Al Nyveldt

BlogEngine.NET Installation Screencast

Al Nyveldt — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:46:29 -0500

Well, it is that time again. I celebrate every release of BlogEngine.NET with a new installation screencast. The process is the same as before, but it is good to have a fresh version for people new to BlogEngine.

For those who prefer written instructions, check out the BlogEngine Documentation. There is a lot of good information out there along with troubleshooting information.

If you have questions or need help, please check out the BlogEngine.NET documentation and forums. Most of the common questions and answers are found by looking in the docs or searching the forums.

BlogEngine.NET 1.6 Released

Al Nyveldt — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:35:51 -0500

This evening, the BlogEngine.NET team released version 1.6. You can head on over and download it now.

This release has a lot of important updates rolled into it including enhancements to the comment system and widget zones. This release has lots of little touches that improve many of the existing features. Be sure to check out the details on the main site for the highlights and release notes.

A huge thanks to the Ruslan, Ben, and Russell who put in a ton of effort to make this release happen. It was a great effort. You guys rock!

Central Penn .NET Code Camp 2009

Al Nyveldt — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 21:48:52 -0500

I had a nice time at the Central Penn .NET Code Camp this past Saturday. It was my first code camp in Harrisburg, PA and while not as large as the Philly Code Camp I’ve been to a few times, it was a good code camp just the same. There was a nice mix of sessions and I had a enjoyed getting to chat with fellow developers from the area (and a few from a bit further away.) I was also shocked to see the swag that was available at this code camp. It was incredible. Everyone who stayed the whole day left with at least a t-shirt and a technical book. My friend Mark scored a ReSharper license and some lucky fella went home with an XBox 360 (whatever that is.)

I gave a talk in the first time slot of the day on the Spark View Engine. I had not done a talk on Spark before and was very curious to see how it go over. I didn’t have a huge crowd for the talk but they were a great audience and had lots of good questions and insight. It was a pleasure to present to them.

In the presentation, I decided to go the route of showing Spark instead of teaching Spark. I showed a lot of different syntax, discussed spooling, partial files, and ended with an example of using iTextSharp and Spark to produce PDFs. Hopefully everyone there got a good taste of Spark and will take a moment to download it and give it a try soon.

I promised to put the demo code out on my blog so I’ll include it at the bottom of the post. It is far from perfect, but it will give you something to play around with.

Anyway, I hope to make it to future Code Camps in Harrisburg. It was a good time and something local developers should really try to make time for.

Download: CPCC2009-SparkDemo.zip

Exploring Spark View Engine for ASP.NET MVC – Part 3

Al Nyveldt — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:00:00 -0500

If you are following along in this series, we have have already looked at getting Spark View Engine setup and some of the basics of markup and layouts. In this last section, we need to look at some of the pieces of Spark syntax that really stand out.

Conditional Syntax

One of the things that makes a view look ugly in a hurry in the Web Forms world is conditional logic. If you have an else or an else if as part of the situation, you’ve got <% %> tags all over the place. Spark makes conditional syntax flow in your html markup. You can see a good sample of Web Forms vs. Spark at the beginning of the part 1 post on Exploring Spark.

The first way to handle conditionals is with the if and else tags:

        1: <if condition="!Request.IsAuthenticated">

       2:   <p>Hey... Login already!</p>

       3: </if>

       4: <else if="Context.User.IsInRole('Administrators')">

       5:   <p>Hello - You are special.</p>

       6: </else>

       7: <else>

       8:   <p>Hello - I know you.</p>

       9: </else>

There is also a test tag that is very similar and there are a few variations on the how you write the markup but that is the basic principle. (Note: the single quote is converted to a double quote by Spark.) Another very cool way to handle conditionals is to put the if as part of the html tag.

       1: <p if="CartTotal < 75">

       2:     Get free shipping when you order more than $75 worth of our good stuff

       3: </p>

This p tag will only show up if the condition is met. In addition, you can still use an else tag underneath the p tag with the if.

One other really neat trick is using conditional logic inside an attribute with a ?{ } syntax.

       1: <li class="listItem inStock?{item.Quantity > 0}">

       2:   ${item.Name}

       3: </li>

In the case above, the class attribute “inStock” will only appear when the Quantity is greater than zero.

Iteration Syntax

To be honest, the first thing I noticed when I looked at a Spark view was how iteration was handled. It just looked elegant to me. Like the Conditional Syntax, you can use separate tags for iteration or put the iteration right inside an existing tag.

       1: <for each="var movie in Movies">

       2:   <p>${movie.Title}</p>

       3: </for>

       4:  

       5: <table>

       6:   <tr each="var movie in Movies">

       7:     <td>${movie.Title}</td>

       8:     <td>${movie.Rating}</td>

       9:   </tr>

      10: </table>

ViewData

A lot of views will use ViewData of some type and while you can wrap your ViewData request in ${ } brackets, there is a better option. With the viewdata tag, you can strongly type your variables in your view.

       1: <viewdata message="string" model="IEnumerable[[Movie]]" />

Note: Spark converts the [[ ]] to < >. These double square brackets and the single quotes are the only Spark conversions I’m aware of at this point.

Inline Code

One of the really great parts of Spark is that you can continue to use your <% %> syntax if you need to or want to. If you want to convert a page from aspx to spark. Rename the file, take out your header and replace your ContentPlaceHolders. The rest of your <% %> stuff should be fine.

In addition though, if you actually need some inline code, you can just proceed the line with a # character and it will be handled as inline code. Again, I think it gives the markup a cleaner feel.

Conclusion

There is a lot more interesting pieces to dive into with Spark, but this is just meant to get you started. If you are interested in more Spark syntax, configuration, or conventions you should check out the Spark documentation.

Exploring Spark View Engine for ASP.NET MVC – Part 2

Al Nyveldt — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:30:00 -0500

In my last post, we took a very brief look at the syntax of Spark then dove right into getting setup to try it out. If you have not looked at the first part of the series, that would be the best place to start.

In this post, we’re going to continue to look at the default project that I converted to use the Spark View Engine (instead of the default Web Forms view engine) and take a look at the syntax and some of the conventions. (Download it here.) Let’s start with a side by side look of the both the original View folder and my Spark version’s View folder.

You'll notice that the files look pretty much similar to the default application except the extensions have been changed from aspx to spark. The exception of course is in the Shared folder, we no longer have a Site.Master file. In its place, we have an Application.spark file and a _global.spark file. I also added an underscore in front of the LogOnUserControl’s file name. These change will be discussed later in this article.

Basic Markup

If you take a look at a simple view, like the Home/Index.spark, you will notice a few difference from the Web Forms version. First, the Page header line is no longer needed with spark. In addition, the ContentPlaceHolders are gone. In addition, there is only one content tagged area instead of the two in the original.

Original Home/Index.aspx:

        1: <%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage" %>

       2:  

       3: <asp:Content ID="indexTitle" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server">

       4:     Home Page

       5: </asp:Content>

       6:  

       7: <asp:Content ID="indexContent" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server">

       8:     <h2><%= Html.Encode(ViewData["Message"]) %></h2>

       9:     <p>

      10:         To learn more about ASP.NET MVC visit <a href="http://asp.net/mvc" title="ASP.NET MVC Website">http://asp.net/mvc</a>.

      11:     </p>

      12: </asp:Content>

My Spark Home/Index.spark:

       1: <content name="title">

       2:     Home Page

       3: </content>

       4:  

       5: <h2>${ViewData["Message"]}</h2>

       6: <p>

       7:     To learn more about ASP.NET MVC visit <a href="http://asp.net/mvc" title="ASP.NET MVC Website">http://asp.net/mvc</a>.

       8: </p>

The loss of a ContentPlaceHolder is interesting. Spark renders your view differently than Web Forms and one change is the the view will spool named content for placement and render any un-named content where the view is called in the master layout.

The spooling concept is very powerful and we will likely dig into this further in a future post. For now, I’ll mention you can put your named content areas anywhere inside your view. You may make multiple entries and they will be concatenated. You can also set up default values in your Master Layout in case there is no matching named content area in the view you are rendering.

The other important change in these files in the displaying of the ViewData[“Message”]. In the original, it is wrapped in the alligator tags and encoded with Html.Encode(). In the spark version, it is simply wrapped with ${ }. You might remember that I added some configuration that html encodes all output by default so that part is not needed. The simple ${ } syntax represents code instead of the <% %>. Any C# code can be put inside the brackets.

This should bring up the obvious question, what if I don’t want to encode the output? In that case, you use an ! instead of a $. When you want to have your output be html, like an Html.ActionLink function or an Html.TextBox function, you’ll need the !{ } syntax. I really like this syntax as it allows me to be deliberate over what is encoded or not encoded with a single character.

Master Layouts

Now would be a good time to look at the master layouts of the original app and my Spark’s Application.spark. This will let us see the rest of the Home page that gets rendered when we start up the application.

Original Shared/Site.Master:

       1: <%@ Master Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewMasterPage" %>

       2:  

       3: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

       4: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

       5: <head runat="server">

       6:     <title><asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="TitleContent" runat="server" /></title>

       7:     <link href="../../Content/Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

       8: </head>

       9:  

<body>

    <div class="page">

  

        <div id="header">

            <div id="title">

                <h1>My MVC Application</h1>

            </div>

              

            <div id="logindisplay">

                <% Html.RenderPartial("LogOnUserControl"); %>

            </div> 

            

            <div id="menucontainer">

            

                <ul id="menu">              

                    <li><%= Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home")%></li>

                    <li><%= Html.ActionLink("About", "About", "Home")%></li>

                </ul>

            

            </div>

        </div>

  

        <div id="main">

            <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="MainContent" runat="server" />

  

            <div id="footer">

            </div>

        </div>

    </div>

</body>

</html>

My Spark Shared/Application.spark:

       1: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

       2: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

       3: <head runat="server">

       4:     <title><use content="title">Default title</use></title>

       5:     <link href="~/Content/Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

       6: </head>

       7:  

       8: <body>

       9:     <div class="page">

  

        <div id="header">

            <div id="title">

                <h1>My MVC Application</h1>

            </div>

              

            <div id="logindisplay">

                <LogOnUserControl />

            </div> 

            

            <div id="menucontainer">

            

                <ul id="menu">              

                    <li>!{Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home")}</li>

                    <li>!{Html.ActionLink("About", "About", "Home")}</li>

                </ul>

            

            </div>

        </div>

  

        <div id="main">

            <use content="view" />

  

            <div id="footer">

            </div>

        </div>

    </div>

</body>

</html>

Comparing the two, we’ll notice that the header line is gone again. Next, you’ll notice the first ContentPlaceHolder has been replaced with a <use content="title">Default title</use> section. This is what looks for any spooled content named title. The place between the tags is where I set a default information in the case there is no content named “title”. If I didn’t want to add default information, I could have made my tag simply, <use content=”title” />. While I’m in the header, I will state that you will want to use application based paths instead of relative paths, so I made this change as well.

As you look further down the file, you will come to a crazy looking tag, <LogOnUserControl />. We’ll talk about this tag in a moment, but let’s continue to scan down the Application.spark first. After the LogOnUserControl, you notice the use of the !{ } syntax wrapping the ActionLink functions and the <use content=”view” />. This is where the named view is rendered with in the layout.

Partial Files

Now, let’s look again at that <LogOnUserControl /> tag. This is simply a fancy way of displaying a partial file/view. When you name a partial file so that it starts with an underscore, it can be used as its own tag. The other syntax, if you prefer, would be <use file="_LogOnUserControl" />. You need to use that syntax is the file does not start with an underscore.

The code for the partial file is exactly what you’d expect, just a snippet of html and code markup. No special headers are needed. The code for the LogOnUserControl was actually shown in part 1 of this series so I won’t go back to it now.

This would also be a good time to look at the last piece of the puzzle, the _global.spark file. It is simply another partial file, but it has a special function. _global.spark is automatically imported into every single view that is compiled from the location it exists in. Since I have placed this one in the Shared folder, it will effect every view compiled. (If you had some specific globals you’d want in just the Home Controller views for example, you could put a _global.spark in the Home view folder.

In my _global.spark, I simply am declaring some namespaces. By default, the HtmlHelpers, for example, are not available without their full namepace included. I included a bunch of namespaces that I may want someday, but really only needed System.Web.Mvc.Html. You declare namespaces in spark like so:

In the next part of the series, we’ll look at more of the Spark syntax including conditionals and iteration.

Exploring Spark View Engine for ASP.NET MVC – Part 1

Al Nyveldt — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 13:00:00 -0500

If you are working with ASP.NET MVC and you haven’t taken a look at the Spark View Engine, you owe it to yourself to spend a few minutes exploring Spark. While it might not be for everyone, Spark View Engine offers a different option to the standard Web Forms View Engine used in MVC and it has a lot going for it.

Over the next week, I plan is to write a few of posts exploring the basics of Spark. We’ll go into installation, configuration, syntax, layouts, and partial files. There would be a lot more to dig into but this is the stuff you’ll want to start with. In this post, we’ll focus on getting your project ready to use Spark and some basic configuration.

The first thing you notice about Spark is the integration of your html and code in a simply easy to read way without all the code blocks in the code. It is a cleaner look to be sure, but the features go far beyond the initial cleaner look. To give you a better idea of what Spark actually looks like, here is the LogOnUserControl that is part of the default MVC application. This is using the default view engine, Web Forms.

Now, here is the LogOnUserControl converted to Spark.

As you can see, it is a cleaner look with the alligator brackets <% %> removed. Also, there is no control header required. Using some simple convention, we are able to encode data and display html and we have conditional elements in use.

The easiest way to get a project started using spark is the following 3 steps. These instructions make the assumption that you have installed ASP.NET MVC and Spark View Engine.

Create a new ASP.NET MVC Application in Visual Studio.
Add a Reference to Spark.dll and Spark.Web.Mvc.dll (both found in the bin folder of your Spark install.)
In your Global.asax, add the Spark View Engine to your View Engine collection by to the Application_Start. The code below also has a using Spark.Web.Mvc statement at the top of the file.

        1: protected void Application_Start()

       2: {

       3:     ViewEngines.Engines.Add(new SparkViewFactory());

       4:     RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);

       5: }

That is it. You are ready to get started with Spark. I recommend adding some default configuration to your web.config, but it is not required. Integrating the code below in to the configuration section of your web.config will turn on debugging information for Spark syntax issues and default to automatically encode your data on your forms.

       1: <configSections>

       2:    <section name="spark" type="Spark.Configuration.SparkSectionHandler, Spark"/>

       3: </configSections>

       4: <spark>

       5:    <compilation debug="true" />

       6:    <pages automaticEncoding="true" />

       7: </spark>

Now that you have the quick and easy setup stuff done, you can go ahead and run your app and you’ll notice… nothing. If you’ve done everything correctly, it still works fine. When you set up your app to use Spark, it will still render Web Forms views (aspx & ascx) if they are available. This is important as you can add Spark to an existing application and create new views in Spark while not causing problems with your functionality. As you might expect, your controllers will look for a Web Form view in the View folder with the name of the controller and then is the Shared folder. If it doesn’t find a match, it will look for the spark versions in the same 2 places.

In addition to allowing you to use either type of view, Spark views will handle the Web Form syntax well, which makes converting views from Web Forms to Spark an easy process that doesn’t need to happen all at once. (We’ll look at this further in a future post.)

I’ve gone ahead and created an ASP.NET MVC application, followed the steps above and then converted all the views to spark views. Download it and take a look around. We’ll look into the syntax and some of the conventions in the next post using this project.

Balsamiq Mockups Review

Al Nyveldt — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:12:20 -0500

I’m pretty late this this game, but… I got here in the end. I needed to make a few mockups recently and I wasn’t really excited about any of the options that I had before me.

Until this time around, I used my trusty pencil and paper or white board depending on the situation. This was always less than ideal and my attempts to use software to build them always took way to much time to do the same thing. This time around, I gave Balsamiq Mockups a try. It was exactly what the mockup experience should be.

The simple interface made the process take just about the same amount of time as using a whiteboard. You drag and drop buttons, controls, etc right into your work space. Double click to edit the default text and done. While this may take a slight bit longer, it has the advantage that you can just move the items on the screen with your mouse instead of having to erase and redraw. The resulting mockups have a hand drawn feel to them which gives the feel of mockup as well. I was able to quickly make a few mockups of forms AND when I was done I had a nice electronic copy to share with my client.

Balsamiq Mockups runs on Adobe AIR so it runs great on a Mac, PC and in a web browser. ( I used the desktop version on my Mac, but I did install the desktop version on my PC so I’m ready for next time.)

Disclaimer: I received a free license to this product. I didn’t need a license to do the work I did with it or to make the fine mockup you see before you, but I did get one so I wanted to be upfront.

BE Theme Tip: Adding default images for each category

Al Nyveldt — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:00:00 -0500

When I looked around at blog templates on different sites, I’m running across more and more templates that expect each post to have an image or two with it in the display template. I think it looks great, but I also think I would post even less if I had to have images in the certain sizes for each and ever post I wanted to make.

In thinking about it however, I decided it would work out pretty well for me if I picked out an image for each category and let my theme put the correct image into the template as needed. In my theme, I have only 2 image sizes and there are different enough that I decided to make images for both sizes, but if they were more similar, you might be able to get away with a single image and resizing it on the fly.

Since these images are part of how the post is displayed, the work for this is part of the PostView.ascx of your theme. I used the code behind file for this as well and added the following into my custom PostView class.

        1: protected string CategoryImage;

       2: protected string FeaturedImage;

       3: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

       4: {

       5:     string imageRoot = Utils.AbsoluteWebRoot.ToString() + 

       6:         "themes/myTheme/images/categories/";

       7:     string catImageName;

       8:     if (Post.Categories.Count > 0)

       9:         catImageName = Post.Categories[0].Title.Replace(".", "");

      10:     else

      11:         catImageName = "NoCategory";

      12:     

      13:     CategoryImage = imageRoot + catImageName + ".jpg";

      14:     FeaturedImage = imageRoot + catImageName + "Featured.jpg";

      15:  

      16:     base.Page_Load(sender, e);

      17: }

Now I had a CategoryImage and FeaturedImage url string that I could use in my PostView.ascx to show the correct image for each post.

       1: <img src="<%=CategoryImage %>" alt="<%=Server.HtmlEncode(Post.Title) %>" />

It is a relatively simple trick, but gives you some neat customization on your blog. This concept can be used to do countless customizations to the PostVIew, CommentView and even the Site.Master pages in your theme.

BE Theme Tip: Make the front page look different

Al Nyveldt — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 13:19:46 -0500

I spent some time over the past few days working on a new theme for this blog. It had been a while since I had made a BlogEngine theme, but the process is still the same as it was 2 years ago. It is a fairly easy process and it really allows for a lot of customization with just the smallest amount of code.

I thought I would share a few of the techniques I used in making this theme over a few blog posts. Hopefully, they will come in handy for someone making their own theme and maybe inspire some more interesting themes in the BlogEngine realm.

One of the most interesting parts of the new theme is the different look on the front page of my blog. The front page on a BlogEngine blog is usually a list of posts (although this can be overridden to be a particular page in the admin section). The list of posts or post list is simply a display of a set number of posts one after another. Each post is displayed using the PostView.ascx of the specific theme. The number of posts depend on the settings you have chosen in your admin section. There is also a setting that determines if the post is displayed in full in the post list or if just the description (or first so many characters) are displayed.

Armed with this basic information, we know that all we need to do is put a little custom code in the PostView.ascx to change the look of the page based on what type of page it is. In my case I really only care if I’m displaying the post list or not, but you could easily write your code to check for a specific page, a particular categories or whatever.

The first thing I did was to make an enum called PageStyle with 3 values (Page, Front, and Featured). Page is for general formatting. Featured is the top item on my front page and Front is the other items on my front page. I then added a ViewStyle variable to my theme’s PostView class in PostView.ascx.cs and the code in in the page load to set ViewStyle based on what page is being displayed. A trimmed down snippet of this code is below.

        1: protected PageStyle ViewStyle;

       2:  

       3: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

       4: {

       5:     string path = Request.RawUrl.ToLower();

       6:     if (path.LastIndexOf('/') > -1)

       7:         path = path.Substring(path.LastIndexOf('/') + 1);

       8:     if (path.StartsWith("default.aspx") || path.StartsWith("blog.aspx") || path == "")

       9:     {

      10:         ViewStyle = PageStyle.Front;

      11:  

      12:         // Latest Post?

      13:         BlogEngine.Core.Post temp = Post.Next;

      14:         if (temp == null)

      15:             ViewStyle = PageStyle.Featured;

      16:     }

      17:     else

      18:     {

      19:         ViewStyle = PageStyle.Page;

      20:     }

      21:  

      22:     base.Page_Load(sender, e);

      23: }

Now that I have ViewStyle set, I can use this in my PostView.ascx page to dramatically change the look of the html that will result for the different type of pages being called. I’ve put a few samples in the snippet below.

       1: <% if (ViewStyle == PageStyle.Page) { %>

       2: <div class="post-page">

       3:   ...

       4: </div>    

       5: <% } %>

       6:  

       7: <div class="<%=ViewStyle == PageStyle.Page ? "post-title" : "junk" %>">

       8: ...

       9: </div>

Personally, I like changing the classes of my divs and span tags where possible and use CSS to make the changes. Sometimes however, I’ve needed to actually use an if block to make the display look as I’d like.

A quick note for those trying this with an existing theme. Most themes I’ve seen do not have a code behind file for the PostView.ascx. You can make one, but make sure you reference it in the PostView.ascx file and that your cs file inherits from BlogEngine.Core.Web.Controls.PostViewBase. If you forget this, you won’t get anything to work.

Hopefully, this is helpful to someone. If you have questions or I need to be more clear, let me know in the comments.

5 iPhone apps that have changed the way I work

Al Nyveldt — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:19:33 -0500

I've been a big fan of my iPhone since I got it back in October 2007. It was a game changing device for me back then. I went from carrying a phone and an iPod to work to a single device. I had mobile web browsing, good email access, and a solid phone which was a major upgrade from my Audiovox Smartphone and I could load up my audio as well.

After 3rd party apps became a reality, I've slowly started to add some to my device. As I was driving home from work today, I was thinking about all the different ways the iPhone has change my work day. Since most people are already aware of the included iPhone apps, I thought I'd share some of the 3rd party apps I use on a regular basis and have added them into my routine.

Todo - This is the most expensive iPhone app I've purchased and it is also the one I'd miss the most if I lost my iPhone. The iPhone doesn't have a good todo list option and I really need something to help me management my tasks. I've become a huge fan of Remember the Milk (RTM) for managing all my tasks, but the RTM iPhone app just wasn't exactly what I wanted. Todo is. Someday I'll likely write a detailed post on my task management process which after many years of struggles, I'm really happy with.

Jobs – Jobs is basically a fancy timer. It helps me keep track of time I spend working for clients. I keep my hours log right there and I don't have to bother to remember how long I spent on this, I simply need to start and stop the timer. I got onto this system using the Freshbooks app, but since I stopped using Freshbooks, Jobs is my time tracker of choice. This is another area that I always struggled with until I got into a system with the iPhone.

Bible - I really like reading the Bible on my iPhone for some reason. I think it was the first app I downloaded and I still use it all the time. I haven't tried any Bible apps other than this one, but I can’t imagine finding anything better. I love how I quickly change versions of the Bible and search to find the verse I was looking for. It is a great reading or studying tool.

Simplify Music 2 - This is an incredible app. I have an 8GB iPhone and I like to leave space for music, podcasts, audiobooks, apps, and files. I don't get to carry all the music I might want to listen to while at work or on the road, but with this app, I can just stream it off of my Mac or PC at home.

Air Sharing - I picked this one up when it was a free app while I thought it was neat I didn't realize the flexibility it gave me. Its basic function is to give you a wireless "USB key", but when you put files on it, you can read them or listen to them as needed. I use the file transfer on occasion as it is a nice option, but I'm more likely to download something I want to listen to on the way home from work or read a document I stored on it from this app. I use this the least of the apps listed here, but I'm always amazed by how it really transforms the iPhone to a computer in my mind. I no longer need to move the file to PC or sync it up to actually access the file.

There are other apps that I use on a regular basis, but I don't view them as routine changing. What iPhone apps have really changed your work habits?