everystockphoto

everystockphoto is a syndicating/search engine for stock/free photos. Photos come from various sources, e.g. Flickr, stock.xchng, Wikimedia Commons, photoXpress, and fotolia, and their usage is subject to their corresponding licenses.

CppDepend

CppDepend is an “NDepend for C++”. It is made by the same company, and looks and behaves in a very much similar way.

PostSharp 1.5 RTM

PostSharp 1.5 has been RTM-ed! Will have to try it in next project.

Today’s Sites/Blogs

• Ask the Performance Team (Thoughts from the EPS Windows Server Performance Team) – in their own words “… the Performance team covers a broad range of seemingly unrelated areas such as Core OS Performance, Printing, WMI and Terminal Services. Simply put – we’re a bit of a “catch-all” team. [...] Because we cover such a wide spectrum of technology, we see many different types of issues – some more frequently than others. So we thought we should share with the broader technical community. We’ll be sharing troubleshooting tips and technical information on areas of our specialty that we cover.”
• 45+ Excellent Code Snippet Resources and Repositories – it is what it says it is.

Flash and Silverlight Video Players

Needed Flash and/or Silverlight web-page video players for our web site, and found Silverlight – Video Player (at CodePlex) and Flowplayer – Flash Video Player for the Web. Both look really good and are fully customizable.

NowDoThis

NowDoThis is an extremely simple task list/ToDo list web application. Check its NowDoThis blog to get more idea. And do not forget to use tabs (denoted by @ symbols in the list) – they are really nice.

Unattended .NET Installation

We needed to do unattended .NET 3.5 SP1 installation for our project, and at the same time we wanted to reduce the hard disk image size, so, after some Internet “crawling”, we found Silent .NET Maker synthesized – [a] script [that] builds custom .NET unattended, switchless, multimode installers/nLite addons, supporting all latest .NET framework versions, all its hotfixes and langpacks for win 2K/XP/2K3 x86 up to date. The thing really works, and we managed to get the size of full .NET 3.5 SP1 installer with all hotfixes down to something like 43MB (packed with 7-Zip) for 32-bit Windows XP. Not bad reduction! Aaron Stebner has also something to say about this topic.

Visual Studio Debugger Visualizers

DebuggerVisualizers – Boost C++ Libraries has nice introduction to custom Visual Studio debugger visualizers.

Font Burner

Font Burner makes it possible for you to use new fonts on your website, even if the end user does not have your chosen font(s) on his computer. There is nothing to install, neither on your computer nor on the end user’s, and the thing is free. The archive of offered fonts is really big (more than 1000 fonts). Really cool!

The only caveat is that, as it is using sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, see more info) to change the fonts, it is likely rather impractical to use it for anything bigger than headings. Basically it hides the text and puts a Flash file in its place, and that Flash file is able to render the chosen font.

Iconfinder

Iconfinder is to icons what Google is to the web – a search engine.

iFolder

iFolder is an open source file synchonization and sharing solution (commercial license is available from Novell). The main difference from all other Internet file sharing solutions is that you can host it on your server and stay in full controll over the thing.

Adobe Flex Builder 3 Professional for Unemployed Developers

Adobe did something I think all other smart software companies should do – started Adobe Flex Builder 3 Professional for unemployed developers program. The program is open worldwide and targets all unemployed developers.

Is IE8 Really Fat and Slow?

Is IE8 really fat and slow? While not using IE8 yet (our software depends on IE7, so have no choice), found that post good to know, as it seems this is quite a common problem with IE8.

browsershots.org

browsershots.org site helps to check your web page for browser compatibility by providing cross platform browser testing in form of taking screenshots of your web page in all kinds of browsers/OSes. It supports seemingly everything there is out there (main page has something like 100 checkboxes for various browsers) and you can customize all kinds of options like screen resolution, Java version, etc. It is a free service, but there is an option to get “priority lane” for money.

UPDATE Just found 10 Browser Testing Tools: Roundup for Web Designers by Bryan Connor – a nice collection of browser testers with short reviews.

CommitMonitor

CommitMonitor is a small footprint system tray tool that monitors Subversion repositories for new commits. I think it is the best utility in this category – IMHO much better than SVN Notifier.

There are a few more interesting tools by same author on his Stefan’s tools site, including FavIconizer that can scan all your favarites’ links and updates websites’ FavIcons, grepWin – a simple search and replace shell-integrated tool supporting regular expressions, StExBar that provides useful extra commands for Windows explorer (my favorite is ability to rename multiple files using regular expressions; you can add custom commands to it), and DemoHelper – an annotation and screen zoom tool you can use for technical presentations that include application demonstrations.

|=uCl<1/\/9 Acrobat Reader!!! (Part II)

Shit! I have already once posted about problems with Acrobat Reader. And, here it comes again! I am really tired of getting stupid “The Adobe Acrobat/Reader that is running cannot be used to view PDF files in a web browser. Adobe Acrobat/Reader version 8 or 9 is required. Please exit and try again.” message almost (almost, but not always) every time I try to open PDF document from some web site. Both solutions I found suck big time:

1. Uninstall Acrobat Reader 9 and install version 8
2. Go to Edit > Preferences > Internet and clear Display PDF in browser checkbox (this is the one I am using now)

This problem is known to Adobe, but ignored by them for more than half a year. Boooooo…

CHDK: Canon PowerShot++

We were looking into supporting RAW images in our product, and purely by accident I bumped into CHDK (the name stands for Canon Hack Development Kit). It is a free firmware addon for Canon PowerShot cameras, enabling/adding many cool features, e.g. recording 10-bit/color RAW files (including experimental support for the open DNG standard), overriding camera parameters, bracketing for exposure, aperture, ISO, and focus, controlling video quality/bitrate, scripting, motion detection, live histogram, etc., etc., etc. Will definitely try it out as soon as will get some free time, but people are very excited about it. The risk is minimal, as it is not overriding the original firmware, but rather loading these extra goodies from the SD card.

EasyBCD Vista Bootloader Tweaker

EasyBCD by NeoSmart Technologies allows extensive tweaking of the new Windows Vista bootloader. Setting up and configuring Windows boot entries becomes a simple task, and now you can boot into Linux, Mac OS X, or BSD straight from the Windows Vista bootloader.

Virtual PC Disk Resizer

VhdResize can resize Microsoft’s VHD files as well as convert between Fixed and Dynamic disks. It performs sector by sector copy operation, so the source file remains unaltered. It cannot resize partitions – for this task you will have to use Partition Magic or whatever other partitioning tools you are used to.

.NET/WPF Obfuscators

We have recently purchased PreEmptive Solutions Dotfuscator (which sounded like a good idea when we were making decision about it), but to be honest I am not very happy about it: it cannot properly handle WPF projects and you have to perform a lot of “voo-doo dances” to get at least some protection there (and all that while costing s|-|1t-load of money). This pushed me to do a new round of evaluations of competing products, and I have found few that are really interesting:

• .NET Reactor (about 150€) is a really powerful tool with lots of features (code and resource protection, code encryption, support for .NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, CF 1.0 and 2.0, ASP.NET, Mono, can merge assemblies, remove IL code, generate native executables, etc., etc., etc.). Additionaly there is a licensing system, but I have not tried it yet. Despite it claims supporting .NET 3.5 I did not manage to protect our WPF assemblies with it, but all other assemblies were protected like a charm.
• DeepSea Obfuscator (about 200€). This obfuscator’s list of features is not much shorter, but few outstanding points are support for WPF assemblies, and declarative obfuscation, where the obfuscation process can be controlled by applying obfuscation-related attributes to your code. I managed to protect our WPF assembly with it, but resulting assembly is crashing when I’m entering one specific screen. I guess this crash can be eliminated by using attribute-based obfuscation and removing some properties/classes from the protection process (which is not that good, to be honest, as it means extra work, howewer small it is).
• {smartassembly} (about 350€-650€, depending on version) looks really impressive as well. It was able to protect WPF assembly and, it seems that the abovementioned crash is not present here; well, it is with certain settings related to obfuscation, but it can be easily eliminated by tweaking settings. Control flow obfuscation seems to be much stronger than that of the DeepSea, and there are some additional protection settings that make lives of Reflector, ILDASM and others really miserable (e.g. invalid metadata streams).

It seems that to get decent level of protection we will have to use either {smartassembly}, or both .NET Reactor and {smartassembly} (in case {smartassembly} would be not able to provide the same protection level for “normal”=non-WPF assemblies as .NET Reactor does – remains to be seen).

Duplo

Duplo is a free tool that can find duplicated source code blocks in C#, C/C++, VB.NET and Java projects. Advantages: free and seems to do decent job. Disadvantages: command line interface only – there is no GUI for this tool.

Visual Studio Productivity

It is impossible to use Visual C++ 2008’s IDE, as nothing really works there – no IntelliSence, no refactorings, nothing. The same sad story can be told about the Visual Studio’s XAML editor – it just sucks (by the way, you get much better experience by using Visual Studio’s XML editor to edit XAML files). So, finally I got really tired of this, and decided to do something.

I went through quite many packages, and settled down on two – Visual Assist X for Visual Studio by Whole Tomato ($249 retail) and ReSharper by Jetbrains ($349 retail, although Euro price is 315€, weird).

Visual Assist X is super-great for C++. In fact, it is “Visual C++ IDE made right” kind of tool – fixes all problems existing in VS and adding a lot of nice extra goodies that can really improve your productivity: working IntelliSense, refactorings, code outlining and browsing, searching for symbols, code coloring, etc. etc. etc. Some of the abovementioned features are available for C# and VB.NET as well.

ReSharper is doing similar things for C#, VB.NET and XAML, as well as for ASP.NET, XML, MS Build scripts and NAnt. Finally you can browse XAML files and have the ability to quickly jump to referenced resources!

So far so good. These tools can work together on one Visual Studio 2008 setup seemingly without major issues. The only bad thing I have noticed is their “competition” for IntelliSense in C# – both are showing their pop-ups and it is a bit annoying. This problem is not seen in XAML, as VAX is not supporting XAML, and in C++, as ReSharper is not supporting C++. So far I couldn’t resolve this issue, as I do not see any configuration settings that would allow me to switch off IntelliSense for C# in one tool or another. In the end of the day, it is not major issue and I should say these tools work very well together.

I do not understand, why Microsoft cannot do something similar to what these tools are doing straight out of the box? If Microsoft’s team cannot do this on its own (because they are busy developing one more piece of useless fancy marketing crappy feature), then I do not get why they cannot buy e.g. Whole Tomato? If they were ready to waste billions on Yahoo (which would give them what advantage? and please, do not tell me about advertisement business – I do not understand why Microsoft being software house should go to Internet business “just because”), then they should rather spending miniscule fraction of that cost and get real boost for all the developers that use their unfinished tools and technologies (WPF, VS2008, Blend, you name it). Just my 2 cents…

UPDATE The abovementioned issue with conflicting IntelliSense pop-ups can be partially resolved by switching off IntelliSense support in ReSharper (Options… and then Environment > IntelliSense > General page).

SciTech .NET Memory Profiler

Schitech .NET Memory Profiler has plenty of features that will make your life easier when you try to fight memory-related problems in your .NET applications. Nice touch – it is able to track unmanaged resource usage (e.g. HWND, HBITMAP and unmanaged memory) and present it together with the .NET memory information. Just this single feature alone saved my day when I had to find unmanaged memory leak in the mixed-mode .NET app (C# and C++), and all other profilers just $@% badly – I had the bug fixed in less than one hour after I downloaded the trial version of the tool (that 1 our included “learning curve” as well!!!). Recommend!

Crack.NET

Crack.NET is a runtime debugging and scripting tool that gives you access to the internals of a WPF or Windows Forms application running on your computer. It nicely rounds the Snoop and Mole for Visual Studio group, as it allows you to “walk” the managed heap of another .NET application, and inspect all values on all objects and types. In addition, you are able to write and execute IronPython scripts that run inside the target application.

Josh Smith is the author, and has a nice introductory page for the tool.

XamlPadX

There is version 4 of the Lester Lobo’s XamlPadX – a replacement for XamlPad with few interesting add-ons like Command Interpreter, ability to view control styles, color selection, etc.