Dan Swearingen's Tech Stuff Blog » Essential Tools

Windows Command Line stuff

daniel — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:45:24 +0000

Creating scripts to automate administrative or programming build tasks is GOOD. It centralizes details and reduces errors.

I find I need to re-learn DOS (and *nix) command line stuff every few years and then I completely forget how to do it and have to learn again.

Resources that I find useful:

The Windows Command Line

Microsoft Windows XP – Using batch files

Government computers and security settings

daniel — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:26:54 +0000

Recently we were asked to test our software on systems that had enhanced security settings. These are the result of (very) numerous configuration changes to the system so I looked around for some tools to help manage and apply these changes.

Bruce Schneier pointed the way on his recent post May 6, 2009
Secure Version of Windows Created for the U.S. Air Force.

The Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) is described here.

Some nifty tools are at Blogs.Technet: Federal Desktop Core Configuration and Blogs.Technet: Utilities for automating Local Group Policy management.

Website software

daniel — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:41:33 +0000

After nearly 18 years of doing web-based work as either my primary job or in support of other work I get this question a few times a year:

We need to find a good, easy to use software program for generating the [website name here]. PC based. Any suggestions?

My snappy answer is

WordPress

WordPress.org WordPress at Wikipedia

Why?

I’ve used notepad, vi, VisualStudio, Netscape Gold, DreamWeaver, … All kinds of different tools. On the server side: Netscape Server, cgi-bin with perl, IIS (since NT 3.51), all sorts of pre-IIS app servers I can’t even remember the names of, Java technologies and LAMP.

I’ve used those bastard website-in-a-box things almost every ISP offers.

Way too many times.

Looking back I have to ask myself: which techniques and technologies stood up to the test of time? Which do I look back at with no regrets?

WordPress on LAMP or IIS
IIS/ASP and IIS with ASP.NET

On the desktop editing/managing side? VisualStudio and Visual Source Safe

That’s it. I assert that you can build ANYTHING with these technologies. I routinely build sites that use BOTH 1. and 2. — like polyweb.com.

If you are a beginner: go pure WordPress. if you need more site functionality there is almost anything you could want available as a wad of PHP you can tack on.

If you need a real web application — and you think it is going to get large: ASP.NET is astoundingly powerful and lots of standard functionality is available out of the box. Especially identification/authentication and data driven UI functions.

Integrating Subversion with Visual Studio 2005/2008

daniel — Mon, 04 May 2009 20:52:16 +0000

Subversion works well and it is easily integrated into Visual Studio using AnkhSVN found at http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/

Note that as of this writing, you need to use a daily build version instead of any stable release if you are using the latest SVN client version.

Installation is easy and in use it works much as Source Safe integration did:

Yell if you want but I still like how Visual Studio integrates with Source Safe.

Actually, I should have said “miss” how Visual Studio integrates with Source Safe since I see VSS in use at fewer and fewer workplaces — except my home. People point out that’s kind of sick.

Missing Visual Studio Trick: Ctrl-J or IntelliSense is Your Friend

daniel — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:18:00 +0000

huh. Usually adding “Intelligent” or “Smart” to the name of anything in software is to doom that anything to complete failure and ridicule.

However, IntelliSense is your friend.

In Visual Studio, just type Ctrl+J anywhere and there’s your buddy. Great for crappy typists like me.

11 Visual Studio 2005 (and 2008) IDE Tips

daniel — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:04:56 +0000

I found this on Scott Guthrie’s blog (he’s the General manager at Microsoft for Visual Studio, ASP.NET, CLR, etc. (I did my “code on whiteboard” interview with him when I interviewed there…)) and he in turn found this post from Chin Do’s blog:

11 Visual Studio 2005 IDE Tips and Tricks to Make You a More Productive Developer

Some of the tips are .NET specific (snippets!) but most work in the C++ world too.

Essential Tool: CopySourceAsHTML

daniel — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:42:14 +0000

In writing any sort of code how-to you end up wanting to write code examples.

   12 
   13 // CAboutDlg dialog used for App About
   14 
   15 class CAboutDlg : public CDialog
   16 {
   17 public:
   18     CAboutDlg();
   19 
   20 // Dialog Data
   21     enum { IDD = IDD_ABOUTBOX };
   22 
   23     protected:
   24     virtual void DoDataExchange(CDataExchange* pDX);    // DDX/DDV support
   25 
   26 // Implementation
   27 protected:
   28     DECLARE_MESSAGE_MAP()
   29 };

… like this.

Enter a really cool tool: CopySourceAsHTML which was written by Colin Coller and was released by J.T. Leigh & Associates Inc.

While you can get the application at the link above, things are a bit terse at that site. An explanation of how to use CopySourceAsHTML may be found at a great page on this and other cool tools Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now from the MSDN Magazine site.

One quick hint: CopySourceAsHTML defaults to showing line numbers (if you have line number in your display). Line numbers are great in an article for indicating details to readers. Line numbers are crappy if you want to make it easy to copy/paste code so in that case, suppress the line number using the CopySourceAsHTML option before adding to your post as I did with this second snip below:

 
// CAboutDlg dialog used for App About
 
class CAboutDlg : public CDialog
{
public:
    CAboutDlg();
 
// Dialog Data
    enum { IDD = IDD_ABOUTBOX };
 
    protected:
    virtual void DoDataExchange(CDataExchange* pDX);    // DDX/DDV support
 
// Implementation
protected:
    DECLARE_MESSAGE_MAP()
};