Tools

Useful Windows Utilities

Devin A. Rychetnik — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 02:43:00 GMT

I know that I'm going to be looking for this article later so I might as well share it here: http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9025855&pageNumber=5.

It has some useful PDF utilities as well as others.

Goodies for Microsoft Office 2007

Devin A. Rychetnik — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 02:49:30 GMT

Here are a few goodies I came across for Office Word 2007...

Want help getting started with Word 2007? Add the "Getting Started" ribbon tab inside of Word: http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archive/2007/07/05/helpful-new-word-ribbon-tab.aspx

Having trouble with the new Word ribbon (menu) system? Use this interactive guide to help with the transition from the previous menu system to the current ribbon system: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA100744321033.aspx

What to save Office documents in the PDF format? Get the free plug-in: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en

.NET Assemblies Lessons Learned

Devin A. Rychetnik — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 22:58:46 GMT

A few things I learned today while instrumenting some binaries in preparation for performance profiling:

Resigning a .NET assembly is as simple as opening a VS command prompt and entering:

sn –R MyAssembly.dll MyApplicationKey.snk

Browsing the GAC through Windows Explorer -- open a command prompt and enter:

SUBST L: C:\winnt\assembly

Now you can browser the assembly folder using your L drive. This also makes it easier to reference a DLL in GAC inside a VS project.

(tips taken from: http://aspalliance.com/1251_Miscellaneous_Concepts_of_NET__Part_2 & http://www.thejoyofcode.com/Accessing_dlls_in_the_GAC.aspx)

Open-source Web service Testing Tools

Devin A. Rychetnik — Tue, 15 May 2007 01:03:40 GMT

This article reviews three open-source web service testing tools that might be useful if you don't already have one: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/05/11/19TCwebservicetest_1.html.

Windows SysInternals Site on TechNet & New Process Monitor Tool

Devin A. Rychetnik — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 17:35:00 GMT

The new Windows SysInternals website has been up, but I just noticed today: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/default.mspx.

The Sysinternals web site was created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to host their advanced system utilities and technical information and Microsoft acquired Sysinternals in July, 2006. Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications. If you have a question about a tool or how to use it, please visit the Sysinternals Forum for answers and help from other users and our moderators.

Also, the new Process Monitor tool has been announced: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/processesandthreads/processmonitor.mspx.

Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It combines the features of two legacy Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon, and adds an extensive list of enhancements including rich and non-destructive filtering, comprehensive event properties such session IDs and user names, reliable process information, full thread stacks with integrated symbol support for each operation, simultaneous logging to a file, and much more. Its uniquely powerful features will make Process Monitor a core utility in your system troubleshooting and malware hunting toolkit.

Process Monitor runs on Windows 2000 SP4 with Update Rollup 1, Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and Windows Vista as well as x64 versions of Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows Vista.

Microsoft Http Fiddler Debugger and Http Performance, Caching, & Compression

Devin A. Rychetnik — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 07:04:00 GMT

As well as introducing the Microsoft Fiddler Http Debugger, these two articles provide a good introduction to Http performance, caching and compression.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/IETechCol/dnwebgen/IE_IntroFiddler.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/IETechCol/dnwebgen/IE_Fiddler2.asp

Rootkit Combatants

Devin A. Rychetnik — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 04:50:00 GMT

This is a bit of an unpleasant topic for most people to even think about, but those who have had to deal with rootkits in the past certainly appreciate knowing about the tools that are available for fighting them.

I have used the SysInternals Rootkit Revealer in the past to clean up a computer and today I just scanned my system with the new Sophos Anti-Rootkit. Both are free and extremely easy to use.

Blinq Prototype - Generate ASP.NET UI for SQL Databases

Devin Rychetnik — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 13:37:00 GMT

Blinq is a tool for generating ASP.NET websites for displaying, creating, and manipulating data based on database schema. Just point Blinq at a SQL database and it will create a website with pages that display sorted and paged data, allow you to update or delete records, create new records, and follow relationships between tables in your database. You don't need to write SQL queries to use Blinq; LINQ will generate optimized queries for you that request just the data you want to show. Blinq uses the May LINQ Community Tech Preview to access data. The code Blinq creates is simple and easy to customize to fit your needs. Everything in the website Blinq creates is meant as a starting point for a website that meets your needs perfectly, so have fun customizing the pages, experimenting with the code, and making it yours!

The description was taken from and the download is available at: http://www.asp.net/sandbox/app_blinq.aspx?tabid=62

Jump on the AJAX Bandwagon

Devin Rychetnik — Sat, 13 May 2006 00:36:00 GMT

So it seems that pretty much everyone has decided to release some sort of AJAX framework.

Microsoft: http://atlas.asp.net/

Sun: https://ajax.dev.java.net/

Adobe: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/

Google: http://goog-ajaxslt.sourceforge.net/

Yahoo: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

UPDATE (20 May 2006): There's more

Oracle: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/java/ajax.html

Google (a more comparable one this time): http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/

Tibco: http://www.tibco.com/software/ria/gi_resource_center.jsp

Great List of Software Tools

Devin Rychetnik — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 02:51:00 GMT

I was planning to just post a link to http://www.sysinternals.com/ because it has an awesome set of utilities that I can't believe I didn't know about before and then I came across Scott Hanselman's crazy list, which includes that and much much more! http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2005UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolList.aspx