I don't quite know what to make of this. There's a prototype of a product called The Bluebook which is basically a normal paper based book printed with conductive ink.In the back of it (or embedded in the jacket/spine) is a bluetooth chip. When you put your finger on an outlined section of text, the book... Read more

Andrew has posted about a guy named Alex in Romania having a big rant about using agile in an outsourcing arrangement. His argument is founded on everything that can go wrong with an agile project if you miss the fundamentals of agile and forget to "inspect & adapt" your process to fit the situation.  And while he... Read more

I've now been at Readify for about 3 weeks now and I've got to say things are going pretty well. I've just completed my second engagement; a review of a "Classic" ASP application and I'm starting to settle into the senior consultant role fairly comfortably.  It's still weird not being able to have water-cooler chats or... Read more

This is pretty cool. Garrett talks about a project that lets TortoiseSVN talk to Team Foundation Server.At it's core SVNBridge converts the Subversion API calls made by the SVN client(s) into TFS API calls, effectively making TFS look like a subversion repository. Nice :-) Read more

It appears I was slightly mistaken about what the new VSORCAS documentation format in Sandcastle actually is. It's actually a new "front end" to the documentation and for now is restricted just to documentation produced by Sandcastle itself (see the comment in my previous blog post).Anyway a new Sandcastle CTP has just been released and the... Read more

Looks like the upcoming Orcas release of visual studio will have a new documentation format.  Why?  Well let me quote: "This new documentation presentation layer targets developer audience who need to find information quickly and easily in our documentation that grows significantly with every Visual Studio/.NET Framework release." If you've ever spent more than 3.75 secs... Read more

I can't believe this is the first time I've run across it but Fiddler 2 is available. And it's been out since September last year!Fiddler for those not in the know Fiddler is a debugging proxy you can use for examining what is going on when you hit a web page. It's very cool stuff (especially... Read more

If you don't use ReSharper you're developing with only one arm. If you know about it but don't know if it's worth learning then have a look at 31 Days of ReSharper.Even better, if watch it being used in anger and download the (33Mb) video of Ayende Rahien demoing Rhino Mocks in a TDD scenario. He... Read more

When I had a disk space problem recently I didn't know and the thought of hunting down big files hidden in deep folder structures was anathema.So I turned to my trusty browser, whipped out my Google branded shovel and got digging. I quickly found a great little utility - WinDirStat. Weird name, great app.In a nutshell... Read more

If I could think of only one reason why Windows needed a transactional file system it's this: Windows Update and the software installation process.I just picked up a temporary laptop as part of my new job. It came with an unpatched XP SP2 installation and Office 2007. The C: drive was kinda full, but there was... Read more

According to David Hayden the good folks at Microsoft have released a CTP for SQL 2008 (Katmai).The SQL 2008 Downloads page currently has just the Books Online and some documents, but according to this forum post it'll be there shortly.Now, how much of my download limit have I got left this month? Read more

Tonight I wrapped up my job with MXL, and got a very nice sendoff (though they did make sure I left the building!)It's a weird feeling - for the past 2 years I've been investing a lot of time, energy and emotion into my staff and now I'm leaving all that behind and hoping it continues... Read more

CruiseControl.NET is a fantastic open source tool for running Continuous Integration processes in your development team. I've been using CCNet with teams for many years now and it works beautifully. Of course these days you can also do continuous integration with a number of other products like Microsoft's Team Foundation Server or any of the various... Read more

Hooray!  I thought it was dead... Windows Live Writer beta 2 has just been released.  Go get it - it's got cool new stuff including support for Blogger labels!! I'm excited! :-) P.S. This was written in Live Writer! Read more

Here's a list of FOSS tools and frameworks that you may find useful when developing .NET software. I've looked at, played with, or used all of these tools over the last few years.Note that Visual Studio Team suite covers much the same functionality as some of the tools listed below and the there are a number... Read more

If you've ever had to demo something and you use keyboard shortcuts it can be a pain to keep telling people what you were pressing. There's now a cool little utility to track those keyboard shortcuts and show them to the audience without having to tell them what you pressed.It's called ShortWatcher (I know - sounds... Read more

It's been 2 years since I started with my current employer and while being a CTO has been fun, I've been feeling recently that it's time for a change. The higher I've been getting in management the less hands on I've been and recently I've not been able to spend much time at all on the... Read more

Static code analysis is the process of examining written code at design time and looking for problems. Typically this is done by tools such as FxCop, NDepend and SourceMonitor - tools that look for at coding rule violations, cyclomatic code complexity and a whole host of other code metrics.Well, there's a few new tools that are... Read more

I've been talking recently with Philip Beadle about the book DotNetNuke for Dummies that he co-authored and some of the effort involved in doing it. I was then wandering through the local bookshop shortly afterwards and saw 4 copies of it on the shelves and thought to myself "That's pretty cool".But is it really worth it... Read more

OK, so it's not as good as the genius that is Firebug (which runs inside Firefox), but if you want to see what's happening in IE when testing your web app then you'd best head on over to the Microsoft web site and pull down the official Version 1.0 release of the IE Dev Toolbar.The IE... Read more