SQL Server Reporting Services Hits its Stride – CODE Magazine

I’ve used SSRS multiple times in the past and know of at least one instance where I’ll be using it again in the future so I was quite pleased to stumble upon Paul Litwin’s recent article regarding the current state of SSRS.
We’ve all heard that version 3 of a Microsoft product is when that product [...]

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Visual Studio Post-Build Event Command Line

Just a reminder for myself on how to create a directory and copy a renamed file into it using the post-build event of Visual Studio.

rd /s /q “$(TargetDir)Temp”
md “$(TargetDir)Temp”
copy “$(TargetDir)$(TargetName).exe” “$(TargetDir)Temp”
rename “$(TargetDir)Temp\$(TargetName).exe” “SomeCustomerUsefulName.exe”
copy “$(TargetDir)Temp\SomeCustomerUsefulName.exe” “$(TargetDir)”
rd /s /q “$(TargetDir)Temp”

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WebsiteSpark – Free Beer for Developers from Microsoft!

Microsoft just announced a tasty new program that offers quite a bundle of free software to individual and small development companies. Sure it’s a shameless attempt to get people hooked on Microsoft products but I can’t fault them for it, they’ve got some good stuff and this will give more people access to it. Sweet!
WebsiteSpark [...]

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Wireframing & Rapid Prototyping Apps

Given the need of my “customers” to have something visual I started looking at wireframing and rapid prototyping tools. I wanted to be able to give them a rough sketch to spur discussion and ideas without the sketching method taking too much time and being more trouble than it was worth.
Back in the 1990s, when [...]

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Balsamiq Studios – Paper Mockups with Digital Convenience?

Heard about this via a software podcast over the weekend, definitely want to try it out.
# Create software mockups in minutes
# Collaborate with your team
# Focus on creating your product
via Balsamiq Studios.

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Roll back (Undo) revisions in the repository

Quick pointer to a particular TortoiseSVN feature I wasn’t familiar with for some reason. This enables reverting to a previous revision easily.
The easiest way to revert the changes from a single revision, or from a range of revisions, is to use the revision log dialog. This is also the method to use of you want [...]

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Sql Documentation

The topic of a recent discussion, Doc-To-Help appears to be a documentation authoring tool. It does NOT appear to be a documentation generating tool. For documentation of .NET assemblies Doc-To-Help will take the output of Microsoft’s Sandcastle and add formatting, TOC’s, etc. As a quick reminder… “Sandcastle produces accurate, MSDN style, comprehensive documentation by reflecting [...]

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VPS Hosting from HostGator

HostGator has been my web host for oh… 5+ years now and I’ve received nothing but excellent and reliable service from them during that time. Apparently they will soon be offering a service I hadn’t considered, Virtual Private Servers. This looks very appealing, both for personal projects and for projects for my employer. Hopefully HostGator’s [...]

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Ext JS – Client-side JavaScript Framework

Ext JS is a RIA framework that was highly recommended by my colleagues, and I must admit I was highly impressed by the brief demo they gave. My next question of course is how well it integrates with the .NET web technologies and Visual Studio, answering that will make a big difference in how useful [...]

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User Stories

Got a chance to give User Stories a “real world” try today, I think explaining them was much easier than the more detailed Use Cases (which I have more experience with). So far they seem like a productive addition to my toolbox that strike a good balance between complexity/detail and user friendliness/accessibility. I have some [...]

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