Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Microsoft Popfly

Check out Microsoft Popfly. Is website development becoming more user-friendly? It even has a plugin for Mac users, although it has some issues when opened in Firefox.

It basically has two capabilities: creating mashups and creating websites. For the mashups, it seems it only links to a set predefined set of websites, which definitely limits what the tool can do. Still, it is an interesting concept! I will stick to DotNetNuke for the moment.

External tools to support VS2005

There are two tools I have been using lately along with Visual Studio 2005. One of them is .NET Reflector which you can download here.

The second tool is FileMon. Find it here. It is a great tool that can tell you the folder paths where Visual Studio is looking for a file and whether it finds it or not. Both of these applications are free.

Finally, another tool is TestDriven.NET. It can help you debug your unit tests if your are using TDD. It works great with NUnit, but there is a small fee to pay.

Monday, January 14, 2008

VS 2008 release

I can not wait to use VS 2008! I downloaded the evaluation version from Microsoft.com. I
read about the new features, I am really interested in the capability of using VS 2008 with
any version of the .NET framework. This will allow companies to support existing projects
before porting them to .NET 3.5

I was planning to get a book to learn LINQ and .NET 3.5, but Microsoft Learning offers 3
free books on the website csna01.libredigital.com/. This will get me started for the next
couple of weeks.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Featuring a new website

Lately I heard about DotNetNuke. I decided to use it for my website and these are the results.

Right now I am just using the installers, but I am planning to download the source code and
customize it as necessary. Too bad the code is in VB.NET!Still, it is going to be a good
opportunity to keep my VB.NET skills sharp.

Sunday, January 6, 2008

Image Server 9.2 - Imagery resolution

I then changed the parameter to PNG24 and then compared the size of the file that is
created and then sent to the client. To my surprise, the results really affect the
performance of the application. For example, with PNG8 the file size is ~150KB, but
with PNG24 it can be up to ~750KB.

When you include the fact that it might be loading more than one image by more than one
user, performance can be even more critical! There are other factors, like the
available bandwidth.

One last test was about using JPEG as the image format. JPEG is really similar to JPG8
when talking about the image size. Therefore, you should be careful when choosing the
Image Format.