Tools: Notepad++

Looking for a real Notepad? There are some alternative, but my choice is Notepad++.

It's free, open source, very fast and most importantly just works.

One of the most useful features is being able to change the content type at run time.

This is particularly important when opening *.config file from .NET solution, or any other data file that you know is of a certain type but it has different extension.

Tools: WinToFlash

The DVD drive on my notebook had its day. No biggie since I don't really use it, but I now have problems for re-install.

WinToFlash looks promising, but haven't tried it yet. If it works, it'll save me £30 - £50 buying an external drive to re-install Windows.

Tools: Agent Ransack

Agent Ransack is a nifty little file search utility. It's leap and bounds better than the bog standard Windows Search (in XP at least, haven't used Windows 7 yet). It's fast and lightweight.

You can search the content of the file or use regular expression. It's great and I can't live without it (at work at least).

Tools: Snippy

A colleague just showed me a really good screen shot tools, with a human aspect on it, Snippy:

http://www.bhelpuri.net/Snippy/

Well worth the download.

But one worth of caution, Snippy hooks into your F11, so if you're wondering why that Debug doesn't go into the method you know why!

Blogger FTP Migration

Blogger is shutting down their FTP publishing. Fortunately they provided us with a rather simple migration tool and even created a dedicated blog for this.

The migration path is painless (at least for me) and it works pretty much straight away with little problem. I am a happy camper and in my opinion my blog now has a better address compared to the old scheme.

Only comment is that I think the migration timetable is rather short from the time of the migration path released to the end of FTP publishing. Having said that I think this is due to Blogger trying to close this project as soon as they can.

All in all I think the migration tool works and works very well and the move to FTP publishing to Blogger's hosted blog is better since it seems that their web server is much faster than my free GoDaddy's one :)

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Referencing assemblies in GAC

I found out that you can't actually refer to assemblies from the GAC directly. So in development, you need to add reference to the physical assemblies (wherever that assemblies are located), set "Copy Local" to false and at run time, the CLS will load the assembly reference from the GAC.

More information here:

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/PrintSearchContent.asp?LINKID=1175
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/demystifygac.aspx