Small little tiny but mostly good things.

My Office Live account silently healed itself.

Now I can really use it instead of Google Docs. Open document, edit, save. Open from another computer and all changes are there. This is Zen-like beautiful. There are ways to go in terms of productivity yet, little things sometimes getting in the way, but overall it works as it should. Good job! (and it’s not even at version 3.0 yet).

GoDaddy updated my hosting account to .NET 3.5

Also without saying a word. Few days after sending me email that it is absolutely positively not possible to upgrade from 2.0 to 3.5 and there is nothing can be done about it, I opened dashboard and it was there. I even put a little sample Silverlight app to test it - yep, works fine. Hmmm...  thanks Daddy!

Visual Web Developer 2008 Express edition SP1

Just read this on ScottGu’s blog:

How cool is this? Sure I do have VS 2008 (thanks to MSDN subscription my company paying) but for average hobbyist developer this is big. Thumbs up! (those guys on MVC team got to be really pushy).

Getting organized with OneNote and EverNote.

My initial impression with these two apps was right; I ended up using both of them in totally different scenarios. Although they are look like competitors, in reality – not so much.

I always use OneNote at work as kind of personal Wiki. And, as Wiki, it really shines – where do you find one that will let you drag and drop video and audio files into it, save emails and calendar entries with a button click, create decent graphics, flowcharts and let you do bunch other crazy things? I’m keep liking it.

EverNote, on the other hand, is indispensable as a visual clipboard that you can throw anything into and it just sticks. I use it all the time when run into something interesting browsing web – keeps your delicious bookmarks so much cleaner.

New theme for be 1.4

Start playing with another conversion from WP to BE. This one is to demonstrate new dynamic features available for upcoming 1.4 release. Because it will let you save theme settings, it opens a world of possibilities. Work in progress so far, I’m still looking for fun and creative ways to abuse this functionality.

Strong typing for Extension Manager in be 1.4

Extension manager is been neglected for some time, but now I’m back to making enhancements there. Strong typing for parameters been a popular demand, so I went for it and added easy ones for starters: Boolean and integer. Boolean rendered on the settings page as check box and both exposed through parameter’s AddValue method. Tricky part will be to implement more complex things like drop-downs etc.

I use thumb flash drives quite a lot moving between computers. It is still much faster to load a gig or two from the flash drive than to use Skydrive or other "cloud" alternative. For the most part it is painless - stick it in and OS will find and mount it, no setup requires. But one day perfectly good USB drive stopped working all of the sudden on one specific computer. It works fine on the others and other USBs work fine on that computer too. What's going on?

I never got any errors and little icon indicated that it is plugged in and works fine. But it would never show up in the file explorer. A bit mystified, I went to disk management (right-click "my computer" -> manage) and found that it is indeed working fine. But there is a small problem: it uses same drive letter as one of the network shares mounted on this box.

Wow. That is interesting. From what I understood, when you use flash drive for the first time Windows runs a setup and assigns drive letter to it. Then it will just re-use it to speed things up. And if in the meantime you mount something else to this drive letter and then try to use that specific USB flash drive again - you pretty much screwed. Windows will never tell you about conflict, it will just give up on mounting this drive and walk away in silence.

It is easy to fix by changing drive letter for any of conflicting devices, you can do it in the device manager itself by right-clicking the drive and selecting "change drive letter". In my case, I've changed it to "K". No one needs "K", right? Should be safe now.

Running public web site from your basement is unprofessional. I know that. For a couple years I'm running my own internet facing toy server at home as a sandbox project. Let me tell you - I'm still working on that 99.99999% uptime. 5-6 times a year my house loosing power, sometimes it comes back right away but it doesn't matter - server is going down and patiently awaiting me coming back from work. This alone means realistically 40-50 hours downtime a year. Sometimes it looks like my ISP goes down, too (may be he also running from the basement?) and I have to reset router to be able to connect again. Yet dependency on external DNS (I use DYNDns). And don't forget that you'll need to maintain it, patch, upgrade software, install new stuff with many-many reboots when you counting it year long. All that put together, and you got totally unreliable site that is constantly, chronically down. More...

Developers don't like to write documentation. There is nothing one can do about it. Yet, no matter how many great features you add to the project, no one will use them if they not well documented and easily discoverable. There is no special department for document writers on the open source projects (alas), so man has to do what the man has to do...

It is work in progress, but I promise to put extra effort and catch up on all features I've been doing for BlogEngine before 1.4 will be released some time late spring. I'll maintain documents both on Wiki and this site, in the future Wiki will have documentation on current release and this site will have latest on new features that will be rolled out to the Wiki when new release will become available.

Do you use design patterns in your daily development? You probably should, and if you don't you might start with reading some books on the subject. I would suggest one from Head First series, although not everybody is a big fan of this book. But I found it fun and easy reading that can trigger your curiosity and encourage you to dig dipper. It is written for Java developers, but language samples presented in the book are minimal and, if you don't understand Java, you can refer to this project for C# translation. More...

When I first tried Paint.net a year or so back, I wasn’t that much impressed. It looked a bit heavy for small feature set and fallen lightning years behind Photoshop. I tried to use it, but soon it ended up in the dusty corner of my toolbox. Right next to the Santa costume and DOS 5.0 set. I was using Photoshop now and then for all my graphics needs and was mostly satisfied with experience, or may be just got used to it. More...

BlogEngine 1.3 has been released this weekend, so now I can take a deep breath and relax a little. Last couple of weeks I've been torn between two deadlines, one on Extension Manager rushing into 1.3 and another on my day job. One down, one to go... Last night I upgraded my blog to 1.3, so now it runs on latest and greatest code base. Not sure if I followed best practises, but it did work so for those curious these are the steps I followed: More...

Don’t be jealous – I haven’t had real vacation for more than three years now, since my kids were born. These few days in Vegas are well deserved! I’m leaving early Saturday and will be back Wednesday, hopefully in one piece and not much poorer. And I’ve done everything I’ve promised: Dark Blog is up and running and Mp3 Player got face lift and don’t choke in IE any more. What more do you want? No, seriously…

In case you didn’t notice, I “enhanced” this site with SnapShots. If it annoys you too much, you can easily turn it off by opting “disable” in the upper right corner any pop-up that jumps when you hover over some of the links (you’ll have to delete cookies to re-enable it again if you’ll get bored afterwards). I can turn it off all together if you’ll start complaining, but so far I’m more like having fun with these little guys. It took about five minutes total to register and set it up, so if you are into this kind of things go ahead and add it to your own blog, it is really that simple. More...