Humble Abode

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

The IE Developer Toolbar  allows you to explore, modify the DOM of web pages, validation of HTML, CSS, and many more.... Pretty useful tool for a web developer to add to his/her toolbox.

Check it out at Internet Developer Toolbar

Products leveraging Windows Workflow

Src: http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/archive/2006/05/12/596532.aspx

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Microsoft Speech Server 2007
• BizTalk Server
• Microsoft Identity Integration Server
• Microsoft Dynamics products

Check out the details!

Consolas

"Consolas is intended for use in programming environments and other circumstances where a monospaced font is specified. All characters have the same width, like old typewriters, making it a good choice for personal and business correspondence. Optimizing the font specifically for ClearType allowed a design with proportions closer to normal text than traditional monospaced fonts like Courier. This allows for more comfortable reading of extended text on-screen.
"

Download the Consolas font pack here

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=22e69ae4-7e40-4807-8a86-b3d36fab68d3&displaylang=en

CodePlex

Check out CodePlex Beta,

"Microsoft's community development Web site. You can use CodePlex to create new projects to share with your fellow developers around the world, join others who have already started their own projects, or use the applications on this site and provide feedback"

One of the projects, the Managed Stacked Explorer is very useful for developers who wish to monitor their .Net 2.0 processes, and also MSBee for developers who wish to use VS2005 to build applications targeting .Net1.1.

Neat job!

Keeping secrets with ASP.Net

Remembered sometime back, was having an interesting discussion on Windows Data Protection APIs (DPAPI) with some peers.

For those interested in protecting your little secrets (E.g. connection strings) for the ASP.NET applications you are building, check out

http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/default.aspx?pull=/msdnmag/issues/06/05/extremeaspnet/default.aspx

"Network cable unplugged" in other os after installing

If you installed Vista (Build 5308)  and then after running it for a while, and you decide to do a dual-boot into other OS (e.g. WinXP, Win 2003), you observe the following problems

1. Network light is not on
2. The network icon shows "Network cable unplugged"

I powered down the PC + the cable modem and waited for a few minutes before re-starting it. And presto! I am connected back to the internet via the cable modem.

Check out
  http://www.winvista-forum.com/showthread.php?t=59

for a discussion on what really happened.

Windows Live Mail Beta

If you want a refreshing change to the Hotmail look-and-feel, check out

http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d

Sign up here

http://www4.imagine-msn.com/minisites/mail/Default.aspx?locale=en-us

Office 2007 - Excel Services!

Check out the MSDN TV video below where Danny Khen and Shahar Prish  share about

Building Custom Solutions with Excel Services

"Excel Services let users calculate, display, and explore Excel workbooks on the server side. This presentation covers the reasons behind Excel Services, the benefits of using them, and a demonstration of using a Web service to incorporate Excel-based business logic into your own server solutions.  " 

Happy May Day!

Wishing all SGDOTNET folks a Happy May Day!