a heck of a lot cheaper. Well, being an amateur radio operator (often called “ham radio”) I have a wide variety of power supplies lying around. I dug into my box and found one kind of like this. I mated them up, found an unused frequency, and plugged the other end of the transmitter into the speaker jack of my computer and boom I was listening to my podcasts through my various radios. Very nice, and I can see a lot of use.

I was pleased too with the range, I can hear it all over my house and even into my yard a bit. I could probably get a bit more range moving it out of my office basement.

One last hint for today, next time you go to various stores keep an eye out for a “clearance” area. They are usually tucked away in the back corner of the store, often near the restrooms. I know I’ve seen them in Staples, Radio Shack, Office Max and Office Depot to name a few. You can get some really good deals, for example I picked up my transmitter for 10 dollars, marked down from the original 49 bucks. Also check out sites like woot for “deal of the day” specials.

Does MacGyver Dream of Mark Miller?

For Christmas this year my family gave me a copy of MacGyver, Season 1 and 2 on DVD. My wife’s side of the family gave me a gift card which I used to get seasons 3 & 4. I’m a long time MacGyver fan, but my wife had only seen one or two episodes and my kids had never seen it at all, so we’ve been having a lot of fun watching. My favorite part of the series was the voice-overs, where you’d hear MacGyver’s voice as he explained what he was doing. It always started with some odd thought or story that led you through the thought process of how he came to the conclusion to build whatever wacky life saving device he was constructing.

I’ve come to realize in some ways these blog entries are sort of like the MacGyver voice-overs, my inner thoughts being created for you on the web. So I hope you’ll bear with me a few minutes while I relate a rather bizarre dream I had last night.

In my dream I’m standing on stage, in front of a fully loaded computer. It has all the bells and whistles, VS2008, SQL Server, and so on. On the other side of the stage, Mark Miller is there, in front of a similar computer. For those unfamiliar with Miller, he’s the genius behind CodeRush and RefactorPro, tools to help you write code faster. Some time back, when the product was first released Miller used to challenge the audience to beat him in a code writing contest. His machine had CodeRush, and he would use chopsticks to write code, his competitor could use their fingers but did not have CodeRush on their machine. Of course Mark always won.

So sure enough, in my dream there’s Miller, chopsticks in hand ready to go, and I’m the guy going up against him. Our task is to take data from table A1, create a mirror table and name it table A2, and then move all million rows from A1 into A2. As you might guess, in my dream, I win. How?

Well I didn’t write a program. Instead I first jumped into SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and used its script generating capability to produce a create table script. Make a quick search and replace and boom I’ve got table A2 created. I then jump over to the Business Intelligence Developer Studio (BIDS) to create a SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) package to do the data move. (Yes, I probably could have used the script generation of SSMS again to generate an Insert script, but I was showing off.) In about three to four minutes I had accomplished the task and moved all the data while Miller was pecking away at computer with his chopsticks.

I didn’t win because I’m a hot shot coder who is smarter than my competitor. Miller is a (some say mad) genius who can run circles around me in the coding world. As I told the folks in my dream, and I’m telling you now sometimes the best solution to a programming challenge isn’t to program at all! If you read yesterday’s post, Straining at Gnats, you may recall I said “…take some time. Push back from your computer and think for a moment. Think what the true outcome of your application is supposed to be. Not “what will the program do” but “what will the program do for the user???” Think about how best to achieve the user’s goals.”

When you are thinking about solutions, take a minute to look outside of your favorite programming language. Is it possible to achieve the goal without writing any code at all? What tool or tools do you have in your tool box that you can combine to get the job done? Here’s a great example that happened to me just before I took off on my holiday vacation.

As I’ve mentioned before at work we have a Business Intelligence (BI) app I work as the lead on, it imports data to a SQL Server 2005 warehouse via SSIS then uses SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to generate reports. The data is imported from a work order management system we bought many years ago. We also have some engineers who have a tiny little Microsoft Access database. This database has a primary key column; we’ll call it a part number for purposes of this example. There are three more columns, some data they need to know for each part but are not found in our big system. They’d like to add this data to the reports our BI app generates. Two last pieces of information, they only update this data once per quarter. Maybe. The last few years they have only done 3 updates a year. Second, the big system I mentioned is due to be replaced sometime in the next two years with a new system that will have their three fields.

A lot of solutions presented themselves to me. Write an ASP.Net app, with a SQL Server back end then use SSIS to move the data. Elegant, but a lot of work, very time consuming for a developer, especially for something that can go away in the near future. Write an SSIS package to pull data from Access? Risky, since we had no control over the Access database. A user could rename columns or move the database all together, in either case trashing the SSIS. Several other automation solutions were considered and rejected, before the final solution presented itself: not to automate at all.

Once per quarter I’ll simply have the engineers send me their Access database. Microsoft Access has a nice upsizing wizard that will move the table to SQL Server, I’ll use that to push the data onto the SQL Server Express that runs on my workstation. I’ll then use the script generating capability of SSMS to make an Insert script for the data. Add a truncate statement to the top to remove the old data and send it to the DBA to run. When I ran through it the first time my total time invested was less than ten minutes. In a worst case scenario I spend 40 minutes a year updating the data so it’s available for reporting. That’s far, far less time that I would have spent on any other solution.

The next time you have a coding challenge, take a moment to “think like MacGyver”. Look at all the tools you have lying around your PC and see what sort of solutions you can come up with. Once you are willing to step outside the comfort zone of your favorite coding language, you may be able to come up with some creative, MacGyver like solutions to your user’s problems.

PS – If you missed the announcement while on vacation, DevExpress just released CodeRush / RefactorPro 3.0. More than 150 refactorings and lots of new CodeRush features! Update yours today.

Arcane Lessons Updated

I just got done updating the Arcane Lessons page. I added the last couple of weeks of WPF lessons to the WPF area, added one new item to the SQL Server Full Text Search area, and created a new category: Arcane’s Toolbox. This first list is all of the Visual Studio add-ins I’ve blogged about. Later I plan to add some of my favorite Windows add-ins, but if you don’t want to wait you can click on the Windows Add-ins tag to see the posts.

Arcane Fun Fridays

WHEW! All of this WPF / XAML sure has been a lot of fun. But I think it’s time to come up for air and see what else is happing out there in Dot Net land.

Alabama Code Camp is coming up in just a little over a week, Saturday October 6^th to be exact. Still plenty of time to register and even just a bit of time if you want to get in on the Silverlight programming contest. First prize for that is a Zune! http://www.alabamacodecamp.com/home.html

devLink, the large conference for a cheap price comes up right afterward in Nashville, Friday and Saturday October 12^th and 13^th. http://www.devlink.net/ . You can tell I’ll be there, my name’s on the front page as a winner of a Barnes and Nobel gift card (look for the dude from AL !)

(By the way, anyone know of a good dog repellent? My nephew is coming to house sit and is bringing Marshmallow and Buttercup, his twin Dobermans along because I have a big back yard they can play in. Last time though they ate the garden hose, chewed the handle off my shovel, and bit through one of my lawnmower tires.)

There’s a new add-on for SQL Server Management Studio I’m eager to try out. It’s still in Beta but looks promising. It was blogged about at http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/mladenp/archive/2007/09/20/SSMS-Tools-Pack—an-add-in-for-SQL-Management-Studio.aspx or you can download it directly at http://www.ssmstoolspack.com/ .

If you are a fan of NUnit, you’ll appreciate the new xUnit. Read James’ announcement at http://jamesnewkirk.typepad.com/posts/2007/09/announcing-xuni.html .

In a recent Dot Net Rocks episode, Carl Franklin announced they would be taking over Shrinkster.com. Shrinkster has been down due to spam abuse, as soon as Carl gets everything setup we’ll be able to go back to using short links again!

Speaking of Dot Net Rocks, I especially enjoyed show 274, where the new features of VB.Net and C# for the 2008 release were discussed. Entertaining and lots of good tidbits. I think my favorite feature so far has got to be C#’s extension methods. http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=274

During my long drive to the Tallahassee Code Camp last week, I put together a podcast theme session, and copied a bunch of related podcasts onto my cheapo SanDisk mp3 player. This time I went with a “Millenator” theme and got all the episodes of Dot Net Rocks that Mark Miller appeared on. Good stuff, lots of thoughtful material combined with some humor. Next time you go on a trip, copy a bunch of past episodes of your favorite podcast that are in the same theme and make that long drive go much quicker.

There have been several updates to the world’s greatest Visual Studio Add-In, CodeRush, over the last few weeks ( http://www.devexpress.com/Home/Announces/CodeRush25.xml ). Apparently Mark Miller and the boys have been busy! If you’re not on 2.5.4 go update yours today.

Speaking of Mark Miller, I love his intro slide for his VSLive session coming up in LasVegas. Take a look, pure genius. http://www.doitwith.net/2007/09/11/MyLastVSLiveSessionEver.aspx

A final note, between getting ready for Alabama Code Camp and going to devLink my blogging may get spotty for the next few weeks, bear with me and I’ll have full reports from both code camps and lots of fun new stuff to share.

TouchCursor 1.3 Released

If you’re not familiar with TouchCursor, it’s a great utility for turning the “home” keys (keys like i, j, k, l, etc) into up arrow, left, down, right, etc. For my initial review, see my post at https://arcanecode.wordpress.com/2007/05/11/arcane-software-touchcursor-for-us-keyboard-geeks/

Now, I have an incredible story of customer service to share. Late last Saturday night I was on the forums on Scott Hanselman’s site ( http://www.hanselman.com/forum/ ) and was having a ‘conversation’ with someone in the Productivity Tools area on TouchCursor. I wondered aloud how hard it would be to change the activiation key from the spacebar to something user assignable. So I shoot off an e-mail to the support site and head off to bed.

When I wake up Sunday, I have an e-mail from the author saying he didn’t think it would be all that hard, it’d be more work getting all the help updated. I thanked him and since I’d made the suggested offered to do any beta testing. And off I went thinking it’d be a while.

I get home from work Monday, to find an e-mail with a link to the Beta version of TouchCursor! Gleefully I download and test away, finding no issues and trying a variety of activation keys.

And what a list! Check this out, and this is just a sample:

For now I’m trying caps lock as my activation key because I seldom use it, and it’s close to my pinky just between shift and tab. Seems the most natural so far. But to get back to my story…

I reported my results back, and on Wednesday morning got the e-mail the new version had been released! Talk about swift response.

Take a look for yourself, download the current version at http://touchcursor.com/ . It’s shareware, so you can try it before you buy, and buying is pretty painless, a mere twenty dollars (US). There’s even a “no install” version, in case you want to run it as a portable app from your USB drive.

TouchCursor has made it to the short list of must have tools in my arsenal. After service packs, virus protection and firewalls it’s one of the first things that gets installed. I challenge you to try it for 30 days and see if you don’t get hooked!

Standard Disclaimer: I have no financial association with Rare Pebble Software, other than having purchased the TouchCursor software. Just a very satisfied customer.

New version of CodeRush/RefactorPro

Just thought I’d take a short break from WPF to make you aware there has been a new release to that wonderful Visual Studio add-in CodeRush. The product has now broken the 100 refactorings mark!

You can read the announcement from DevExpress at http://www.devexpress.com/Home/Announces/CodeRush25.xml

If you are not familiar with DevExpress’ CodeRush/RefactorPro tools, you can read my original post at https://arcanecode.wordpress.com/2007/01/09/visual-studio-add-ins-coderush/

The new version already works with Visual Studio 2008. Talk about being on the ball, VS2008 is still in Beta and they’ve already got refactorings out there just for it!

Arcane Searching

I think we’d all agree the internet is one of the greatest productivity tools around, allowing us to find vast stores of information. I’m sure you’ve also heard it’s the greatest time waster, with lots of distracting sites or useless pages that get in the way of the results we want.

I find it really valuable to have a good search tool, one that focuses on the content I need, and limits the scope of the search to relevant areas. Of course we’ve all heard of Google, the 500 pound gorilla of search engines. While the do a pretty decent job, when your search phrase returns half a million hits it can be difficult to narrow down.

Recently I’ve found the Microsoft engine, Windows Live ( http://www.live.com/ ), has gotten a lot better, especially when looking for .Net related developer content.

My favorite so far though, is Search.Net ( http://searchdotnet.com/ ), a site put together by coding legend Dan Appleman. Dan ( http://www.desaware.com/ ) created a Google powered site, but maintains the list of sites it searches so you know that you are only combing sites devoted to programming and not Happy Harry’s House of Wild Women.

Another site I just learned about this week is Koders ( http://www.koders.com/ ). It’s a site devoted to searching through source code. It also has some helps that will let you zoom in on what you want. You can pick the language, or specify your search word needs to be in the class name, method name, or interface name. This kind of search is valuable when you are looking for an example, or trying to avoid reinventing the wheel.

A similar site is Krugle ( http://www.krugle.com/ ). It has similar paradigm to Koders, allowing you to search through code.

The final code search tool I’ll mention is Google’s new Code Search engine ( http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en ). It allows you to search using regular expression syntax, which is a nice feature (I just wish regular expressions weren’t such a pain in the underwear to use).

I have to give a quick thanks, most of these I learned about through either my listening of Dot Net Rocks ( http://www.dotnetrocks.com/ ) and HanselMinutes ( http://www.hanselminutes.com/ ) or through Scott Hanselman’s new forum site, which I blogged about yesterday.

Those are the list of place I go when I need to find something, how about you?

DVD Burning Under Vista: Grab & Burn

As much as I’ve enjoyed Vista, the one area I haven’t enjoyed is the DVD burning capabilities. They require an amount of empty disk space equal to one DVD. Usually by the point I need to burn a DVD it’s because my drive is full! Further, it’s slow, and not real friendly. As such I began a quest for an app that would let me burn DVDs / CDs under Vista, and was inexpensive. After a lot of searching I found just the tool.

Grab & Burn from RocketDivision ( http://www.rocketdivision.com/download_grabandburn.html ) has flavors for both Linux and Windows. It uses a wizard interface to step you through all of the various tasks. You can create an ISO, or burn a disk from an ISO, or take files and burn directly to disk without going through the ISO step. It also doesn’t require you have a lot of empty disk space, a critical thing for someone like me who often fills his drive up before he realizes it.

In addition to the file burning abilities Grab & Burn also has some interesting copy abilities. It will do a standard disc copy, a handy feature. When I burn my photos to a disc, I always burn two copies, one for my wife and one to leave at work as an “off site backup”. Family members also wind up getting copies at some point.

It also has the ability to convert 8.5 gig DVDs down to 4 gig ones by removing things like menus and extras. It also says it can master new DVDs out of your videos and the like.

To be honest I have not yet tried these last two features, I’ve been thrilled with the basic capabilities of being able to create data disks so quickly and easily.

Best of all, RocketDivision is giving the software for free, so the price is perfect. It’s easy to install, light weight, and fast. Even if you are already using another product consider downloading and checking it out. I’ve used it on both XP and Vista so far with great success.

Arcane Portable Passwords

After a long time searching, I finally found a password manager I like. I’ve looked at quite a few, but for whatever reason never seemed to find one that suited me. Today I finally found KeePass and am happy.

KeePass ( http://keepass.info/ ) is a free, open source password manager. It has the same basic functionality that most password managers have, but laid out in such a manner that to me is easy to use. It will generate a complex password for you, or you can enter your own. It even has a meter, which measures the strength of your password.

Be warned I had some issues with the installer version of KeePass under Vista. However, it also has a standalone no-install version which you can download and use, which is what I did. It works like a champ under Vista.

It also has a version (http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/keepass_portable ) that integrates nicely with Portable Apps ( http://portableapps.com/ ). In case you are not familiar with Portable Apps, it’s a suite of tools that don’t require installation.

The idea behind portable apps is you can place all of them on a USB thumb drive or external USB Hard drive. Then no matter what machine you plug it into, all off the apps and settings go with you. Nothing is stored on the host PC.

There are versions of FireFox, OpenOffice, GIMP (the paint program), and of course KeePass. Much more too, so take a look. Great for someone who travels a lot and just needs a few simple apps on the road.

Virtual Box

I’ve started playing with a new virtualization alternative, Virtual Box (http://www.virtualbox.org/ ). It’s an open source alternative to other virtual machine programs like VMWare or Microsoft’s Virtual PC. It runs on both Windows and several flavors of Linux, and has guest additions for Windows and Linux. It also has USB support, a feature lacking in Microsoft’s product.

I found the user interface very intuitive. Simply clicking New brings up a wizard and walks you through the steps to setup a new machine.

You can choose to use a physical CD/DVD or mount one off of an ISO file, access hard disk info, audio, etc all by clicking on the blue links you see above.

As an initial test I downloaded Damn Small Linux (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ ) as a ISO file, and ran it in “Live” version as a mounted image. I only gave it a quick run, but so far it seems to work OK. I plan further testing with XP as a test image, but would be interested in seeing comments with your experiences.

Arcane Tools: Cropper

Well, the uber cool Scott Hanselman has done it again, found another gem. OK, he’s been using it for a while, but in watching his GrokTalk ( see my post on Tuesday ) I learned about Cropper.

Cropper is a screen capture tool. As you can see below, it puts an translucent window on your screen. You can move and resize this window with the mouse, or the keyboard.

The arrow keys will move the cropper window in 1 pixel increments for fine tuning, or for quick moves combine the arrows with the CTRL key to make 10 pixel jumps. You can also resize, use ALT plus the arrows for 1 pixel resizes, or CTRL+ALT+arrow for 10 pixel resizing jumps.

You have the option to save in a variety of formats, including BMP, PNG, and JPG, and can even select a level of JPG compression. You can also save to the clipboard if you so desire.

To capture an image, simply double click on the translucent cropper window, or press ENTER. When you do, a file is written to your Documents folder in a subfolder called Cropper Captures (although this is user configurable). I like this, as it lets me quickly grab one screen shot after another without having to put a lot of thought into it.

The coolest thing about Cropper though, is it’s entirely written in C#, and open source so you can see all the code. It comes courtesy of Brian Scott, you can see his blog and download Cropper for yourself at http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/articles/Cropper.aspx .

The only negative I’ve found is the name. Apparently cropping is also a popular term in the scrapbooking world, so when I started talking about cropper my wife ( http://southerntinkerbelle.com ) got all excited and tought I was getting into scrapbooking! I hated to disappoint her, but on the bright side the sofa really wasn’t all that uncomfortable.

Arcane Surfaces

By now most folks have heard of the new Microsoft Surface ( http://www.microsoft.com/surface/ ). In case you’ve been busy organizing your Star Wars figures, Microsoft Surface is a technology that lets you interact with the top of a coffee table sized device, as if it were a touch screen. You can draw on it, write, move the windows around and resize them.

It also has the ability to interact with wireless devices. In one demo, a camera is placed on the Surface and the pictures appear to spill out onto the top of the table. Multiple people can “grab” these, spin them resize them, move them around to the delight.

What’s interesting though is the level at which people seem to want to take this. I’ve seen numerous blogs and websites exclaiming how they can finally have their “Tron Desk”.

In case you don’t recall, Tron (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/ ) was a 1982 movie in which Jeff Bridges gets sucked into a computer and has to play games to escape, and TRON is the program that can stop the bad guy. In the “real world” the bad guy (Ed Dillinger, played by David Warner (above)) has a really cool desk.

The monitor is built in, as is the keyboard. Dillinger types on the flat surface of his desk as lighted keys appear under his fingers. Of course in 1982 it was a mock up, but today we do have the technology to do that kind of thing, I recall some early personal computers of that era having flat keyboards, each key was just the slightest bump. Today, my PDA has a touch screen, I can use my finger to key in the password and manipulate the start menu.

So if this is so cool, and do-able, why isn’t everyone using flat desks like the Tron one today? Well for the same reason that I think the Surface is going to see limited use: Tactile Feedback.

Humans, at least for the time being, still like multisensory input. We like the feeling of the keys bouncing against our fingers, or the satisfying click of the mouse as we press it. It’s these tiny subtilities that we don’t think about that make the device usable, and largely unchanged since the inception.

Sure, Surface will have it’s place. I can see it as a big conference room table, or on a conference room wall. Maybe in resturaunts, to place orders or ask for drink refills.

But using the Surface as my desk? No thanks. Not unless it has a USB port for my keyboard!

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Arcane Holiday

Today in the US we are celebrating Memorial Day, where we remember all of the soldiers who fell in battle. So let me first start by thanking the families and those men who sacrificed themselves for the greater good.

In keeping with the holiday theme, I thought I’d take a brief holiday from the Windows Services series and catch up on a few things.

First, there’s been an update to my favorite Windows add-on, TouchCursor. The new version fixes the issue I mentioned with Virtual PC’s. The only issue since I’ve run across is in using it with Visual Studio and DevExpress CodeRush add-in. CodeRush also wants to use the spacebar for activation. However, I was able to easily change the activation key from CodeRush to something else, and problem was solved. Check it out at http://touchcursor.com/ or see my initial review at http://shrinkster.com/pf4 .

Next, about a week ago I mentioned some great music to program to by a group called Midnight Syndicate. Shortly after posting I found out the Haunted Voices Radio podcast did an entire weekend of Midnight Syndicate, including playing their music and complete interviews. Check out Haunted Voices Radio at http://www.hauntedvoicesradio.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=6 or http://shrinkster.com/pf2 . Each banner ad is to a separate MP3 (the weekend was broken up into 2 hour chunks for easy downloads). I believe there are 17 in all.

Finally I have to confess to a guilty pleasure. I recently received a gift certificate to a book store, and used it to purchase “Windows Developer Power Tools” by James Avery and Jim Holmes. (Amazon link: http://shrinkster.com/pf5 )

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you know I’m a “tool freak”, I love add-ins and tools for Windows and Visual Studio. As such I’ve been wanting this book for a while, but since I’ve already got a huge stack of books I’m still reading through I was having problems justifying yet another book. The gift certificate gave me just the opportunity I needed to get this cool new book. At over 1200 pages it’s chock full of toys, can’t wait to dig in!

IE Developer Toolbar Released!

After a long beta, Microsoft has released the IE Developer Toolbar. This toolbar allows you to look at the DOM (Document Object Model) in depth. You can delve into the CSS in detail as well. Take a look:

First you need to install the toolbar, you can download it from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E59C3964-672D-4511-BB3E-2D5E1DB91038&displaylang=en or http://shrinkster.com/ozm.

After installing, launch IE, I’m using IE7. Select Tools, Toolbars, Explorer Bar, IE Developer Toolbar to open the toolbar inside IE. You’ll see more features than I can cover here, just start playing with a webpage.

Here I’ve got this blog open, and clicked on a header element in the DOM tree. You can see a blue outline at the top of the picture (look at the dark blue next to “Arcane Code”). That’s the IE Dev Toolbar highlighting the element you just clicked on.

If you are doing serious ASP.Net development, this tool will be invaluable for working out the coding to make your website look it’s best. And it’s free, so you’ve got no excuses!