• Verizon FiOS DVR Manager
• Verizon FiOS on Demand
• Fidelity
• US Airways
• Amazon Cloud Drive
• Amazon Cloud Player
• Google+
• Gmail
• Google Reader
• Angry Birds Seasons
• Angry Birds Rio
• NPR
• Sportsline Fantasy Football
• Sportsline Fantasy Baseball
• Stack Overflow
• WatchESPN
• Audible – I’m hearing March 2012 rumors on this one.
• Dropbox
• Box
• Instapaper
• Tumblr
• Posterous
• 7 Wonders (1, 2 & 3)
• Worms
• A good Bocce game

What do you think? Let’s see your lists.

• Convert Google Reader Items to PDFs
• More Google Reader “Send To” Tricks

Evernote also published a “how to” of their own today, and I showed DZone readers how to push items to DZone’s queue yesterday.

Here’s how you can send stories to DotNetKicks or DotNetShoutout…

Open Google Reader and click on Settings (upper right), select the ‘Send To’ tab. Then just click the ‘Create a Custom Link’ button and enter this info:

Name: DotNetKicks
Url: http://www.dotnetkicks.com/submit/?url=${url}&title=${title}
Icon: http://www.dotnetkicks.com/favicon.ico

Name: DotNetShoutout
Url: http://dotnetshoutout.com/Submit?url=${url}&title=${title}
Icon: http://dotnetshoutout.com/Assets/Images/fav.ico

Enjoy!

The MSDN Developer Conference series has been making its way around the country over the last several weeks. The conference takes the best of PDC08 and boils it down to a one day event at a reasonable price – $99. On Friday, Washington, DC area developers got their opportunity to experience the event in Reston, VA. Since there is no Philadelphia event, I decided to drive south to Reston rather than north to New York City.

There was a Developer Dinner the evening before the conference featuring a Silverlight line-of-business presentation by Marc Schweigert and Pete Brown. Marc showed some tricks for data retrieval with the current feature set available in Silverlight, and then Pete took over and showed how future improvements in Silverlight are going to streamline the code necessary to perform data access. Pete and Marc did a great job, and the pizza wasn’t bad either. 

I was really looking forward to the conference, and I must say it did not disappoint. My biggest problem was deciding which sessions to sit in on. There were interesting topics and engaging speakers throughout the day. Ultimately, I decided on a language futures session with Kevin Hazzard, a Windows Azure session with G. Andrew Duthie, a VSTS 2010 session with Steve Andrews and an ASP.NET 4.0 session with Rachel Appel.

After lunch, I sat down and chatted with Kevin Hazzard about how he approached his talk, which was a meld of three PDC sessions on the .NET languages. I agree with his observation that when watching Anders Hejlsberg’s session on The Future of C#, you could feel his passion for the language. Kevin wanted to harness that energy in his talk, and I think he did a very good job of it. I also learned that he is working on a book about scripting languages & .NET due out later this year. Stay tuned for more details…

I was able to finally meet some other bloggers & tweeters like Jeff Fritz, Justin Etheredge and Christopher Steen. It’s nice to associate an actual face with the tiny icons in the interwebs.

I want to give special thanks to Lindsay Rutter, Dani Diaz, G. Andrew Duthie, Pete Brown, Kevin Hazzard, Bob Familiar, Rob Keiser, John McClelland (founder of Partner Huddle on Facebook), and many others for all their efforts. They all had their hands full with this event and also took some time during the day to chat with me a bit. I had a great time on Friday and picked up a few tips and tricks along the way.

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7, and it appears to be a successful upgrade. Please contact me if you see any issues with the site.

Thanks!

Alvin

This post is in response to Jeff Blankenburg’s post about the contents of his Quick Launch bar.

Nothing. Mine is turned off. Here’s what my start menu looks like though. I have turned off the display of my recently opened programs, and I dragged these shortcuts out there. (This is my work notebook.)

Internet Explorer 8 – I use it mainly to see what’s new in IE8 and when Firefox doesn’t render something correctly (hardly ever).

Firefox 3 – My primary web browser. The plug-in support is the difference-maker for me.

Outlook 2007 – Used for my work email. I also use the Outlook Connector to access one of my Hotmail accounts.

Windows Live Mail – I use this to access my other Hotmail account. I could put them both in Outlook, but I like to keep my hands in Live Mail too.

visionapp Remote Desktop 2008 – A fantastic remote desktop management tool with a very low price tag.

Visual Studio 2005 – Still some existing development work in VS2005.

Visual Studio 2008 – For all new development. Also, for playing around with new stuff out on CodePlex.

SQL Server Management Studio - ‘nuff said.

Visual SourceSafe – All of our old releases are still in VSS.    -cringe-

Command Prompt – Launches as Administrator.

FileZilla – For all my FTP client needs, mostly for uploading files to my blog.

Windows Live Writer Beta – The best blogging client for Windows.

Word 2007 – Because it’s MS Word.

Paint.NET – My favorite image editing tool… and it’s free!

Zune – My current media player, but MediaMonkey is still the default on my home PC and my favorite.

Services – Because sometime you just have to stop some services.

Event Viewer – A developer’s friend.

Programs and Features – This is here because I’m always installing and uninstalling stuff from CodePlex and MS Downloads.

Windows Update – I want to be the first one to get my Windows Defender definition updates!

So, that’s my list. What’s in your Quick Launch bar and/or Start Menu and/or Launcher of choice?

It certainly sounds to me like David Treadwell is equating Live Mesh to Windows in the cloud. Listen carefully and let me know what you think.

Countdown to PDC2008: What the heck are Microsoft’s Live Platform Services? Treadwell Tells All!

PDC 2008 Keynote in 3 weeks. We’ll know soon enough.

EDIT (2008-09-02 08:35) - I uninstalled and re-installed via an elevated command prompt. Still the same results. Fail Folder.

This is all I see for any web page I try to open in Google Chrome. It appeared to install without a hitch.

“Aw, Snap! Something went wrong while displaying this webpage. To continue, press Reload or go to another page.”

I dub thee “Google Fail Folder”:

Anyone else see this problem? I’m running Vista 32-bit. I’ve already tried running the app as admin with no luck.

With a nod to John Lam and Shawn Wildermuth for the inspiration, here is a rundown of the things I use on a daily basis to develop software. This includes hardware, software and online resources.

Hardware

Personal Desktop

• Dell Dimension e521
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
• 4GB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM
• Radeon HD 4850 512MB GDDR3 Video Card
• System HDD – 300GB Seagate Barracuda SATAII Drive
• Data/Media HDD – SATAII RAID1 Mirrored Set of 750GB WD Drives
• Creative Fatal1ty 1010 Mouse
• 20” Widescreen Dell LCD

Work Laptop

• IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T60 15”
• Intel Core Duo T2500 / 2GHz CPU
• 2GB RAM
• ATI Mobility Radeon X1400
• 100GB 7200rpm HDD
• Logitech Cordless TrackMan Optical
• 2nd Monitor: ViewSonic 19” Widescreen LCD

Operating System and Productivity Tools

I run Windows Vista Business (32-bit) on my machines. I don’t currently run Vista Sidebar or any launcher/toolbar applications. I have been getting along well by simply organizing the folders in my Start Menu and putting the items I use frequently in my Favorite Programs section.

Firefox 3 is my default browser, but I’m thinking of giving IE8 Beta 2 a shot at daily use. I have it installed, and it looks quite promising. My must-have Firefox extensions include Adblock Plus, Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures, Download Helper, FFClickOnce, Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer and Greasemonkey.

At the office, I use Outlook 2007 for email, contacts, calendar and tasks. I am beginning to use OneNote 2007 for meeting notes and other task organization & mind mapping activities. Outside of my day job, my email and contacts are in Gmail. I use both Presdo and Upcoming for calendar / scheduling.

I use Windows Live Writer to post to my WordPress blog. It’s simply the best blogging tool for Windows, with tons of great plug-ins available.

MediaMonkey is my media management tool of choice. It’s great for maintaining large MP3 libraries and podcast subscriptions.

I am giving Sysinternals Desktops 1.0 a try to manage multiple desktops on my laptop. I tried another tool a few months ago, but docking/undocking with the second monitor was freaking it out. So far so good with Desktops 1.0.

Developer Tools

I use both Visual Studio 2005 Team Developer SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 Team Developer SP1 using a custom vssettings file I created on Ryan Lanciaux’ Visual Studio Theme Generator online tool. My must-have Visual Studio plug-ins are ReSharper 4.0, GhostDoc and StyleCop. My company uses TFS for feature/bug tracking and source control, MSUnit for unit testing, and CruiseControl.NET for our continuous and daily builds.

My text editor of choice is Notepad++, and I use Paint.NET for all my image editing needs. BeyondCompare is fantastic for comparing files & folders. My group uses it for code reviews as well.

Here is a quick rundown of some other handy tools to keep around, most of which I use quite frequently:

• FileZilla
• visionapp Remote Desktop
• PureText 2.0
• Reflector
• Depender
• Resourcer
• LINQPad
• Sysinternals Process Monitor

The Cloud

• Twitter for random thoughts and blog notifications
• Google Reader for RSS feed reading
• Flickr for posting personal photos
• LinkedIn and Facebook for connecting/re-connecting
• Live Mesh for file sync between machines

How About You?

That’s enough about me. Let’s hear what you use on a daily basis to make yourself a more productive developer.

• Some Finalizer Pitfalls and Not All Bytes Are Exactly 8 Bits (Oren Eini)
• Finalizer vs. Application: A Race Condition From Hell and Guaranteed, Finalization Order Is Not (Sasha Goldshtein)
• CBR/CBZ Comics in C# (thund3rstruck)
• ReSharper 4.0 Lambda Refactoring (David Starr)
• Countdown to F# CTP (Chris Smith)
• There’s Usually an Easier Way (Mike Hadlow)
• Extended DSL Model Explorer – Release v1.0 (MSDN Code Gallery)

Design / Methodology / Testing

• Migratory Compromises (Dave Laribee)
• The Poetry of Testing and Prevention v. Cure (Part 3) (James Whittaker)
• Three Qualities That Every Piece of Code Should Have (Jan Van Ryswyck)
• Going Full Circle with TDD (Kyle Baley)
• .NET Rocks! – Christian Weyer on the Internet Service Bus (MS Downloads)
• Five Questions with Kyle Larsen (Michael Hunter)
• Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History (David Starr)
• SOA Patterns Chapter 2 for Free Download (Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz)

Silverlight / WPF

• WPF Futures Is Out! (Vladimir Milev)
• Using CSLA Light, Part 1 and Part 2 (Rocky Lhotka)
• Expression Blend Training Resources (Frank La Vigne)
• WPF Photo Print (.NET 3.5 SP1) (Chris Cavanagh)
• Behold! Silverlight Streaming! (John Holliday)

Web Development

• Virtual Earth ASP.NET Control Released (John O’Brien)
• How to Encrypt Query String Parameters in ASP.NET (Keyvan Nayyeri) – Link of the Day
• ASP.NET MVC Tip #26 – Create a Lightweight Control View Engine (Stephen Walther)

Database

• Quick Tip: Generate Change Script for SQL Modifications (Ryan Lanciaux)
• SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP Now Available (Marcelo Lopez Ruiz)
• SQL Server Data Services (Aghy)
• SQL Server – Simple Example of Recursive CTE – Part 2 – MAXRECURSION – Prevent CTE Infinite Loop (Pinal Dave)
• SSDS Demo Code Now on CodePlex (Jamie Thomson)

SharePoint

• SharePoint Magazine Articles for July (Arno Nel)
• Question to SharePoint Developers (Gunnar Peipman)

PowerShell

• DevHawk’s Slightly Useful PowerShell Configuration and Some PowerShell Scripts (Harry Pierson)

Events / Community

• Events This Week – July 28th, 2008 (G. Andrew Duthie)

Miscellaneous

• Announcing the Summer of Arcade and Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2 Releases This Week (Larry Hryb)
• .NET Rocks! – Scott Guthrie on MIX and Matthew Manela on the MSDN Code Gallery (MS Downloads)
• Cuil Shows Us How Not to Launch a Search Engine (Rafe Needleman)
• Nerd Test Results (Frank La Vigne) – My results are on my About Me page.
• Academics to Get a Glimpse of Microsoft’s Sphere (Ina Fried)
• Windows Live Wave 3: New Photo Feed Service – Windows Live FrameIt (Chris)
• IE8 and Reliability (Andy Zeigler)
• Tigerpress – A Free WordPress Theme (Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz)
• Adobe Releases Photoshop Lightroom 2 (PhotoshopNews.com)
• The Mojave Experiment (Sunshine)
• Must-Have Software and Tools – July 2008 Edition (Tim Boland)

Link-O-Rama

• Weekly Links #11 (Grant Palin)
• Clearing a Blog Backlog (G. Andrew Duthie)
• Interesting Finds: 2008.07.29 (gOODiDEA)
• Silverlight News for July 29, 2008 (Denislav Savkov)
• Everyman Links for July 28, 2008 (Dave Burke)
• Silverlight Cream for July 28, 2008 — #337 (Dave Campbell)
• The Morning Brew #146 (Chris Alcock)
• Double Shot #258 (Mike Gunderloy)

Book of the Day

Lessons Learned in Software Testing: Cem Kaner, James Bach, Bret Pettichord: Books

• Data Structures and Algorithms Book (Granville Barnett)
• CSLA .NET 3.5.1 RC0 Available (Rocky Lhotka)
• Relational-Object-XML-Object with LINQ to SQL & LINQ to XML (Dinesh Kulkarni)
• Learning Ruby via IronRuby and C# Part 5 (Justin Etheredge)
• More Fun with ‘yield return’ (Mike Hadlow)

Design / Methodology

• SCRUM — As Explained by Ken Schwaber (Manish Agrawal)
• The Data Disconnect (Justin Etheredge)

Web Development

• ASP.NET MVC: Avoiding Tag Soup (Rob Conery) – Link of the Day
• ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, More Databinding Help with the DataView (Phani Raj)

Database

• Different Foreign Keys for Different Tables (Kenneth Downs)
• Simple Example of Recursive CTE (Pinal Dave)

Miscellaneous

• A New Search Engine Appears: Will You Use It? (Robert Scoble) – No.
• Understanding the Hardware (Jeff Atwood)

Link-O-Rama

• New and Notable 259 (Sam Gentile)
• Interesting Finds: July 27, 2008 (Jason Haley)
• Silverlight Cream for July 27, 2008 — #336 (Dave Campbell)
• Silverlight News for July 28, 2008 (Ilia Iordanov)
• Weekly Link Post 52 (Rhonda Tipton)
• Links (7/27/2008) (Steve Pietrek)
• The Morning Brew #145 (Chris Alcock)
• Link Listing – July 27, 2008 (Christopher Steen)

Book of the Day

Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers) (Pragmatic Programmers): Michael Nygard: Books