Blogging Tidbits

I spent quite some on Wednesday catching up with blogs and compiled a list of entries I found interesting, however just before posting it Pretoria suffered a major power outage. I haven't saved either my blog entry nor about 6 hours work in Visio (I've now turned on AutoSave) which left me quite ticked off with myself to say the least.

Below is some of those links as I recalled them...

General .NET

• Inside Image File Execution - Little known feature in NT based machines, if you need another application, like a debugger, to launch your application. Add an entry to the Image File Execution key in the registry to enable to "intercept" and launch the alternative application. Useful for debugging services or even more useful for confusing your friends by launching something like Winzip instead of notepad :[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\notepad.exe]
  "Debugger"="\"C:\\Program Files\\WinZip\\WINZIP32.EXE\""
• Based on Scott Hanselman's (who was in South Africa last year for a holiday :p) "What Great .NET developers ought to know", Tim Heuer came up with a similiar list for Sharepoint, "What a Good Sharepoint Consultant ought to know". Worth a read if either of the technologies affect you.

.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005

• February CTP available on MSDN with Beta 2 hopefully here before end of March. [Link via Kent Sharkey]
• To my dismay realized yesterday that Database Diagrams was pulled from SQL Server 2005 toolset. And Visio don't speak to Yukon and even though the rumors are that they made a comeback in the October Whidbey CTP I'm either blind or it's not there. I'm skipping the Nov/Dec CTP's so hopefully they're in the February one. 

Open Source

• NHibernate 0.7.0.0 Beta - My object persistance library of choice. [See Anders Norås's old post, "Try doing this with SQL " - right, try that with SQL]
• NHibernateContrib 0.7.0.0 Beta - Tools and additional tidbits not part of the NHibernate Core.
• Community Server 1.0 Source released. - [via Rob Howard ]
• NAnt 0.85 RC - Old news but I haven't seen this earlier.
• NDepend - Excellent code metrics tool. - "NDepend allows you to automatically measure the quality of a design in terms of its extensibility, reusability and maintainability to effectively manage and control the assemblies’ dependencies of your .NET applications" -  [Original link via Eric Gunnerson]
• The Mono website switched to MediaWiki, same Wiki engine that runs Wikipedia. [Link via Miguel de Icaza] - While on Mono, There's quite a bit of the .NET 2.0 functionality available already in the 1.1.4 build.

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