Alek Davis: Technoblog

Essential Visual Studio add-ins and other tools

2009-11-05T22:47:00.000-08:00

Summary: Improve your programming experience with Visual Studio add-ins and other enhancements.

If you are a Windows programmer using Visual Studio, here are a few thing which can enhance your programming experience.

Visual Studio add-ins

Code Convert converts source code between C# and Visual Basic.NET.

CodeRush Xpress for C# includes hand-picked features taken from CodeRush and Refactor! Pro add-ins.

CopySourceAsHtml allows you to copy source code, syntax highlighting, and line numbers as HTML.

GhostDoc automatically generates XML documentation comments for methods and properties based on their type, parameters, name, and other contextual information.

NArrange automatically organizes code members and elements within .NET classes.

SelectionTree adds feature selection tree dialog to appropriate setup and deployment (MSI) projects.

Spell Checker supports text verification in HTML style comments, ASP.NET server side comments, JScript, C# and C++ comments, CSS and C, VB and VBScript style comments, as well as in JS, CS, VB, CSS, CPP and H files (requires Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Microsoft Word 2003 or 2007).

StyleCop analyzes C# source code to enforce a set of style and consistency rules.

Versioning Controlled Build automates versioning of .NET and VC++ projects (handy for multi-project solutions).

Code snippets

Visual Studio 2008 Code Snippet Library (C#)

Visual Studio 2005 Code Snippets (C#, Visual Basic.NET)

Hacks

How to Automatically Stop a Visual Studio Build on an Error: will save you time when the build of dependent assemblies fails (it makes no sense to continue with the solution build when one of the project builds fails).

Download free music... legally

2009-10-14T23:45:00.000-07:00

Summary: Discover and download free music without violating the law.

If there is such thing as a typical music preference of a typical computer programmer, it probably does not apply to me. Sure, I like Pink Floyd, but my musical preferences diverge from majority of popular rock/hard rock/etc icons. My favorite music genre is baroque (Bach, Palestrina, Vivaldi), but I also enjoy The Mamas & the Papas, Cesária Évora, Angelique Kidjo, Al Bano & Romina Power, ABBA, Leonard Cohen, Joe Dassin, Astor Piazzolla, b-tribe, Canadian Brass, Ivan Kupala, and other performers, who have little in common with each other. Within the last year or so, I have been discovering performance by the less known artists (at least, less known by me), such as The Puppini Sisters, Natalia Clavier, Lee Rocker, and Melody Gardot, and I really liked some of them.

If your interests in music are similar to mine, this is how you can find and enjoy new music; it's free and absolutely legal.

Amazon.com
Amazon.com offers free MP3 downloads, but the list of songs can be overwhelming. You can use the navigation panel to narrow songs by genre:

In addition to individual songs, Amazon.com also offers free albums. To find free albums, use the Sort by Price: Low to High option.

Amazon normally offers high quality MP3 files (above 192 Kbps).

Podcasts
A number of radio stations offer one-song-a-day podcast downloads, which are normally of lower quality (128 Kbps - 192 Kbps), but they should sound fine to most ears. Sure most of the downloads are crap, but occasionally, you may stumble upon a gem. There must be more podcasts available, but here are the ones from NPR that I like:
MPR: The Current Song of the Day (RSS)
KCRW's Today's Top Tune (RSS)
KEXP Song of the Day (RSS)
To download podcasts, you can use a device-specific program, such as iTunes or Zune, but I prefer a free, open-source program called Juice.

Once you find a track that you like among the downloads, you can use an application like Mp3Tag to edit ID3 tags (you may also want to rename file names, because the downloaded files normally have cryptic names).

Use RSS tools
You can automate the process of searching for free MP3 downloads across multiples sources using RSS tools, such as Yahoo! Pipes. The key is to subscribe to the right aggregation service. I would recommend the SlickDeals' Freebes and Hot Deals forums, as well as Front Page (each of these has a subscribe/RSS link). You can follow this tutorial (and this one) to set up a Yahoo! Pipe filtering only posts containing music-specific keywords, such as free, MP3, music, album, etc.

Keep your eyes (and ears) open
Many vendors offer free promotional MP3s and CDs, some of which are not too bad. For example, I do not remember how I got it, but somehow I received a free Mommy Mix CD from Safeway.

Being a promotional CD, I did not expect much from it, but it it ended up being one of my family's favorite music CDs (in fact, if it were available for sale, I would've bought it). So don't assume that promotional music is always crappy, some may surprise you.

Technobrief #9

2009-09-17T18:05:00.000-07:00

Summary: Recent findings of software, articles, and more.

English

Online Style Guides: Collection of free style guides.

Guidelines and standards

Windows UX Interaction Guidelines: 828-page guide (PDF) for each aspect of Windows 7 user experience (UX); the first 32 pages cover the UX design principles for Windows 7, a list of inspirations for how to design a great UX, top design guide violations, and more.

Quotes

From Don't Believe Anyone by Jurgen Appelo:
"After eating and sleeping, disagreeing comes third on the list of basic necessities in my life. It's because I like thinking."

Jobs

From 7 great reasons to work at Netflix (Reason #5):
Rules Annoy Us
Rules creep into most companies as they try to prevent errors by less-than-stellar employees. But rules also inhibit creativity and entrepreneurship, leading to a lack of innovation. Over time this drives a company to being less fun and less successful. Instead of adding rules as we grow, our solution is to increase talent density faster than we increase business complexity. Great people make great judgment calls and few errors, despite ambiguity.

Programming

ComposedRegex: Martin Fowler explains how to write more readable regular expressions.
Four switch oddities: Eric Lipper explains non-obvious aspects of the switch statement (I did not know any of these).
TDD Anti-Patterns: James Carr catalogs the most common misuses of and omissions in Test-Driven Development.

Software

AoA Audio Extractor provides you a handy tool to extract audio/sound or background music from video files.
Copy Path is a Windows shell extension that adds the ability to copy the path, folder path, or filename within the right click shell extension; works on individual and multiple files and folders.
GoOo is another Microsoft Office alternative based on the OpenOffice.org source code; it claims to be fster and slicker.
Precision Helper creates and manages help projects; works natively with the Microsoft HTML Help projects format (HHP) and allows to publish resulting help to the CHM, WebHelp, PDF and the single HTML document formats.
SmillaEnlarger increases the size of digital images while trying to retain the quality.
SpyDLLRemover is the standalone tool to detect and delete spywares from the system.
StyleCop analyzes C# source code to enforce a set of style and consistency rules.
XMedia Recode is a video converter, which can cut and crop a movie, change the resolution, invert and correct the colors and do more (to change the default German interface to English, use the Optionen - Sprache menu option).

Web development

11 Classic CSS Techniques Made Simple with CSS3: Vasili explains how to create rounded corners, box/text shadows, use fancy fonts and opacity, define multiple backgrounds and do more using classic way and CSS3 way.
32 Indispensable Bookmarklets for Web Developers and Designers: A collection of bookmarklets for testing, analyzing and tweaking web pages.
Inline Validation in Web Forms: Luke Wroblewski reports on the findings from the usability study assessing various methods of inline form validation (a must read for developers!).
Mastering CSS, Part 2: Advanced Techniques and Tools: advanced techniques and effects you can achieve with CSS, e.g. date parts using sprites, timelines, menu lists, sequential lists, date badges, and more.
Niceforms is a script that will replace the most commonly used form elements with custom designed ones.
Web app theme showdown: Aristo and Ace: Comparison of web application UI themes released by two thick-client web frameworks; both look great, are licensed as Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike, and come as part of the framework or as separate assets.

Web tools

JSON Formatter and Validator is intended to help debug JSON data.
25 Essential Web Services for Designers collected by Giulio Bai (by Services, Giulio might have meant tools or sites).

Sending HTML-based email from .NET applications

2009-08-25T12:53:00.000-07:00

Summary: How to use XSL templates to design, build, and test HTML-based email, and avoid common pitfalls in the process.

If you're writing a .NET application that sends HTML-based emails, you have a number of options: you can use .NET Framework's own MailDefinition class, build a custom solution just like Dave did, or use a third party library similar to TemplateEngine by Ader Software. In this post I'll explain how to design, test, and generate complex HTML-based email messages using XSL transformations (XSLT). I'll also explain how to avoid common problems related to HTML-based emails and describe the tools that will help you in doing so.

Before I get to the nitty-gritty, let me briefly summarize the idea. You, a designer (or developer), create an XSLT file that defines an email template. To convert the XSLT template to an HTML message body, you application will load the XSLT file at run time (you will need to make sure that the application has access to the file location) and merge it with the data (data must be formatted as an XML document). The XSLT engine will substitute the placeholders with data and use conditional formatting to generate the HTML markup.

The advantages of using XSLT files for email templates include:

No dependency on custom libraries: Everything is built into the .NET Framework.
Flexible transformations: XSLT allows rather complex transformations and substitutions. For example, you may not know at design time how many items the message must display, in which case, word-by-word substitution will not work; XSLT handles cases like this nicely.
Ease of design and testing: You can build a number of data XML files and use them to test your template without running or debugging the application.

Here are the steps you need to follow:

Define XML structure to hold your data inputs.
I found it helpful to create static XML files to be used for testing XSLT templates for various combination of inputs. Your sample XML data file may look like this one:

Newsletter.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Root>
    <UserName>Mary Sweet</UserName>
    <Message>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit...</Message>
    <Offers>
        <Offer>Aenean sed nunc nec felis interdum rutrum...</Offer>
        <Offer>Nullam facilisis erat nec dolor tempor sed interdum neque consectetur...</Offer>
    </Offers>
    <UnsubscribeUrl>http://somesite.com/unsubscribe </UnsubscribeUrl>
</Root>

You can add sample XML data files to your project so you have them at hand for quick testing once you need to make changes to XSLT files, which you'll create in the next step.

Create XSLT files for HTML-based email templates.
If your email templates are totally different (say, you use one template for password expiration notices, and another for a weekly newsletter), then you will need to define multiple XSLT files (one for each template), but slight variations in a single template can be handled with the help of XSLT language constructs within the same file. If you end up with more then one XSLT template, I recommend implementing common sections of the message (e.g. header, footer, styles) in separate XSLT files, which you can then include in the final templates. For example here are three shared templates that define common header, footer, and CSS styles:

Header.xslt

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:template name="Header">
    <!-- If you need common header elements (logo, etc), include them here. -->
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Footer.xslt

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:template name="Footer">
    <xsl:param name="UnsubscribeUrl"/>
    <p>Best regards,</p>

    <p>John Doe, Editor</p>

    <!-- Only display message if URL is available -->
    <xsl:if test="string($UnsubscribeUrl) != ''">
      <p>
        <hr/>
        <span class="Footer">
          If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, please
          <a>
            <xsl:attribute name="href">
              <xsl:value-of select="$UnsubscribeUrl"/>
            </xsl:attribute>unsubscribe</a>.
        </span>
      </p>
    </xsl:if>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Style.xslt

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:template name="Style">
    <style type="text/css">
      body { 
        font-family:Verdana; 
        font-size: 10pt; 
        background-color: white; 
        color: black; }
      td {
        font-family:Verdana;
        font-size: 10pt;
        background-color: white; 
        color: black; }
      p {
        margin-top: 8pt; 
        margin-bottom: 8pt; }
      p + p { 
        margin-top: 8pt; 
        margin-bottom: 8pt; 
      }
      <!-- More definitions -->
    </style>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Assuming that you place the shared files in the Common subfolder under the main XSLT templates, you can reference them from templates as illustrated in the following example (note: when referencing an external template, use relative path in relation to the caller template):

Newsletter.xslt

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:include href="Common/Style.xslt"/>
  <xsl:include href="Common/Header.xslt"/>
  <xsl:include href="Common/Footer.xslt"/>
  <xsl:output method="html"/>
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <html>
      <head>
        <xsl:call-template name="Style"/>
      </head>
      <body>
        <table>
          <tr>
            <td>
              <xsl:call-template name="Header"/>

              <p>Dear <xsl:value-of select="/Root/UserName"/>,</p>
              
              <p><xsl:value-of select="/Root/Message"/></p>

              <xsl:if test="/Root/Offers/Offer">
                <p>Here are this week's offers:</p>
                <xsl:for-each select="/Root/Offers/Offer">
                  <blockquote>
                    <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="."/>
                  </blockquote>
                </xsl:for-each>
              </xsl:if>

              <xsl:call-template name="Footer">
                <xsl:with-param name="UnsubscribeUrl" 
                    select="/Root/UnsubscribeUrl"/>
              </xsl:call-template>
            </td>
          </tr>
        </table>
      </body>
    </html>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Notice how the XSLT markup references data values from the XML document using XPath.

Test XSL transformations.
Once you got your XSLT templates and sample XML files ready, you can test transformation using Visual Studio (activate XSLT file and select Show XSLT output from the XML menu; on the first attempt you will be prompted to specify the XML file) or other tools. Use different versions of the data XML files to test various permutations of data.

Test HTML-based email in the intended email client programs (web sites).
Although, your XSLT template may produce perfectly good HTML, there is no guarantee that it will look good in a particular email client. For example, Microsoft Outlook 2007, which uses the Word 2007 HTML rendering engine, does not recognize many of the standard CSS constructs. I learned the hard way that I could not use DIV tags to limit the page width (had to switch to TABLE tags). In the references section at the bottom of the post I included some articles discussing inconsistencies between HTML rendering in various email clients, but they did not help me much (I figured out how to fix formatting issues by trial and error), so the best thing you can do is to check how the mesages appear in various client application (Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Thunderbird, Gmail, etc).

For testing email messages, I recommend using the free Mozilla Thunderbird email client. Unlike other email clients, Thunderbird allows pasting unaltered HTML source in the message body, so you can send the message in the exact same format as your program. To send your HTML-based email messages via Thunderbird, do the following:
- In the program you use to test your template transformations, select the option to view source of the resulting HTML and copy it to the clipboard.
- Switch to Thunderbird and create a new message.
- In the message Compose form, click in the body field and select Insert - HTML from the main menu.
- Insert the HTML markup from the clipboard into the Insert HTML dialog box, and click the Insert button.

Implement code to handle XSL transformations.
The following example illustrates how a console program loads an XSLT template, merges it with XML document holding data, and uses the resulting HTML as the email body (note: the example does not contain any error handling):

Program.cs

using System;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Xsl;
using System.IO;
using System.Net.Mail;

namespace EmailXsltDemo
{
class Program
{
  static void Main(string[] args)
  {
    // Input data will be defined in this XML document.
    XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
    
    // We will use XML nodes to define data.
    XmlElement xmlRoot;
    XmlNode xmlNode;
    XmlNode xmlChild;
    
    // XML structure for data inputs (we'll add <Offer> elements later).
    xmlDoc.LoadXml(
      "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\" ?>" +
       "<Root>" +
        "<UserName/>" +
        "<Message/>" +
        "<Offers/>" +
        "<UnsubscribeUrl/>" +
      "</Root>");
    
    // Set the values of the XML nodes that will be used by XSLT.
    xmlRoot = xmlDoc.DocumentElement;
    
    xmlNode = xmlRoot.SelectSingleNode("/Root/UserName");
    xmlNode.InnerText = "Mary Sweet";
    
    xmlNode = xmlRoot.SelectSingleNode("/Root/Message");
    xmlNode.InnerText = 
      "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.";
    
    xmlNode = xmlRoot.SelectSingleNode("/Root/Offers");
    
    // Insert two <Offer> elements and set their values.
    xmlChild = xmlDoc.CreateNode(XmlNodeType.Element, "Offer", null);
    xmlChild.InnerText = 
      "Aenean sed nunc nec felis interdum rutrum vivamus tempor.";
    xmlNode.AppendChild(xmlChild);
    
    xmlChild = xmlDoc.CreateNode(XmlNodeType.Element, "Offer", null);
    xmlChild.InnerText = 
      "Nullam facilisis erat nec dolor tempor sed interdum neque consectetur.";
    xmlNode.AppendChild(xmlChild);
    
    xmlNode = xmlRoot.SelectSingleNode("/Root/UnsubscribeUrl");
    xmlNode.InnerText = 
      "http://somesite.com/newsletter/unsubscribe/?user=1234567890";
    
    // This is our XSL template.
    XslCompiledTransform xslDoc = new XslCompiledTransform();
    xslDoc.Load(@"..\..\Xslt\Newsletter.xslt");
    
    XsltArgumentList xslArgs = new XsltArgumentList();
    StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
    
    // Merge XSLT document with data XML document 
    // (writer will hold resulted transformation).
    xslDoc.Transform(xmlDoc, xslArgs, writer);
    
    MailMessage email = new MailMessage();
    
    email.From = new MailAddress(<YOUR_FROM_ADDRESS>);
    email.To.Add(<YOUR_TO_ADDRESS>);
    email.Subject = "Demo message";
    email.IsBodyHtml = true;
    email.Body  = writer.ToString();
    
    // Specify appropriate SMTP server, such as "localhost".
    SmtpClient smtp = new SmtpClient(<YOUR_MAIL_SERVER>);
     
    smtp.Send(email); 
  }
}
}

For your convenience, I created a sample Visual Studio 2008 project which illustrates the functionality:

Download sample project
Before running the project, make sure that you substitute the YOUR_FROM_ADDRESS, YOUR_TO_ADDRESS, and YOUR_MAIL_SERVER placeholders with the actual string values.

See also:
What kind of language is XSLT?
How to Code HTML Email Newsletters
The Dark Heart of HTML Email
Guide to CSS support in email clients
2007 Office System Tool: Outlook HTML and CSS Validator
Template Messages Using XSL Transformations and XML Serialization

How to optimize web page width

2009-08-07T12:33:00.000-07:00

Summary: One approach for optimizing a web page layout to make it look nice on both smaller and bigger screens.

When it comes to web page width, web designers choose between two basic options: fixed width and liquid (AKA dynamic, stretch, etc) width. Either option has a number of pros and cons, but it looks like the fixed width approach is more prevalent. And this irritates the heck out of me! I just hate having to scroll up and down when navigating a web page half of which content is empty. I do not use small computing devices, but I suspect that people, who view fixed width web pages on 10"-screen netbooks, also do not enjoy scrolling left and right.


Fixed layout	Liquid layout

Dynamic web page layouts maximize the use of screen real estate and minimize scrolling, but they have one drawback: many liquid pages look weird on bigger (24"+) monitors. And just as wide-line paragraphs are difficult to read, really wide web pages are difficult to use.

A few years ago, when 15"-19" monitors used to be the norm and the spread between the small and big monitors was not as big, this was not such a big problem. Now, with cheap large (21"+) monitors and small devices (like 10"-screen netbooks) gaining popularity, it is more difficult to optimize a web page for different screen sizes. So how do you design a web page layout to make it look nice on both 10" and 24" screen?

I have an idea, but before I get to it, let me summarize and justify my goals.

Goal #1: No wasted space.
White space is generally good, but only until it starts causing unnecessary hassles. For example, it makes no sense to force the user to scroll vertically on a page with 40% of blank content (on the left and right sides).

Goal #2. Reduce scrolling.
Vertical scrolling is bad, but horizontal scrolling is worse. There should be no need to scroll horizontally when viewing a page on 12"+ screen. Of course, depending on the displayed content, there may be exceptions (e.g. a grid is more likely to require horizontal scrolling than say textual content). Vertical scrolling should be required only when there is no wasted white space.

Goal #3: Trim content width when page is too wide.
Wide page is normally good, but not too wide. There is a threashold, after which each page width increase will reduce its readability.

With these goals in mind, here is my idea:

When designing a web page layout, use liquid (dynamic) width until a certain threashold is reached (the threashold would depend on the type of the page); when the width of the browser window exceeds the value of this threashold, switch the page layout to fixed width.

This approach offers the best of both worlds: it minimizes wasted space and scrolling on small and medium size screens, and it improves page readability on larger screens. It also does not require to resize the browser window on a bigger screen to make the page smaller.

Now, how do you actually implement this layout? I'm not particularly strong in CSS and web design, so I was not even sure if it was possible. Fortunately, it is. The answer came from user PortageMonkey, who responded to my question at StackOverflow. To make it work, you just need to define the maximum width of the container holding your web page content (normally, a <DIV> or <TABLE> element) using the max-width CSS selector. The max-width selector is supported by all major browsers, except IE 6 (and earlier). To make this functionality work on IE 6, use IE dynamic properties to set up the page width, such as in the following example, which limits the width of an element to 600 pixels:

width: expression(document.body.clientWidth > 600 ? "600px": "auto");

Here is the complete example:

<html>
<head>
<style>
div#content
{
  max-width: 600px; 
  width: expression(document.body.clientWidth > 600 ? "600px": "auto" );
  border: red 1px solid;
}
div#wrapper {width: auto; border: blue 1px solid;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
  <div id="wrapper">
    <div id="content">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.[...]</div>
  </div>
</body>
</html>

If you save this page on a local drive and try to open it in IE, you will notice an ActiveX warning that gets displayed because the CSS style section uses the expression property. If you do not allow blocked content, the page will not work as expected. Fortunately, the warning appears only when you try to open local files (via the file:/// protocol), so it should not be an issue.

This is what the content of a page would look like when the width is below the maximum (the inline images are adjusted, so they appear to have the same width, although they are not [compare the text displayed on each line]; to see the original, click the image):

And once you increase the width beyond the threashold, the content will stay within the maximum width boundary:

When using this approach, simply adjust the value of the maximum width to the size that is most appropriate for your application.

Improve HP Compaq laptop performance

2009-07-13T20:25:00.000-07:00

Summary: A couple of things that can help improve your HP Compaq performance.

My company-issued laptop (HP Compaq 6910p) has been sluggish lately. The major problem was the login delay: it took 3-5 minutes for the system to become responsive on every login. I recently cleaned up and defragmented the laptop's hard drive and voila: performance has improved. The login response time now takes a fraction of what it used to be.

If you are suffering from a poor computer performance (and it does not have to be HP/Compaq laptop, but can be any brand of laptop or desktop), try defragmenting the system drive. Before you start defragmentation, uninstall the programs that you do not need, and use the Disk Cleanup tool to delete unnecessary files. To launch Disk Cleanup, in Windows Explorer, right-click the system drive (normally, C:), and select Properties from the context menu.

In the General tab, click the Disk Cleanup button to launch disk diagnostics. Once diagnostics is complete (which may take a few minutes), use the options to delete all temporary and unneeded files.

After cleaning up the disk, switch back to the disk Properties dialog box (or re-open it if needed), click the Tools tab, and press the Defragment Now button.

Depending on how badly your hard drive is defragmented, you may need to run the defragmenter 2-5 times to get the best results. It may take a few hours to complete the first pass, but each consecutive run will take less and less time.

Along with defragmenting the system drive, I also uninstalled the HP ProtectTools software (Credential Manager, Embedded Security, etc), which caused me nothing but irritation (since I use other security solutions, I have no need for HP ProtectTools).

If you are using an HP Compaq laptop and want to get rid of HP ProtectTools, you need to uninstall the applications in the following order (you may not have all of these utilities installed, so just remove the ones that you have):

Credential Manager for HP ProtectTools
Java Card Security for ProtectTools
Drive Encryption for HP ProtectTools
Smartcard security for HP ProtectTools
Embedded Security for HP ProtectTools
BIOS Security for HP ProtectTools
HP ProtectTools Security Manager

I’m not sure if removing HP ProtectTools helped improve my system performance, but at least I do not see the "Embedded security was not initialized" pop-up on every login and my system tray is now a bit cleaner.

Free WinZip alternatives

2009-07-11T14:05:00.000-07:00

Summary: Comparison of several free file archivers.

WinZip is a classic file archiving tool. It is a nice utility, but it has a major drawback: it is not free. If your budget for a file archiver is short of $30 (the current price of the cheapest version of WinZip), you can try a number of FREE alternatives, such as:

7-zip
ALZip
DesktopZip
iZarc
jZip
KGB Archiver
PeaZip
SecureZIP Express
TugZip
ZipGenius
ZipItFree

I recently checked these tools looking for the following features:

Standard archiving algorithms: the tool must work with archives produced by other archivers, generate archive files that can be opened by other archivers.
Encryption: the tools should allow encryption of the new archives and it must be able to decrypt archives generated by other tools.
Self-extractor: the tool must be able to generate a self-extracting executable archive file.
Filename Unicode support: the tool should correctly handle Unicode characters in file names.
Multilingual interface (Russian wanted): not a requirement, but is nice to have.
Installer: is also nice to have.
Documentation: help file, or at the very least online help, could be handy.
Command-line operation: I do not need it now, but being able to compress, update, and decompress files via a command-line interface is a plus.

In short, all of the programs I tried (or considered trying) failed in one or more areas; however, some came closer to my ideal than the others. Before I describe how the tools compared, let me briefly explain my testing strategy.

To test the tools' capabilities, I used a (legally purchased) copy of the Cabo Verde album by Césaria Évora. The album folder contained 13 MP3 tracks. Almost all file names included Portuguese characters. I encrypted the files in the archive using the AES encryption algorithm with a 256-bit key and compared the results with the archive generated by WinZip (I used WinZip v. 12). I tried to open the archive generated by each tool in WinZip and extract a single file from it (the file had to be decrypted). I also tried to open the encrypted WinZip archive in each of the tested tools. I ran the tools on Windows XP SP3. This is what I found.

First, based on the information from Wikipedia and some preliminary test, I determined that some tools on my list did not support Unicode file names. Because these archivers cannot handle Unicode file names, I excluded them from my test (which is unfortunate, since some of these programs looked promising):

Among the tools supporting Unicode file names, I still noticed a problem related to Unicode characters. For example, file Cesaria Evora - Mãe Velha (Old Mother).mp3 often appeared normal in the archives opened by the programs that produced it, but its name was corrupted when I opened the same archive in other tools. This is how the archive generated by WinZip appears in WinZip (click to display the original -- bigger -- image):

But look how 7-Zip displays the archive:

Notice the extra folder that appears at the top of the file list. When I expand this folder, I see the file, but the name appears corrupted (letter ã turns into π):

In some tools, Unicode characters appear corrupted only in the GUI, but they were fine in the extracted files; however, most tools -- especially the ones built on the top of the 7-zip compression engine -- actually did corrupt the file names (e.g. name of the file extracted from a WinZip archive in 7-Zip was corrupted). This was a common problem (with slight variations) among the tools.

Now, let me summarize how the tools stacked up for me.

7-Zip (v. 4.65) is considered a classic free file archiver. I've read lots of praises to 7-Zip, but I did not like it. The interface is not intuitive. It took me a while to figure out the workflow which differs from WinZip-like programs. For example, in WinZip you select File - New to create a new archive, to which you can then add files and folders. In 7-Zip, there is no File - New menu: you first need to select files or folders, and then click 7-Zip - Add to archive in the context menu. The purpose of some menu options and features is unclear (for a novice). For example, what's the point of two-panel view? 7-Zip also does not use standard Windows dialog boxes, such as File Open or File Save. Navigation in the file manager is awkward: there are no shortcuts to standard folders, such as Desktop or My Documents. There are many quirks like these. The interface of the program is really outdated. I would probably tolerate 7-Zip after more frequent use, but it is rather irritating for a beginner. On the positive side, 7-Zip is very capable. It can use many archiving algorithms. The interface is available in many languages. Command-line version offers many options. Help file covers available features (especially command-line options) very nicely.

Summary:If you get used to the 7-zip workflow, can tolerate the ugliness of the GUI, and keep in mind the possible issues with Unicode file names in the archives generated by other tools, 7-Zip is worth considering, but I'll pass.

DesktopZip 2008 does not have an installer. It looks simple enough but I quickly dismissed DesktopZip once I realized that it does not support encryption. I did not find an option to encrypt the archive. DesktopZip also did not prompt me for the password/passphrase when I tried to extract an encrypted file from the WinZip archive and promptly failed.

Summary: No encryption - no go.

jZip (v. 1.3.0.67918), which uses the 7-Zip engine, looked nice on the first run. Although the web site claims that jZip is available in multiple languages, I only found an English version. The application UI looks reasonably modern and simple. Basic archiving and dearchiving operations are intuitive, but there are some gaps. When I tried to encrypt the files in the archive, jZip asked me to enter the encryption password (which is expected), but then it asked me to enter the decryption password. This made no sense to me, since in the AES encryption algorithm, which I used, encryption and decryption passwords must be the same. I did not enter the decryption password, and was able to decrypt and extract a file from the jZip archive using jZip and WinZip. Like WinZip, jZip makes it difficult to archive a folder with all its contents (you can archive contents of the folder without the folder info). The program can run from command line, but it does not provide a help file. Development status is unclear. The major problem I encountered in jZip was related to Unicode. For some reason, jZip changed letter ã in the name of the Cesaria Evora - Mãe Velha (Old Mother).mp3 file to a, and it did this with its own archive.

jZip also sneaked a shortcut file Archive created by free jZip.url, which I assume points to the jZip's web site, into the archive. In the spirit of the software trojans, jZip GUI did not show the file in the archive, but I noticed it when I opened the jZip archive in WinZip:

Summary: Sneaky and corruptive - I'll pass.

KGB Archiver (v. 1.2) works as a wizard that lets you perform three operations: compress or decompress archive and change the application settings.

The program offers support for several languages, but not for Russian (and you call yourself KGB Archiver?). Surprisingly, when I opened a WinZip-generated archive in KGB Archiver, it displayed the problematic Cesaria Evora - Mãe Velha (Old Mother).mp3 file correctly; however, KGB Archiver changed the name of this file in its own archive (a'la jZip).

KGB Archiver could not extract files encrypted with a 256-bit AES encryption key from a WinZip archive (it kept popping the Password dialog box even after I submitted the correct password; I assume it would work with legacy WinZip encryption). KGB Archiver cannot create a self-extracting executable archive. Command-line execution is available, but offers just basic options. There is no help file. KGB Archiver does not let you make any changes to an existing archive. I am not sure which encryption algorithm the program uses. The wizard does not provide the back button (to go to the initial screen) and the program closes automatically after performing an operation, which I found a bit irritating.

Summary: Limited capabilities, awkward interface, and shaky handling of Unicode files make KGB Archiver a poor choice.

PeaZip (v. 2.6.2) is another program that uses the 7-Zip engine and therefore suffers from the similar problems with Unicode file names. It's a bit worse, though: when I opened a WinZip archive in PeaZip, it did not show the Cesaria Evora - Mãe Velha (Old Mother).mp3 file at all (it correctly identified 13 objects in the archive -- 12 files and one folder -- but it only displayed 11 files). In its own archive, it showed that it had changed letter ã in the file name to letter a, but when I opened this file in WinZip, the file name appeared correctly (go figure!).

The PeaZip's user interface supports several languages (including Russian), but no matter which language I tried, it seemed confusing. It took me a while to figure out how the interface works, and I'm not sure I got it all. It starts in the Browse mode (showing the file system), but then I clicked the Options button and the screen switched to the Options mode (the Options button transformed to the Browse button). The archive creation operation are relatively straight-forward, but if you want to change the default settings, pay attention to non-obvious clues. For example, to archive a folder, you need to click a down arrow next to the Add file(s) button, and select the Add folder option. When archiving a folder, I did not find any option to show the archived files. PeaZip claims to support creation of self-extracting archives, but I did not try this feature.

I assume that the Layout feature allows making changes in the archive, but I did not understand how to use it. Archiving options support most common capabilities, such as encryption settings, but still, they are a bit confusing (e.g. see the Encryption group: the Encrypt option include None and Content; how bizarre; why not use a simple check box or radio buttons to indicate whether to encrypt contents or not; also once the archive is created without encryption, how do you encrypt it?). PeaZip comes with a PDF help file, but reading a manual to understand how to use an archiver should not be necessary.

Summary: PeaZip has some potential, but in current implementation, it suffers from usability issues and problems related to handling Unicode file names.

SecureZIP Express (12.30.0016) is a free and somewhat limited version of SecureZIP made by PKWare. It looks more professional than most tools in this review. The interface is simple and intuitive with exception of security settings pertaining to certificates, which will probably confuse most users. SecureZIP Express handled Unicode file names in a WinZip archive well, but it corrupted the notorious Cesaria Evora - Mãe Velha (Old Mother).mp3 file name (changed letter ã to letter a). Two other limitations include English-only interface and no support for command-line execution. SecureZIP can create self-extracting archives.

Summary: I really like the SecureZIP interface, but Unicode file name issues tarnish the tool's reputation (if not for the Unicode problem, I would've overlooked lack of language support and no command-line execution).

ZipItFree (v. 2.10) did not have a good start. During installation, it tried to shove the following programs on to my system: My.Freeze Toolbar, Xobni, SmartShopper, WeatherBug, and Zwangi (I declined every one of these). The tool is kind of a pain to use. For example, to create a new archive, I selected an existing file and changed the name, but the tool asked me if I wanted to override the existing file (the file which I selected first). I had to switch folders to clear the file selection or type in the new file name without selecting a file first. ZipItFree offers several skins, but neither of them makes the application look like a typical Windows program. The dialog boxes and other controls in ZipItFree do not behave like standard Windows controls (e.g. Ctrl+A does not select all displayed files). The windows in the dialog boxes are too small and awkward to use. And you need to pay attention to the instructions (e.g. when archiving a folder, I had to drag-and-drop it from one window to another; I first thought that selecting the folder would've been enough). ZipItFree user interface does not support languages other than English, and I did not find any mentioning of command-line execution. On initial run, ZipItFree displayed a small add in the top right corner of the application window, but after I changed the skin, I did not see the ad (not sure if it is permanently gone or will be back). To my surprise, ZipItFree was the only program that did not have any problem with the Unicode file name. It worked with Unicode file names in both the WinZip and its own archive without a hitch. Wow! After so many disappointments, I'm really impressed. Encryption also worked fine between WinZip and ZipItFree. Unfortunately, ZipItFree cannot make a self-extracting archive.

Summary: I hate the controls, such as file navigation windows, in the ZipItFree user interface, but it appears to be the only free program among the ones I tried that does not have any problems with Unicode file names. If Unicode file name support is important for you, and you understand English, and you do not need a command-line interface or a self-extracting archive, ZipItFree may be a decent option. Just be careful during installation and decline each crapware offer that you do not need.

The bottom line
In the world of free archivers, there is no perfection. All tools I tried had problems, but some were worse than others. Nevertheless, you should be able to pick a tool that is more appropriate for your job, preferences, and tolerance level, as long as you understand its limitations.

If you want to add more pros and cons for the tools that I covered or suggest another application, please leave a comment (just make sure that the tool meets my requirements).

Technobrief #8

2009-07-06T22:42:00.000-07:00

Summary: Recent findings of software, articles, videos, and more.

Articles

Cannot Measure Productivity by Martin Fowler
Emerging Trends in Web Design by Aaron Kupferberg
Social Media Experts Are Poets, Software Developers Are Novelists by Jurgen Appelo

Blogs

AjaxLine (resources for AJAX, jQuery, ASP.NET, and other web technologies)
94 Great Freeware Programs For A Freeware Only PC
Top 200 Blogs for Developers (Q2 2009)

English

Online Style Guide by Saint Anslem College:

Graphics

15 wonderful set of icons for web design
Iconza (free customizable icons for a web site)

jQuery

15 Resources To Get You Started With jQuery From Scratch by by Jeffrey Way
jQuery plugins by Jörn Zaefferer (includes accordion, auto-complete, password validation, tooltip, treeview, and more)
jTruncate in Action by Jeremy Martin (jTruncate is a jQuery plugin that truncates long text entities on a web page)
jQuery vs MooTools by Aaron Newton

Programming

Quotes

From Sphinx - text search The Pirate Bay way by Ted Dziuba:
"Before Sphinx, the other option for text search was Apache Solr. Solr, whose name-giver understands that vowels are a scarce resource and must be used sparingly, is a server that sits on top of Lucene. Solr is popular with the enterprise crowd, who love its Java. Being a Java program, Solr includes no shortage of technology whose acronyms contain the letters J and X."

Software

CodecInstaller detects the installed audio and video codecs, analyzes files to understand which codecs they require, and suggests which codecs need to be installed.
Convert AVI to MP4 converts video files from various formats (AVI, DivX, Xvid, WMA, MOV, H.264, MPEG1/MPEG2) to the MP4 (MPEG4) format.
GSpot shows information about video and audion codecs used in a media file.
DriverBackup! backs up, restores, and removes drivers.
JPEG Lossless Rotator rotates JPEG images without re-encoding and loss of quality.
MPEG Streamclip video converter plays, cuts, copies, pastes, trims, exports, and converts video files (MPEG, VOB, PS, M2P, MOD,VRO, DAT, MOV, DV, AVI, MP4, TS, M2T, MMV, REC, VID, AUD, AVR, VDR, PVR, TP0, M2V, M1V, MPV, AIFF, M1A, MP2, MPA, AC3, and more).
Postbox email client offers an alternative to the popular Outlook and Thunderbird.
Roadkil recovers files from disks with physical damage (bad sectors, scratches, etc).
Shrink Pic automatically reduces the size of photos sent or uploaded toemail, instant messaging, blogging, and web galleries
Svchost Process Analyzer lists all svchost instances and checks the services they contain making it easy to uncover worms and viruses, such as Conficker.
Zimbra Desktop is an email, which can syncs Zimbra, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail email, contacts, and calendars.
Zortam MP3 Media Studio includes audio file organizer, ID3 tag editor, CD ripper, WAV/MP3 converter, MP3 volume normalizer, lyrics finder, batch lyrics and cover finder, playlist manager, CD burner, and more.

Videos

Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon by Jared Spool

Web design

15 CSS Tricks That Must be Learned by Drew Douglass
Common Mistakes in Web Design by Marko
A Pattern Library for Interaction Design by Welie.com
Visual Hierarchy in Web Design by Jarel Remick
Web form design guidelines: an eyetracking study by Chui Chui Tan

Web tools

Color Scheme Designer (page examples are really helpful)
SpiderOak provides an easy, secure and consolidated free online backup, sync, sharing, access and storage solution for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (Ubuntu, Debian & Fedora)
Mojo Helpdesk centralizes, assigns and tracks organization requests for customer and tech support, internal tasks management, website maintenance, and so on (free edition offers 3 ticket queues and 2 support accounts)
Path 101 provides free career services including personality test, resume analysis, and career advice
ProjectLocker offers source control, defect tracking, document management and other services (free account supports 5 users, 500 MB of space, and unlimited number of projects)

Essential freeware for Windows

2009-07-02T12:59:00.000-07:00

Summary: List of my favorite freeware tools and utilities.

The lists of my favorite freeware for regular users and developers have been getting out of hand lately, so until I find a better method, I'll use this post to keep track of the FREE Windows tools and utilities that I consider the best for various tasks.

When assessing the tools, I prefer software that:

is totally free: no shareware, not limited to home use (although, home-use restriction is fine in some cases, such as for anti-virus software);
works across corporate firewalls (for internet connections);
supports Unicode (international character sets);
offers multi-lingual interface (mostly interested in Russian);
comes with an installer (okay, lack of installer will not kill it, but it's really nice to have).

Here is the list of my favorite freeware:

Media Players
Best Audio Player: AIMP2
Pros: highly customizable; clean interface; good sound (with enabled equalizer); no ads; Unicode support; multilingual interface; can be minimized to system tray; rips CD tracks to audio files (including MP3); records streaming audio; converts audio files between different formats (MP3, WAV, OGG, WMA, etc); edits ID3 tags (ID3v1, ID3v2, etc). Cons: slight startup delay; some customization options are confusing.

Best Video Player: KMPlayer
Pros: comes with internal codecs; plays practically any video format; easy to launch video from a file, folder, or CD/DVD; clean interface; multi-lingual interface; no ads; captures screenshots. Cons: I noticed subtitles getting out of sync with video a few times (could be a hardware issue); menu is accessed via right mouse click.

Media Editors
Best Video Editor: Avidemux
Pros: converts between various video formats; instant preview of changes; easy to adjust cropping settings; simple to use filters; color/saturation/brightness adjustment; displays file video/audio encoding data. Cons: two versions of UI (GTK+ and Qt4) are confusing; toolbar buttons do not show tooltips; terse descriptions of available options and settings.
Alternatives: VirtualDub.

Best Audio Editor: Audacity
Pros: many features; easy to use (once you get familiar with the interface); records streaming audio; trims silence; reduces background noise; imports/exports audio files from/to various audio formats; mixes tracks; adds sound effects (bass boost, etc); Unicode support; multilingual interface. Cons: outdated look; does not come with LAME MP3 encoder (must be installed manually); cannot edit MP3 natively (need re-encoding); some menu options are not standard (e.g. Edit - Preferences).

Best Audio Tag Editor: Mp3Tag
Pros: supports MP3 tags and other metadata (ID3, Vorbis Comments, APE); renames files based on the tag information; supports cover art; works on multiple files; Unicode support; multilingual interface; retrieves metadata from external sources (Amazon, freedb, etc). Cons: populating metadata from external sources is a bit awkward.

MP3 Tools
Best MP3 Splitter: mp3DirectCut
Pros: splits, trims, crops audio files; no-destructive cut, copy and paste; automatic track splitting (by timed intervals); keeps ID3 tags. Cons: cannot adjust interval-based auto-cues to fall on to silent pause.

Best MP3 Merger: MP3 Album Maker
Pros: simple operation; reversible merge. Cons: I haven't used it much, so can't think of any.

Best MP3 Volume Normalizer: MP3Gain
Pros: lossless normalization; can be reverted back to the original. Cons: functionality is a bit confusing; I'm not sure how it handles clipping.

Disk Tools (CD/DVD)
Best DVD Ripper: DVD Shrink
Pros: decrypts (breaks copy protection from) many DVDs; removes region code; rips video to an ISO file or VIDEO_TS folder; can compress ripped video to fit on a standard 4.7 GB DVD; allows removing of unnecessary data (audio/video tracks). Cons: cannot decrypt some latest DVDs.
Alternatives: DVD Decrypter (decrypts most DVDs that DVD Shrink cannot); DVDFab HD Decrypter (haven't tried, but seems good); AmoK DVD Shrinker (does not remove copy protection, but claims to "[shrink] DVDs up to one fifth of the original size without any noticeable quality reduction").

Best DVD Maker: Windows Movie Maker
Pros: creates videos and slide shows; unlimited video clips and audio tracks; many transition effects; fades video/audio in/out; clips video/audio; brightness adjustment; some video effects; supports H.264 encoded videos (via ffdshow video decoder); video menu (several themes); video chapters; video preview; supports PAL and NTSC; not very resource hungry; built into Windows; easy to learn; useful help and tutorials. Cons: supports limited video formats; does not work with QuickTime (MOV) or Flash (FLV) files; few video improvement features (e.g. no exposure, color correction); few audio adjustment features (e.g. no audio normalization); somewhat crippled Vista version; needs Windows DVD Maker to build DVD menus and burn DVDs (Windows DVD Maker is not available in Windows Vista Basic and Business editions).

Best CD/DVD Burner: ImgBurn
Pros: creates image file (such as ISO) from a disk (CD/DVD); writes image file to disk; verifies disk readability; compares disk to image file; checks quality of drive and media (requires DVDInfoPro); lots of customization option (burn speed, etc). Cons: does not offer a single-step disk copy.
Alternatives: Ashampoo Burning Studio Free 6.76 (also version 2009); BurnAware Free; CDBurnerXP; Exact Audio Copy; InfraRecorder; StarBurn Free.

File Tools
Best File Manager: Cubic Explorer
Pros: Multi-tab interface; looks clean out of the box; can copy full file path; quick access to favorite folders via bookmarks; natural sort (e.g. 1.txt, 2.txt, 10.txt); file preview panel; built-in text editor; when renaming a file, extension is not selected; multiple skins; file filtering. Cons: cannot undo (rename, delete, etc); crippled search (cannot search for text in a file); access to remote shares (via UNC path) is slow; does not display folder sizes; limited customization options.
Alternatives: UltraExplorer (took me some effort to customize to my liking); FreeCommander (GUI is a bit too busy).

Best File Renamer: Rename Master
Pros: file filtering; preview of results; can use file properties (timestamps, audio tags, image tags, etc); scripts for commonly used renaming options; undo changes; integrated explorer. Cons: GUI is not very polished.
Alternatives: ReNamer; Ken Rename.

Best File Synchronization: DropBox
Pros: 2 GB of free space (+ more via referrals); automatic backups; handles corporate firewalls; tracks file changes. Cons: cannot delete old file revisions; works only with one parent folder; does not seem to work with auto-proxy configuration scripts (need to explicitly define proxy URL).
Alternatives: Syncplicity (2 GB of free space; can complement DropBox; manages standard folders, such as My Documents; can customize what get synced); SpiderOak (2 GB of free space).

Best Online Backup: Mozy
Pros: 2 GB of free space; automatic backups; uses encryption. Cons: can't say if there are any.
Alternatives: iDrive (2 GB of free space; similar to Mozy).

Best File Eraser: Eraser
Pros: simple interface; Windows shell integration. Cons: none.
Alternatives: CyberShredder.

Best Virtual Drive Mounter: Gizmo Drive
Pros: supports various image file formats (ISO, BIN, etc); supports encryption; Windows shell integration. Cons: a bit heavy on pop-ups.
Alternatives: Virtual CloneDrive; MagicISO Virtual CD/DVD-ROM; Total Mounter; StarBurn Free; Pismo File Mount; ISODisk; WinCDEmu.

Graphics and Photo Tools
Best Vector Graphics Editor: Inkscape
Pros: clean interface; standard commands an operations. Cons: manual does not load; used the program very few times, so can't say much.

Best Image Editor: GIMP
Pros: feature rich; bit editor; editable text layers; photo enhancing. Cons: non-standard menu options; some operations are non-intuitive and/or more complex than they should be.
Alternatives: Paint.NET (does not support editable text layers); virtualStudio (has a few nice touches; red-eye correction needs improvement).

Best Photo Cropper: JPEGCrops
Pros: extremely easy to crop for preset sizes (such as 4x6); preview; lossless cropping; batch mode. Cons: none.

Best Photo Resizer: Fotosizer
Pros: simple resizing process for popular formats; batch operation; can lock aspect ratio. Cons: none.
Alternatives: Image Resizer (part of Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP).

Best Screen Capture: Gadwin PrintScreen 4.4
Pros: easy to use, no-frills program; can capture mouse cursor. Cons: no built-in image editor; no annotation capability; does not detect non-rectangular or shaded windows' borders; development work on free version has stopped.

Office and Business Apps
Best Office Suite: OpenOffice
Pros: supports Microsoft Office 2007 formats; multi-lingual interface; traditional toolbar (no ribbon); extensions. Cons: not as feature-rich as Microsoft Office; interface is somewhat outdated.
Alternatives: SoftMaker Office 2006; GoOo (based on OpenOffice, but claims to run faster).

Best Text Editor: PSPad
Pros: supports Unicode; multi-lingual interface; built-in spell checker; syntax highlighting (for many programming languages); ability to run external tools (for example, when editing a VBScript file, you can execute it directly from the editor); search and replace options; supports regular expressions (PSPad is the only free text editor among the ones I tried that correctly handled new line and end-of-line replacements); text bookmarking; line numbering; multi-document interface; built-in file explorer; macros; character case change (UPPER/lower/Sentence/etc); text conversion (to/from Base64, URL, quoted printable, decimal/hexadecimal, etc); auto-insert (optional) and finding matching brackets (parentheses); HTML-RTF conversion; column selection mode; HTML preview; HTML document template; option to set as default text editor. Cons: some menus are not standard (Settings should be under Tools); I wish it could do XSLT previews.
Alternatives: Notepad++ (still has problems with regular expression-based search and replace); Q10 (minimalist, full-screen, spell checker, and more).

PDF Tools
Best PDF Reader: PDF-XChange Viewer
Pros: fast; light; fills and saves forms; exports text an images; adds content to PDF files; allows typing over PDF documents. Cons: does not remember font settings when typing over multiple fields; when printing documents with typed over text, Print Markups in the Print dialog box must be checked (not obvious).

Best PDF Writer: Primo PDF
Pros: converts many file formats to PDF; works as a printer driver; can append and merge PDF documents; works in remote desktop (over terminal session). Cons: text quality of the converted PDF file may be worse than original.
Alternatives: doPDF (does not work in remote desktop).

Language Tools
Best Dictionary: Lingoes
Pros: Dictionary, glossary, and more; translates to/from many languages; pronounces words. Cons: plugin for PDF files does not work with Adobe Acrobat Reader (but it works with FREE PDF-XChange Viewer).
Alternatives: 1-Click Answers; WordWeb.

Security Tools
Best Anti-Virus: Avast! Home Edition
Pros: light, yet capable; clean interface; multi-lingual interface; anti-spyware; anti-rootkit; automatic updates; resident execution. Cons: must re-register every year to get virus signature updates.
Alternatives: AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition; Avira AntiVir Personal.

Best Password Manager: LastPass
Pros: web-based (no need to sync data between multiple computers); integrated with Firefox and IE; form auto-fill; grouping; search; support for custom properties; can import data from other apps (Firefox, KeePass Password Safe, etc); can export data. Cons: occasional connectivity errors in Firefox (when connection is fine); interface could be more polished; problem logging on to my Live/Bing cashback account (I have several Live/Bing accounts and something just did not work; I had to switch from Firefox to IE and not use LastPass).
Alternatives: KeePass Password Safe (for multi-computer synchronization, it can be used along with file synchronization tools).

Best Disk Encryption: TrueCrypt
Pros: treats a virtual partition (encrypted file) as a disk; works with flash (USB) drives; can encrypt full or part of a disk. Cons: cannot auto-grow encrypted partition; need to read instructions to understand how to encrypt removable disks (such as flash drives).

Desktop Tools
Best Screen Saver: Analogy
Pros: fascinating; elegant; simple; shows current time. Cons: none.

Best Clipboard Manager: ArsClip
Pros: keeps track of text and image-based clipboard entries; allows pasting plain text by default; single step to access clipboard history menu; permanent items; under active development. Cons: pops up an occasional error message; McAfee anti-virus occasionally treats it as a trojan.
Alternatives: ClipX (may require a hack); Ditto (paste takes one more step than necessary); xNeat Clipboard Manager (supports text only); CLCL (hasn't been updated in a while).

Best Taskbar Sorter: Taskbar Shuffle
Pros: supports drag-and-drop; light-weight. Cons: none.

Best Task Manager: SystemExplorer
Pros: displays full paths of the running processes; shows command-line parameters; checks suspicious processes against the VirusTotal database; passes process information to Process Library; shows network connection information (which processes are connected to which addresses over UDP or TCP/IP); displays startup data (which applications are loaded at start-up); displays list of open files and file owners (which process holds open handle to which file); displays loaded DLLs and their host processes (press CTRL+F and enter the name of a DLL in the SystemExplorer Search window); can export info from every tab; can be configured as a default task manager. Cons: when configured as default task manager, cannot start Windows Task Manager; cannot show threads per process; Performance window shows a single graph for multi-CPU systems; controls in the Performance window do not get resized correctly.
Alternatives: AnVir Task Manager Free (shows prompts when new applications are added to Windows startup); Process Explorer.

Best Program Launcher: Launchy
Pros: automatically detects new applications; small footprint; clean interface; plugins; skins. Cons: defining catalog filters is a bit confusing.

Best Sticky Notes: Stickies
Pros: elegant by default; appear on desktop; can auto hide; transparency effects; rich-text support; hyperlink support. Cons: none.
Alternatives: Sticky Notes.

Best Volume Control: MKN VolWheel
Pros: controls volume via mouse wheel. Cons: no option to mute/unmute.

Communication and Collaboration Tools
Best Chat Application: Google Talk
Pros: minimalist (in a good sense); uses Google account info; takes fewer resources than other apps (such as Skype); informs about incoming Gmail messages; can transfer files; works across corporate firewalls; multi-lingual interface. Cons: none.
Alternatives: Meebo (web-based, Firefox add-on, and Windows app versions; supports AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, MSN, ICQ, and other protocols; consolidates all chat applications and account in one; clean interface).

Best Video Chat Application: Skype
Pros: everybody is using it; works well; user discovery. Cons: annoying sounds (always need to disable); runs at startup by default (always need to disable).
Alternatives: Google Video Chat (I need to give it a try).

Best Desktop Sharing Tool: Team Viewer
Pros: easy set up; can run on-demand; authorization is based on session secret (session ID and password); works on Vista; auto-update. Cons: none.
Alternatives: Ammyy Admin; Microsoft SharedView (per Privacy Statement: "This Service may only be used within the United States of America"); Adobe ConnectNow (web-based; no installation; organizer must have an Adobe account, participants do not; max of 2 participants + organizer).

Internet Tools
Best RSS Reader: Google Reader (web-based)
Pros: web-based (stays in sync across multiple computers); quick preview of unread posts; mark as favorite; intergated search. Cons: does not contain all enclosures (e.g. there is no link to comments for the SlickDeals' Hot Deals forum posts).
Alternatives: FeedDemon (some people swear by it).

Best FTP Client: FireFTP (Firefox add-on)
Pros: light-weight; works across corporate proxy servers; easy to set up. Cons: none.
Alternatives: FileZilla; net2ftp (web-based).

Best Podcast Receiver: Juice
Pros: automatically downloads podcast audio files; easy to set up; multi-lingual interface. Cons: cannot be minimized on startup; development work seems to be halted.

If you have suggestions for applications or categories, please leave a comment.

How to test XSL transformations

2009-06-23T22:21:00.000-07:00

Summary: Brief overview of several tools that can be used for testing XSL transformations.

I recently spent several days redesigning XSL templates that our application uses to generate email messages. To get the job done faster, I needed a FREE tool that would help me edit XML files and test XSL transformations. [Note: I'm not against commercial software, but I did not want to get into the licensing mess, since other team members would also need to use the tool.] Microsoft's recommendation to create an ASP page for testing XSL transformations seemed like an overkill, so I looked elsewhere.

Had I checked StackOverflow earlier, I would've learned that Visual Studio 2008 offered all features I was looking for. Alas, I trusted Google more, so I started by trying out the tools that I found first:

XML Notepad 2007
XML Copy Editor
WMHelp XMLPad
Xselerator

This is how these tools stacked up for me.

XML Notepad 2007 is a free utility offered by Microsoft. To preview XSL transformations in XML Notepad 2007, you first need to open the XML data file.

Then switch to the XSL Output tab, specify the XSLT file, and click the Transform button.

Although, XML Notepad 2007 is great for previewing XSL transformations, it is not very usable for editing XML documents. The editor does not seem to offer an option to edit the source and I found the built-in XML-specific editing features awkward to use. Another limitation of XML Notepad 2007 is that it does not allow opening more than one XML file at a time. It also considers the XML file to be the primary file for the transformation (other tools let you specify the XSL file for the XML file, as well as the XML file for the XSL file).

XML Copy Editor has been recently updated. I tried version 1.2.0.4 which was released in April 2009.

XML Copy Editor lets you edit the source of XML/XSL files, but generating previews takes a couple of steps. Once you load the data XML file, select the XML - XSL Transform menu option, and the tool will prompt you to enter the location of the XSLT file. After you specify the XSLT file, XML Copy Editor generates a temporary output file, which you can preview in an external browser by clicking the Browser toolbar button. I did not like this multi-step operation and the need to switch between two applications, so I moved on.

WMHelp XMLPad (v. 3.0.2.1) turned out to be the tool I used most. At first, I could not figure out how to automatically generate HTML preview after transformations (the tool kept opening the source of the transformed XML file). Eventually I determined that I needed to include the <xsl:output method="html"/> element in the XSL file and preview started to work.

To generate the preview, you need to specify the XML file for the open XSL file (there are a few gotchas here), and then simply click the Debug current stylesheet toolbar button.

Once the preview tab appears, you can switch between the Source and Preview modes. The tool can also open the preview page in an external browser, but I found the internal preview option more useful. WMHelp XMLPad keeps your options (such as mappings between XSL templates and XML files) in the styledata.xml file in the same folder as the XSL files. Although I found WMHelp XMLPad useful (which was before I discovered the capabilities of Visual Studio), it has a decent number of annoyances including the following:

Help page does not work; causes error "Not Found - The requested URL /doc/XmlPad/Welcome.htm was not found on this server."
Text editing features are really crippled. Tabs are not predictable: sometimes pressing Tab moves cursor by 8 positions, sometimes it moves by one position; you never know. If you select a block of text and press Tab, the selected text will be deleted. Shift+Tab (moving selected block to the left) obviously does not work.
The editor lets you place cursor anywhere. For example, you a line is 10 characters long, you can click on position 25 (a typical text editor would not allow this), hit Enter, and the editor will insert 15 new space characters at the end of the line.
For some reason the editor leaves a number of blank lines at the end of the document.
I already mentioned the need to define the output method in XSL files to auto-generate HTML previews.
Auto-complete issues. Say you are entering an <a> tag in front of the word link. The auto-complete feature will turn your text into the following: <a></alink>link. Also, auto-complete uses the Enter key as a selector; pressing Tab will just insert a tab character (or whatever space characters the editor decides to use).
Pressing the Home key moves the cursor to the beginning of line instead of the first character of text.
The File - Open option does not allow opening multiple files (although, you can drag and drop multiple files from Windows Explorer and the editor opens them fine).
You cannot perform searches across multiple files.
A highlighted word does not get automatically entered in the Search dialog, so you need to type it in.
To see transformation properties (such as XML source file), the cursor must be moved to the top of the XSL file. The properties also gets disabled if you open a read-only file.
Right-click clears text selection, so you can't copy or cut selected text using a context menu.
Debug toolbar occasionally disappears.
Switching between open files showing transformation previews causes losing the previews.
Changing the source XML file for a template, results in the preview tab displaying XML text instead of the preview.
It would be nice to be able to open a new tab (with an empty document) by double-clicking empty space in the tab area (a'la Firefox).
There are occasional errors (for the most part, the errors are not serious, although once I had to restart the program).

Despite all these annoyances, I found WMHelp XMLPad quite useful.

Xselerator was the last free XML editor I tried and I did not like it at all. First, it does not have an installer, so I had to go through the motions of creating folders, extracting files, defining shortcuts. Having done this I started the program and immediately encountered an error: "CoCreate failure on IAltovaApplication. Error: Class not registered." Apparently, the tool expects the AltovaXML engine to be installed. It would be nice if there were an indication of this requirement somewhere (installer?). The error does not seem to affect functionality, but still... Anyway, some people praise Xselerator, so you may want to give it a try.

If I am to test any XSL transformations in future, I will probably stick to Visual Studio, but if you're looking for a free alternative, see if any of the applications I described fits your needs.

My.Utilities Class Library

2009-06-15T21:38:00.000-07:00

Summary: Helper utilities library that some .NET developers may appreciate.

For several years, I have been compiling a library of utility/helper classes reused across multiple projects. You may recognize some of these classes if you read my published articles, but there are several classes that have not been released to the public, yet.

Here is a brief description of the most useful classes in the library (and there are more):

BaseForm
I derive all my web form classes from this class. This classed extends the functionality of System.Web.UI.Page by offering many handy features, such as easy time localization (automatically converts time from GMT/UTC to local time on the client and vise versa; for additional information read It's About Time), invoking JavaScript pop-ups from code-behind, quick enabling/disabling/showing/hiding page controls, setting/getting session parameter in/from a cookie, retrieval of data values from form/query string, deep search for controls, and more.
AppProcess
Loads a named assembly from a non-standard path (assuming that you specify alternate paths).
ExceptionInfo
Generates formatted error messages for different type of exceptions based on various parameters and exception types, retrieves messages from inner exceptions and database error objects (for additional info, read Dissecting Error Messages).
Helper
Okay, I agree: this is not a good name... Anyway, this class makes it easy to check for empty objects of different data types. For example, you can check for empty or null array in a single statement (if (Helper.IsEmpty(myArray)) instead of having to check for null first, and then for the number of elements in the array.
WindowsService
Simplifies implementation of Windows services. Other classes in the same namespace (My.Utilities.Services) make it trivial to write periodic tasks (daily, weekly, etc) that Windows services normally perform (for additional info, see Implementing Windows services in Visual Studio 2008).
DataHelper
Converts database values to standard .NET types, so you do not have to worry about special handling of DBNull values.
Name
Makes formatting of people's names based on the available name parts easier, e.g. John F Kennedy, Jr; Kennedy, John F, Jr; John F Kennedy; Kennedy, John F; John Kennedy; Kennedy, John; etc.

To see the description of all classes in the library, download the help file:

My.Utilities.chm

This help file covers all classes, methods, properties, etc., and even offers a few samples.

If you are still interested, you can download the library project:

My.Utilities Class Library Project (Visual Studio 2008)

Just keep in mind that I started writing this library around 2001/2002, so some functionality could've been improved had the technology -- nullable types, generics, etc. -- been available at the time. Also, the general disclaimer applies: use at your own risk.

I hope this helps someone, but if you run into any issues, please let me know.

Security Hall of Shame: Lenovo

2009-04-23T16:03:00.000-07:00

Summary: What is wrong with password rules at Lenovo?

The winner of today's Security Hall of Shame Award in the category Stupid Password Rules (subcategory: We want you to think that we support strong passwords, but we don't, ha-ha) is... Lenovo.

When you register at Lenovo IBM Shareholder Purchase Program, you are not allowed to specify the password (not sure why, but whatever). Once you submit the registration info, you will receive an e-mail with your user name and random password (not that smart to send password along with user name, but whatever). Now the logical step is to change the password to the one you can remember, so you click the My Account link (not easy to find on the page, but whatever), and then click Change Account Information (would be better to separate security info -- user name, password -- from regular account info -- address, phone, etc. -- but whatever).

Okay, let's change the password. This is not a financial site, so make a new password, which is:

8 characters long, with
upper-case letters,
lower-case letters, and
a number.

This should be good enough, so save changes... and... o-ops, error:

"The password is too simple. It must contain at least two numbers."

Hmm, among the passwords I use, none of them has two numbers, but let me try this:

9 characters long, with
upper-case letters,
lower-case letters,
a number, and
a special character.

This one complies with most password security guidelines, so save changes... and... da-ang:

"The password contains special characters. Only letters (a-z) and numbers are allowed."

Hmm, okay let's try this:

hello123

Save changes... and... no hay problema. Bravo, Lenovo! You know your security.

Now, kids, remember that Lenovo will lose its Security Hall of Shame Award when it changes password rules to:

allow special characters (such as: +-*#@!~&%), and
not require two numbers (this is not a bad rule, but it's not common).

See also:
What is strong password? by Webopedia
Strong passwords: How to create and use them by Microsoft

Technobrief #7

2009-04-22T12:42:00.000-07:00

Summary: Recent findings of software, articles, tips, podcasts, and more.

Articles

Why hiring is paradoxically harder in a downturn by Auren Hoffman

Books

Almost Perfect by W. E. Peterson (a story of the rise and fall of WordPerfect Corporation from the author's point of view; free online/PDF version)

Browser add-ons, bookmarklets

Ask & Record Toolbar lets you download, record and convert all kinds of Internet Video and Audio, right from within your browser.
PriceProtectr browser toolbar helps you monitor prices, keep track of your purchases, and get rebates when prices drop.
Readability bookmarklet removes clutter around text on web pages making it easier to read.
Web Development Helper browser extension for Internet Explorer that provides a set of tools and utilities for the AJAX and ASP.NET developers.

Humor

From ManagementSpeak by Bob Lewis:
ManagementSpeak: Work space will be designed to create an environment that promotes teamwork and effectiveness, while improving space utilization.
Translation: We’re going to cram twice as many employees into the same floor space.

Quotes

From How to Do Things Your Customer Didn't Ask For by Jurgen Appelo:
"The underpromise, overdeliver principle tells us that we should manage our customer's expectations in such a way that we are able to deliver more than the customer asked for."
From How to be a program manager by Joel Spolsky:
"There are so many development organizations where specs are a monument to mindless bureaucratic paperwork that entire movements sprung up organized around the idea of not writing specs. These people are misguided. Writing a functional specification is at the very heart of agile development, because it lets you iterate rapidly over many possible designs before you write code."
From Make It Simple vs. Do It Simple by Jurgen Appelo:
"It's a complicated thing to build stuff that is simple. It's a simple thing to build stuff that is complicated."
From Out with objectives, in with technique? by Bob Lewis:
"Measuring employees is a bad idea because employees have a remarkable talent for gaming the system. They can: Work the system so the numbers look good; behave in ways that make the numbers look good while circumstances deteriorate; or just falsify the data outright. I pointed this out once in an executive meeting, and one of the participants recommended firing any employee who would behave this way. Interesting concept, as I was referring to a very large number of American CEOs."

Software

Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks.
Greenshot creates screenshots.
Ken Rename is a capable a multi-file rename utility.
RichCopy offers comprehensive file copying capabilities.
SEAMonster can resize images with minimal pixel loss (see seam carving).
Starter is an application startup manager which also provides extended process info (similar to Task Manager), as well as service and driver manager.
UnlockMe enables you to delete, move or rename files or folders that are temporarily locked by other processes.

Tips

10 Youtube URL Tricks You Should Know About by Varun Kashyap
15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website by Lee Munroe

Tutorials

A beginner’s guide for consuming a WCF service in JavaScript using ASP.NET AJAX by R. M. Masudur
Interactive Prototypes with PowerPoint by Maureen Kelly
Make a Mega Drop-Down Menu with jQuery by Raena Jackson-Armitage
Regular Expressions for Dummies by Jeffrey (video tutorial)

Videos/podcasts

Living with legacy software by David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals) at RailsConf Europe '08 (also podcast)

Web tools

AlternativeTo suggests alternatives to popular applications.
AnyClient is a web-based file transfer application that supports all major file transfer protocols including FTP/S, SFTP and WebDAV/S.
StyleNeat organizes and standardizes your CSS in a structure that makes it easier to define page areas and see how they relate to each other.
When is Good offers an easy way to find out when everyone is free for your next meeting or event.

Convert a string to a table in T-SQL

2009-04-22T12:34:00.000-07:00

Summary: Transact-SQL function that converts a string of comma-separated numbers to a table of integers.

Here is a common SQL programming scenario. Your code receives a string holding comma-separated values (CSVs), such as IDs of records stored in a table (say "98,256,17,34"). Now it needs to retrieve these records from the database. How do you do this?

[Note: For the sake of simplicity, I use a comma-separated value (CSV) holding numbers, but the string can contain other values, such as dates, or other strings, which can be separated by semicolons or other delimeters.]

Option #1. Use EXEC (not recommended).
The obvious option would be to generate a dynamic SQL query and execute it via an EXEC statement. For example, you can do the following:

use AdventureWorks

declare @ProductIDs varchar(256)
declare @Query      varchar(256)

select @ProductIDs = '1,350,400,440'

select @Query =
  'select
    ProductID,
    Name,
    ProductNumber
  from
    Production.Product
  where
    ProductID in (' + @ProductIDs + ')'

exec(@Query)

There are two major problems with this approach. First, generating the query -- in this example it's a SELECT query, but it can be any query -- as a string will degrade readability: you will lose syntax highlighting and IntelliSense (if you're using a new SQL Server 2008 IntelliSense feature or some other third-party tool, such as SQL Prompt). Second, and even more important, this approach is prone to SQL injection attack. Even if you use a command parameter to pass a comma-separated value (CSV) to the stored procedure, since you're simply appending it to dynamic SQL, you must make sure that it does not contain suspicious characters. Whether you do it in T-SQL code or in the application code (C#, or whatever), it's a hassle.

Option #2. Convert string of values to a table of values (recommended).
A better alternative would be to convert the CSV to a table of numbers (again, I use numbers in this example, but the values can be of any type). You can accomplish this with the help of a user-defined function (UDF), such as this one:

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[ConvertCsvToNumbers]
(
    @String AS VARCHAR(8000)
)
RETURNS
     @Numbers TABLE (Number INT)
AS
BEGIN
    SELECT @String = 
        LTRIM(
            RTRIM(
                REPLACE(
                    ISNULL(@String, ''), '  ' /* tab */, ' ')))

    IF (LEN(@String) = 0)
        RETURN

    DECLARE @StartIdx       INT
    DECLARE @NextIdx        INT
    DECLARE @TokenLength    INT
    DECLARE @Token          VARCHAR(16)

    SELECT  @StartIdx       = 0
    SELECT  @NextIdx        = 1

    WHILE @NextIdx > 0
    BEGIN
        SELECT @NextIdx = CHARINDEX(',', @String, @StartIdx + 1)

        SELECT @TokenLength =
            CASE
                WHEN @NextIdx > 0 THEN @NextIdx
                ELSE LEN(@String) + 1
            END
        - @StartIdx - 1

        SELECT @Token = 
            LTRIM(
                RTRIM(
                    SUBSTRING(@String, @StartIdx + 1, @TokenLength)))

        IF LEN(@Token) > 0
            INSERT
                @Numbers(Number)
            VALUES
                (CAST(@Token AS INT))

        SELECT @StartIdx = @NextIdx
    END
    RETURN
END

Now you can reference this UDF in a query, such as:

select
    ProductID,
    Name,
    ProductNumber
from
    Production.Product                   prod,
    dbo.ConvertCsvToNumbers(@ProductIDs) numbers
where
    prod.ProductID = numbers.Number

In addition to improving readability and security, this method lets you treat data contained in the CSV as a regular table. If you want to try this approach, you can download the script generating the UDF, which is more robust than the listing above (the script sets the permissions and contains code for repeated compilation):

Download ConvertCsvToNumbers.sql

Best of MIX09

2009-04-10T00:09:00.000-07:00

Summary: My favorite presentations from the MIX09 conference.

If you are interested in design and web technologies, but did not have a chance to attend MIX09 (the annual Microsoft conference focusing on design and web technologies), here are some of the free online presentations that I would recommend.

Best talks

If you do not have much time, just watch just these two presentations (they both focus on design):

Web Form Design (74:36)
by Luke Wrobleski, Senior Director of Product Design, Yahoo!
This session focuses on the most common design mistakes and introduces 10 best practices for web form design. The presentation covers such topics as form organization, alignment rules, input validation, using help and tips, progress indicators, error reporting, and more.

Ten Ways to Ensure RIA Failure (39:34)
by Anthony Franco, President, EffectiveUI
Great (and short) talk focusing on what NOT to do in web design and development. My favorite points include:
"If you're looking to fail, trust developers to make good design decisions."
As well as:
"If you're looking to fail, value the process over the product."

The following presentations mostly focus on design, development, deployment, and security:

Design

Interactive Prototyping with DHTML (75:11)
by Bill Scott, Director UI Engineering, Netflix
Bill is a co-author of Designing Web Interfaces, an excellent book for web designers and developers. This talk offers many tips and recommendations on prototyping techniques and related topics, such as CSS frameworks. Great references also.

Design Prototyping: Bringing Wireframes to Life (59:49)
by Dan Harrelson, Senior Technologist, Adaptive Path
Dan Harrelson explains how to build great prototypes. After watching this presentation, I learned that I could easily created interactive (animated) prototypes in PowerPoint (did you know that?). (Bonus: Dan also published a list of prototyping tools.)

Advance Your Design with UX Design Patterns (69:17)
by Ambrose Little, User Experience Designer, Infragistics
Ambrose goes over common UI design patterns. Helpful references include Quince, a design pattern aggregator.

Development

Microsoft ASP.NET: Taking AJAX to the Next Level (70:11)
by Stephen Walther, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft
As always, Stephen delivers a great talk on ASP.NET AJAX development.

Web Development Using Microsoft Visual Studio: Now and in the Future (77:07)
by Jeff King, Program Manager (Visual Studio), Microsoft
Good overview of new features and capabilities of Visual Studio 2010. MSDeploy was new to me (see around 65 min).

Choosing between ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC (65:34)
by Rachel Appel, Wintellect
This presentation illustrates the differences between two ASP.NET frameworks: Web Forms and MVC (you can skip the first part -- intro and history -- if you're familiar with classic ASP and Web Forms).

Building Amazing Business Centric Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 3 (75:24)
by Brad Abrams, Product Unit Manager (Application Framework), Microsoft
Good demo of Silverlight 3 capabilities appropriate for business app development (no multimedia crap or spinning buttons).

Deployment

Developing and Deploying Applications on Internet Information Services (IIS) (72:40)
by Thomas Deml, Group Program Manager (Web Platform and Tools), Microsoft
Overview of changes and new capabilities of IIS7 (interesting new deployment techniques: see around 47 min).

Security

Securing Web Applications (75:30)
by Eric Lawrence, Security Program Manager (Internet Explorer), Microsoft
This talk is more about IE 8 features, but it still raises a few interesting points about web application security.

Managing files and personal information online

2009-03-21T20:23:00.000-07:00

Summary: How to manage documents, photos, music, passwords, e-mails, contacts, personal information, and other files and data.

Can you relate to the following scenarios?

Scenario #1: You bought a new computer and now you need to migrate your bookmarks, e-mail messages, music, and other important files from your old PC to the new system.

Scenario #2: You are using several computer (like work PC and home PC) and would like to keep some files in sync between them.

Scenario #3: Your hard drive crashed and you haven't backed it up since Prohibition. Now all of your important files, including your doctoral dissertation, are gone (well, you have a backup of your dissertation on a floppy, but it's also corrupted).

Scenario #4: You backed up your photos to CDs, but you have so many of then that you cannot find your favorite photo of your cat.

Scenario #5: You're losing track of your Internet passwords, usernames, etc.

I can go on, but the point I'm trying to make is: managing personal information (files and data) on multiple computers and avoiding data loss from a hardware crash is not trivial. In this article, I'll explain how (with minimum effort) you can keep your data safe, up-to-date, and accessible. My recommendations are intended for PC users, but some of them can be applicable to Mac and Linux fans, too.

Before I get to the recommendations, let me emphasize the following: your personal computer -- whether it's running Windows, Mac OS, or Linux -- is not reliable: its hard drive can fail, the operating system can get corrupted (e.g. via a virus), it can get stolen. To avoid data loss with the loss of your computer (or its parts), you must keep copies of your data somewhere else.

A traditional approach is to back up files to an external drive. Although, it's a praiseworthy strategy, it has several limitations. First, it requires additional hardware. Second, it does not address the issue of accessibility (not a big deal, if you have only one computer, but can be a problem if you want to keep some data in sync between several machines). Third, have you actually tried to recover data from your backup? If you haven't, you may be up to an unpleasant surprise. Finally, most people don't perform regular backups because they consider them a hassle.

Whether you regularly back up your hard drive(s) or not, consider an alternative (or complementing) approach: keep important data online using what techies call cloud computing. Here is how you can use cloud computing services from reputable providers and software to keep your data safe, manageable, and accessible.

Internet bookmarks/favorites
First a suggestion: do not add every interesting page you find on the Internet to your browser's bookmarks/favorites; only bookmark the sites which you visit regularly (daily, weekly); for everything else use a social bookmarking service such as Delicious (or any of the alternatives). If you're not familiar with social bookmarking, watch this short (3:25 min) video:

For regular bookmarks/favorites, use the Foxmarks browser add-on(s), which will keep your bookmarks (and optionally passwords and cookies) in sync between different machines and browsers. Even if you have one computer, Foxmarks can be handy in case you need to rebuild it or reinstall the browser.

Note: Foxmarks are currently being ported to Xmarks, which at the time of writing only work with Firefox, but support for other browsers is coming.

E-mail/calendar/contacts
For e-mail needs, I have two words: use Gmail. Why? First, Gmail is the only service that lets you forward your e-mail to any other address for free. You can forward your messages to your work e-mail, your ISP's account, or anywhere else. This way, you will not lose any messages if you switch jobs or ISPs. Second, Gmail's generous storage capacity (currently, over 7 GB) lets you archive important messages without the risk of running out of space. Third, if you do not like the web-based interface, you can use Gmail with most mail clients (also see these), such as Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and Mozilla Thunderbird.

Tip: If you are using a desktop e-mail client and keep the incoming e-mail in local/personal folders (.PST files in Outlook), you need to back these up.

Tip: If you are not using a desktop e-mail client, you can still set up Gmail as a default mail application (also see other options).

Google offers tools to automatically sync your Google calendar with Microsoft Outlook and mobile devices (BlackBerry, iPhone), but to sync Google contacts (with Outlook), either transfer them manually or get a commercial tool, such as kiGoo (Google released the Contacts Data API about a year ago, but I still cannot find a good and free contact syncing tool).

Passwords
For storing passwords (and other sensitive information, such as user IDs, bank accounts, etc), I can recommend any one of these two options. Option 1: Use the free web-based password manager LastPass (other alternatives include Clipperz and Passpack, but LastPass seems to be the most capable). LastPass can protect your browser passwords better than the browser. It can also auto-populate login forms. When using LastPass along with Foxmarks, you may need to disable the Foxmarks' password synchronization feature. Option 2: Use the free KeePass application and synchronize the KeePass' data file across multiple computers with the help of DropBox or Sincplicity mentioned below.

Photos
You can use online photo storage to back up your photos and to share them with friends and family. Many sites, including MySpace and Facebook support photo sharing, but most of them are too restrictive: they resize photos, limit the number of photos you can upload, and so on. Among the sites I tried, Flickr (now owned by Yahoo!) seems to be the most feature rich: it supports multiple sizes of photos (including original size), photo downloads, slide shows, videos, and more. A free Flickr account imposes a few limitations, but it's still better than most alternatives. After trying a Pro account, I decided to keep it for $24.95/year ($2/month is not that much for unlimited photo uploads and storage).

Music
Most sites that let you upload and listen to music, such as Deezer and Imeem, do not allow downloading MP3 files (including the ones you uploaded). There are two exceptions: mp3Tunes and tunesBag (currently in beta). Mp3Tunes gives you 2 GB of online storage for music and video files; tunesBag offers at least 5 GB. I have been using tunesBag for a few months and so far I have few reasons to complain: it lets me back up my music and listen to it from anywhere. I was a bit disappointed with the mp3Tunes' and tunesBag's upload tools intended to automatically keep the local and online audio libraries in sync: neither of them worked for me (well, they worked, but both had bugs that made them useless). Nevertheless, these two sites are worth considering if you are looking for an online storage option for your music files that also allow playback and other listening and sharing features. [UPDATE: I take back my comment about tunesBag's uploader. It works fine, BUT it does not sync files automatically; you need to run the tool manually to upload the files.]

Software keys
Use Keyfiler to store your software license and registration info (serial keys, activation keys, etc).

Documents
For Microsoft Office users, Office Live Workspace allows storing and sharing documents (Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, etc) online. If you do not use Microsoft Office, you can try switching completely to a web-based office suite, such as Google Docs, Zoho, or ThinkFree. If you prefer a free desktop alternative to Microsoft Office, such as SoftMaker Office or OpenOffice.org, you can back up your documents and synchronize them across multiple computers with the help of file synchronization and backup tools.

Sync tools
File synchronization tools allow you to duplicate files across multiple computers. Manual file synchronization tools, such as Microsoft SyncToy that must be launched by the user, are okay for occasional use, but they are not well suited for continuous synchronization. Out of automatic file synchronization services I tried, I liked DropBox and Syncplicity most. Both services offer 2 GB of free online storage and they just work: they work on my home laptop as well as my work PC, they work over firewalls and corporate proxy servers, they work on Windows and Mac OS. The only limitations I can think of include relatively high memory footprint (the running process takes about 50 MB of RAM for DropBox and 70 MB for Symplicity). Also DropBox can synchronize only one root folder (which can contain multiple subfolders), while Syncplicity can synchronizes Desktop, Documents, Favorites, Music, and Pictures. I highly recommend DropBox and Symplicity to anyone who wants to synchronize files across multiple machines. There are other file synchronization services, such as Microsoft Live Mesh (currently in beta), Windows Live FolderShare (currently transforming into Windows Live Sync), but I did not have much luck with these (for one, Mesh and Live Sync do not seem to work across corporate firewalls (also here), and I could not use FolderShare, because our corporate proxy server settings block access to the site); however, they work for some some users, so depending on your settings, they may work for you.

Backup tools
You can use scheduled backup to save important files online with the help of such services as Mozy and iDrive (either service offers 2 GB of free online storage).

Online storage
Finally, for occasions when you just want to save a files or two online once in a while, you can use the following online file storage services:

Acrobat (5 GB free)
ADrive (50 GB free)
Box.net (1 GB free, 10 MB max file size)
Mediafire (unlimited free file storage, 100 MB max file size)
SkyDrive (25 GB free, 50 MB max file size)

Here are some references for other free online file hosting services:

Initially, it may take you a bit of effort to follow these recommendations, but once you adopt them, you will make your digital life easier and data safer.

See also:
Prepare your new PC for a long run

Jurgen Appelo on Agile and more

2009-03-21T19:35:00.000-07:00

Summary: Some interesting stuff from Jurgen Appelo.

Jurgen Apello just published a new quarterly list of the Top 100 Blogs for Developers. I'm glad that Jurgen's own blog made the list because it's gooood. Here are some quotes from a few recent articles:

From AINO: Agile In Name Only:

"I want to suggest the acronym AINO (Agile In Name Only) for those cases where there is a significant gap between preaching and practising the agile approach."

From The Complex Manifesto for Software Development:

"I believe it is time for a new manifesto. A manifesto of complexity. With this manifesto we must recognize that it is human to prefer simple solutions, but also that the world is more complex than we think."

From The Decline and Fall of Agilists:

"Agility is about staying successful in ever-changing environments. That's it. There's nothing more to it. This includes defying any expert who claims that practice X is essential for your organization. Because, quite likely, practice X happens to be something this expert is very good at, and is willing to assist you with, for a considerable consultancy fee."

While we're on the topic of Agile development, here is a very good and brief interview with Jurgen Appelo, where he discuss his experiences of introducing and using Scrum and the curse of dogmatic use of "recipes for success" in software development:

On a lighter note, here is some humor:

From Thank You, Stupid Americans (WARNING: If you easily get offended, do not read this piece):

"Americans are stupid, and I love them for it. Because stupidity leads to simplicity, and simplicity is exactly what we need in software development."

Freeware Appreciation Day: Analogy screensaver

2009-03-18T12:48:00.000-07:00

Summary: Analogy screensaver is a thing of beauty.

Today, my small token of appreciation goes to Analogy screensaver written by Jesson Yip (you can see Analogy in action on Jesson's web site).

Quoting the author:

"Analogy is a typographic clock which fuses the immediacy of digital with the visual-spatial quality of analogue into a hybrid format. It presents an everyday object with a fresh twist."

Normally, I would not consider a third-party screen saver a necessity, but being a sucker for minimalism and elegance, I just can't keep my eyes off it. Great job Jesson. You deserve a drink. ;-)

Helper VBScript library

2009-03-16T12:47:00.000-07:00

Summary: Common utilities for VBScript files.

I'm not a fan of VBScript, but I have been using it extensively for writing utility scripts. In this post, I want to share one technique that I found helpful when working with VBScript files.

The scripts I write share many functions, such as processing command-line parameters, connecting to SQL Server, and so on. To make my life easier, I combined these common functions in a reusable helper file. I called this helper file Common.vbs. Here are some of the most helpful functions implemented in Common.vbs:

GetParamValue: Returns the value of the specified parameter for a given command-line switch; command-line switches are case insensitive and support name variations, such as "h|help|?" (i.e. /h, /help, and /? are considered identical).
GetParamValues: Returns an array of values for the specified command-line parameter (command-line switches use the format {/|-}switch[:Value1[,Value2[...]]], such as /in:c:\data1.txt,c:\data2.txt).
GetFile: Prompts user to select a file using the standard File Open dialog box.
GetSecretValue: Prompts user to enter a password (or any other sensitive value) and masks the entered characters.
RevertToCscript: Forces script to be run by the CSCRIPT engine (instead of WSCRIPT).
SqlConnect: Opens connection to SQL Server via OLE DB provider (supports Windows authentication).
ExcelConnect: Opens an ADO database connection to an Excel file.
GetComError: Generates formatted error message retrieved from the Err object.
GetExcelWorksheetName: Returns the name of the first worksheet in the Excel file.

You can find the detailed description of these and other methods in the file comments. Use the following link to get the Common.vbs file:

Download Common.vbs

To reference the Common.vbs file from another script, implement your script as a Windows Script File (.wsf). Unlike regular VBScript (.vbs) files, .wsf files can reference other VBScript files (you must specify the location of the referenced file using either an absolute or relative path).

To implement a script as a .WSF file, just wrap you VBScript code in XML elements and add a <script> element referencing the Common.vbs file, such as:

<package>
<job ID="SomeID">
<script Language="VBScript" Src="Common.vbs" />
<script Type="text/vbscript">
' Your VBScript logic goes here.
</script>
</job>
</package>

You can execute a .wsf file via the CSCRIPT (or WSCRIPT) command as if it were a .vbs file.

See also:
Windows Script Host
VBScript

According to Bob

2009-03-05T12:55:00.000-08:00

Summary: Quotes from (and links to) recent articles by Bob Lewis.

Here are some good quotes from the recent articles by Bob Lewis.

From Spotting weak managers:

"[B]ad metrics are worse than no metrics: If you have no metrics you’re ignorant and know it. Bad metrics, in contrast, give either the wrong answer to the right question or answer the wrong question."

From To cut your budget, hire expensive employees:

"You know and I know that any number of mediocre leaders mistake getting along with strong performance, while considering employees who make waves to be undesirable troublemakers. When they have to lay off staff their troublemakers are the first to go; the employees they personally like the best are the ones who get to stick around. That means exceptional IT professionals are pounding the pavement right now, waiting for you to find them."

From Methodologies are fine, so long as they aren’t processes:

"No, the problem doesn’t lie in the methodologies themselves. It lies in their cooption by those who turn them into religions, complete with orthodoxies, splinter groups, apostasies, and all the other distractions religiosity introduces to prevent potentially productive employees from accomplishing something useful."

Technobrief #6

2009-03-02T21:48:00.000-08:00

Summary: Recent (and not so recent) discoveries of software, articles, and more.

I haven't posted latest findings in a while, so here some of the goodies I've found since the last Technobrief post.

Software

3DP Chip: Shows a summary of devices -- CPU, audio card, video card, hard drive, DVD drive, etc. -- installed on the computer along with device drivers.
Ammyy Admin: Remote computer access and desktop sharing.
Analogy (screensaver): Typographic clock which fuses the immediacy of digital with the visual-spatial quality of analogue into a hybrid format (beautiful).
ArsClip: Windows clipboard manager (good alternative to ClipX and Ditto).
DriverBackup!: Backs up and restores drivers.
DVD Flick: DVD authoring tool; supports custom audio tracks, subtitles, and navigation menu.
DVD slideshow GUI: Import photos and burn them as a slideshow on a DVD (supports music, transitions, effects, subtitles, and more).
Gizmo Drive: Mounts ISO, BIN, CUE, and NRG files to a virtual CD-ROM drive.
Inkscape: Vector graphics editor with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X.
JPEGCrops: Crops images without quality loss (very handy when preparing images for printing, i.e. 4x6 aspect ratio).
jZip: WinZip alternative that supports many compression formats including Zip, TAR, GZip, 7-Zip, RAR, and ISO (think of it as 7-Zip with a better GUI supporting different languages).
MKN VolWheel: Changes system volume via the mouse wheel or a hotkey.
Quick Media Converter: Converts files between multiple video and audio formats.
RIOT - Radical Image Optimization Tool: Resizes and optimizes JPEG, GIF and PNG images in a simple, clean user interface (offers a nice plugin for IrfanView).
RocketDock: Slick, Mac OS X Dock-like program that gives quick access to programs and Windows features (can replace the default Windows Quick Start toolbar).
SketchPath: XPath editor and XML analysis and testing tool supporting XPath 1.0-2.0, which provides an integrated graphical environment for viewing XML files, developing and testing XPath expressions against them and managing the expressions in file libraries.
SoftMaker Office 2006 for Windows: Free alternative to Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org (it's smaller, and reportedly faster than OpenOffice.org).
Tail for Win32: Windows version of the UNIX 'tail -f' command.
TeamViewer: Remote control your partner's PC.
Ultimate List of Free Office Software from Microsoft: Lists many FREE software titles offered by Microsoft.
UndercoverXP: Prints CD and DVD covers.
Windows Essentials Codec Pack: One of the most comprehensive collection of media codecs, filters, splitters and other tools that will enable you to play 99% of all the movies, music, and flash files you download off the internet.

Web

AccessMyLibrary: Free access to millions of articles from top publications available at your library.
Code Converter: Translates C# code to VB.NET, and VB.NET to C#.
Microsoft Live Labs: Thumbtack: Online notes (similar to Evernote and defunct Google Notebook)
net2ftp: Web-based FTP client.
Nregex: Online regular expression builder and evaluator (C# syntax).
Rex V: AJAX regular expression evaluator (JavaScript, PHP syntax).

Articles

Amnesia: Joel Spolsky writes about effects of short-term memory on project management.
Firefox 3: 8 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do: Logan Kugler shares several Firefox usage tips.

Firefox add-ons

iMacros for Firefox: Records and replays repetitive tasks like filling out forms.
FireRainbow: Javascript syntax highlighting for the Firebug add-on.
SwitchProxy Tool: Easily switches proxy settings.
YSlow: Analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow based on Yahoo's rules for high performance web sites.

References

CSS Reference by SitePoint
HTML Reference by SitePoint
JavaScript Reference by SitePoint

Tutorials

6 Steps to Professional Podcast Publishing: Kevin Yank describes steps for podcast publishing.
GoingManual.com: Tutorials on photography, Adobe Photoshop, and GIMP.
Wix# (WixSharp) - Managed Interface for WiX: Oleg Shilo explains how to build application installers (MSI packages) using his Wix# program.

Photos

Fog Creek's New Office: Sneak peek at an ideal office space.

From nDoc to Sandcastle

2009-02-27T20:51:00.000-08:00

Summary: A new old way to generate documentation (help) files for .NET 2.0+ applications.

I owe Kevin Downs, the author of nDoc, a long delayed apology (nDoc is a popular open-source help file generator designed for .NET 1.x apps). Although I used nDoc extensively (in fact, it was one of my favorite development tools), I did not contribute to the project. The nDoc project died in mid-2006 and it was partially my fault. I'm sorry Kevin. Shame on me: I should've started celebrating Freeware Appreciation Day earlier.

[Not to shift the blame, but the role of Microsoft in the nDoc demise was hardly praise-worthy. I never understood Microsoft's approach to successful applications complementing -- notice, not competing with -- Microsoft technologies and tools: announce an alternative solution, overpromise, and underdeliver. Why wouldn't Microsoft cooperate with the authors of these applications in some way. I totally agree with Scott Hanselman's point:

"It's a shame that Microsoft can't put together an organization like INETA (who already gives small stipends to folks to speak at User Groups) and gave away grants/stipends to the 20 or so .NET Open Source Projects that TRULY make a difference in measurable ways. The whole thing could be managed out of the existing INETA organization and wouldn't cost more than a few hundred grand - the price of maybe 3-4 Microsoft Engineers."

Microsoft should've known better.]

Well, life went on and I needed an nDoc replacement, which would work with .NET 2.0+ apps. So I tried Sandcastle, the Microsoft-sponsored open-source alternative to nDoc, and to my surprise, it worked reasonably well. There was a couple of problems, though.

Problem #1: Sandcastle failed to convert a working nDoc project with error:

"Unable to convert project. Reason: Error CVT0005: Error reading project from 'C:\[...]\[...].ndoc' (last property = DocumentInheritedMembers): String was not recognized as a valid Boolean."

I posted this problem at the CodePlex Issue Tracker not expecting it to be noticed, but received a response on the same day. Since it was easy enough for me to create a new project, I did not use the suggestion, but if you encounter a similar issue, check out the replies to the Error CVT0005 converting nDoc project post.

Problem #2: My first attempt to compile the project failed with error:

"The imported project "C:\SandcastleHelpFileBuilder.targets" was not found."

After some poking around, I figured out that the environment variable SHFBROOT used by the help compiler did not take effect after installation. To fix it, I had to log off and log on to Windows.

After that everything worked well. You can see an example of the Sandcastle project and the generated help file in the Windows service demo project.

If you want to generate documentation from the XML comments in your Visual Studio 2005 (and later) projects, you need to do the following:

Make sure that HTML Help Workshop is installed.
Install the main Sandcastle app.
Install Sandcastle Help File Builder (SHFB) (a GUI app used for building help files).
Create a new project and add your Visual Studio 2005 (or later) project, solution, or output (DLL or EXE) file to the SHFB's documentation sources.
Define other project properties and build the project.

I specified the HTML Help Workshop location in the Sandacastle settings, but this may not have been necessary. I also used Sandcastle to build HTML Help 1.x (.CHM) files, so I'm not sure how it works for HTML Help 2.x (.HxS) files.

If you are not sure about particular settings, check the provided help file or Sandcastle Help File Builder Overview. You can find a number of related projects -- such as DocProject for Sandcastle, Sandcastle Extensions, and others -- at CodePlex, but I haven't tried them. For the latest news, check the Sandcastle blog.

See also:
NDoc to Sandcastle - Generate MSDN Style Documentation and Help Files Based on XML Comments in your .NET Code by David Hayden
Microsoft's Sandcastle emerges as NDoc's creator calls it quits by Brian Eastwood

ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery

2009-02-24T20:00:00.000-08:00

Summary: Brief of the talk and presentation given to Sacramento .NET User Group, plus links to shared resources.

Thanks to all who attended my talk at Sacramento .NET User Group on Tuesday. In case you did not attend the event, the discussion focused on developing intranet applications using ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery. We covered the following topics:

Pros and cons of different technologies for building rich internet applications (RIA)
Introduction to ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery
ASP.NET UpdatePanel and UpdateProgress controls
Using UpdatePanel with data-bound controls (such as Repeater)
Pros and cons of using UpdatePanel with jQuery (and other alternatives)
Adding AJAX and jQuery to an ASP.NET applications (walkthrough)
Common problems and solutions for applications using ASP.NET AJAX, UpdatePanels, and jQuery
Demos and references (tools, tutorials, videos, and more)

I uploaded the presentation to Docstoc (see the slides below).

You can download the original PowerPoint slides from Box.net.

To run the demo project, download the ZIP file containing the Visual Studio 2008 solution, extract the files, and open the solution (you will be prompted to create a virtual directory for the project).

UPDATE: The following article by Dave Ward explains the idiosyncrasy that I mentioned in the presentation (firing multiple events after partial postback) and offers ways to mitigate the problem (I will update the presentation and sample):

$(document).ready() and pageLoad() are not the same!

Thanks, Dave!

Here are some additional references that did not make into presentation but you may find useful:

Explore Rich Client Scripting With jQuery, Part 1 and Part 2 by Dino Esposito
An intensive exploration of jQuery with Ben Nadel (screencast; also see Ben's blog)
30 Essential Controls by Theresa Neil (great collection!)
Designing Web Interfaces by Bill Scott, Theresa Neil (book)
5 Popular CSS Frameworks + Tutorials & Tools for Getting Started by NOUPE
Advanced Debugging with JavaScript by Chris Mills, Hallvord R. M. Steen
Expandable panel inside a GridView by Amauri Rodrigues
Client-Side Web Service Calls with AJAX Extensions by Fritz Onion
Embed UpdatePanel inside Repeater by Daron Yöndem
Why ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanels are dangerous by Dave Ward
jQuery and Microsoft by Scott Guthrie
50 Most Beautiful Icon Sets Created in 2008 by Noupe
jQuery Memory Leak in UpdatePanel by gstolarov
15 Most Interesting jQuery Tutorials by AjaxLine
10 Best jQuery Plugins - April 2009 by AjaxLine
jQuery Puts the Fun Back into Browser Scripting by Rick Strahl
15 Resources To Get You Started With jQuery From Scratch by Jeffrey Way

Implementing Windows services in Visual Studio 2008

2009-02-23T17:45:00.000-08:00

Summary: How to write a better Windows service in Visual Studio 2008.

Last week I discovered a couple of problems related to porting my Windows service demo project from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2008. A minor problem was caused by an obsolete method in the sample Windows service. Another problem was quite embarrassing: once started, it was impossible to stop a service from Service Control Manager. To fix this problem (and a couple of other issues related to .NET 2.0-specific functionality), I made the following changes:

Swapped the contents of Start and OnStart methods (now the Start method calls the OnStart method).
Moved the contents of the Stop method to the OnStop method.
Removed the Stop method (it's really not needed).
Modified is IsInstalled method.
Renamed the TestService source file in the demo project to CustomService (to reflect the name of the class).

If you have been using the My.Utilities library to implement a Windows service and are planning to upgrade it to the Visual Studio 2008 version, please use the updated projects (see the download link below) and keep an eye on the following:

Move your custom startup logic of a WindowService-derived class from the Start method to the OnStart method.
Don't forget to call the base class' OnStart and OnStop methods in the corresponding overriden methods.
Well... that's it.

One other thing that I could've done would be using the nullable DateTime members and variables when checking for uninitialized date and time values (instead of DateTime.MinValue), but since this would not improve functionality, I left the current implementation as is. If you strive for code elegance, feel free to do it yourself, since you have the source.

Here is the Visual Studio 2008 version of the project, which incorporates all reported bug fixes up-to-date:

Download the Windows service demo project for Visual Studio 2008

Let me know if you encounter any problems.

See also:
Write a Better Windows Service by Alek Davis

To TDD, or not to TDD?

2009-02-12T21:33:00.000-08:00

Summary: Some thoughts on Test-Driven Development (TDD).

A few weeks ago, Stack Overflow co-founders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood discussed criticized certain aspects of Test-Driven Development (TDD) and SOLID Principles of Object-Oriented Design (OOD) [the latter advocated by Robert C. Martin, AKA Uncle Bob]. Check out the excerpts from the original podcast and the follow-up talk (you may also want to listen to the Scott Hanselman's interview with Uncle Bob, which prompted Joel's rant):

The Stack Overflow: Podcast #38, Excerpt (14:32) [see also podcast page and transcript]
The Stack Overflow: Podcast #39, Excerpt (18:35) [see also podcast page and transcript]

As expected, the discussion criticism triggered rather emotional rebuttals from TDD supporters, including Uncle Bob himself; see (and read comments):

And then, a counter-rebuttals by Jeff Atwood:

Eventually, Joel, Jeff, and Uncle Bob met for a makeup session, which you can find -- along with the summary -- at:

The Stack Overflow: Podcast #41

Although all participants of the podcast #41 seemed to agree on many issues, I have a feeling that the opposing sides stuck to their points of disagreement: uncle Bob remained convinced that TDD could do only good (the more TDD, the more good), while Jeff and Joel continued emphasizing that other aspects of software development may be more important than TDD.

I happen to lean more towards Jeff and Joel for the following reasons (in addition to the reasons mentioned in The Stack Overflow podcasts).

First, Joel mentioned the issues related to GUI testing, but it's not just the GUI: the database layer poses another challenge. When unit testing database-driven apps, a common approach is to rely on mock objects (in which case, you totally skip database testing) or use test-specific data in a simplified version of the database (here you will have to figure out how to maintain this database and integrate it into your build process). Even with the 100% code coverage of the business layer, if your unit test skip the GUI and database, about half of the application (more or less) will remain untested, and you'll have to address this gap using functional testing, which will overlap with unit tests. So why spend time writing unit test for the code that will be tested functionally anyway?

Second, claims that TDD improves code quality are rarely, if ever, substantiated by data. You may hear statements like:

"Since I (we) started using TDD, my (our) code has become much better."

I'm not claiming that these statements are false, but without data they are just personal opinions. Even assuming that code did in fact improve, could it be due to other factors, such as better programming experience, tools, team composition, processes?

Analyzing effects of TDD on code quality is extremely difficult. One of the better studies on the subject was conducted by Microsoft and IBM (see the 8-minute interview with one of the researchers and the original paper). The study found that TDD improved code quality, but it also increased development time.

There is a trade-off: either use TDD and spend more time writing, maintaining, and running unit tests now or do not use TDD and spend time fixing bugs later. The question is: how much time? If TDD activities take 2 weeks out of an 8-week development cycle (a typical 25% TDD penalty) to prevent defects that could've been found and fixed in 3 days during functional testing, would TDD give you the best return on investment? By the way, it is worth noting that the team with the smallest test coverage (62%) in the study achieved the best results (90% drop of defects), while the team with the highest test coverage (95%) achieved the "worst" (as compared to other teams) results (40% drop of defects; still not bad when compared to the control group). I would also emphasize that the use of TDD in the study was close to ideal: the projects were appropriate for TDD and the teams were not pushed to achieve the maximum code coverage.

The Microsoft-IBM study had a few problems, though. First, the number of participants was rather small. Second, and more important, it tried to compare similar teams and projects, but there were many difference between them, such as team/project sizes, and project durations, which is expected in a study focusing on real life projects. Studies performed in academic settings -- with undergraduate students of approximately the same grade working on identical projects -- attempted to minimize some of the differences and make experiments more controlled. According to an abstract from one of such studies:

"[T]est-first students on average wrote more tests and, in turn, students who wrote more tests tended to be more productive. We also observed that the minimum quality increased linearly with the number of programmer tests, independent of the development strategy employed."

How this sounds depends on how you interpret the study's findings. If you're a TDD supporter, you may join Phil Haack and announce that Research Supports The Effectiveness of TDD. Or, you can look more closely at the results of the study and come to a different conclusion. For example, Jacob Proffitt suggested (see also post comments) that:

"[W]ithout question, testing first leads to having more tests per functional unit. The question is if this is valuable. This study would seem to indicate that this is probably not the case, at least if quality is your intended gain. But then, I'm not that surprised that number of tests doesn't correspond to quality just as I'm not surprised that the number of lines of code doesn't correspond to productivity."

I would also point that the code in the experiments was not written for database-driven apps with web-based GUI, so again it was an ideal usage of TDD. So I would speculate that if either of these studies focused on database-driven apps with web front ends, the results would probably be even less encouraging.

I'm not an opponent of TDD and agree that it can be valuable when applied to certain types of projects. My gripe against TDD is that it is being often sold as yet another silver bullet and forced into adoption indiscriminately, in the projects where TDD offers minimal, if any, benefits.

I also resent the assumption that TDD always leads to good code. Your My project can have 100% code coverage, but it can still suck. It will pass all unit test, alright, but at the same time it can be unreadable, unnecessarily complex, uncommented, resulting in an app with bad GUI and unintuitive behavior, an app which both the users and support teams hate. But don't you dare to criticize my code: since it's 100% unit tested, it's good by definition. Usability testing? Never heard of it. And as far as everything else goes (like comments, better design, etc), do I have time for this when I spend my better hours working on unit test? Something's gotta give.

Finally, what about all those great apps written by developers, who did not use TDD or any other silver-bullet-like methodology? Take Google developers, who apparently do not follow any software development methodology or approach, but somehow manage to write apps that people love. If they can write great apps (which is one of the goals of good code), why would one want to impose TDD on them?

Now, Google developers are good, but what do you do if your developers are bad? [I'm not talking about developers who make occasional, sometimes serious, errors (this happens even to the best of us); I'm talking about developers who consistently write bad code.] Wouldn't TDD help them write better code? I wouldn't expect it, but if you can share a success story, please leave a comment.

If your organization suffers from bad code, consider adopting TDD (when applied correcly, it may help), but more importantly, consider other factors, such as:

The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code by Joel Spolsky
What Makes Good Code Good? by Paul DiLascia

Once you the adopt common-sense practices, you may not need TDD after all.

See also:
Hanselminutes Podcast 146 - Test Driven Development is Design - The Last Word on TDD
Hanselminutes Podcast 31 - Test Driven Development
TDD Tests are not Unit Tests by Stephen Walther
Test-After Development is not Test-Driven Development by Stephen Walther