Posted on December 18th, 2007%
Granted, I’m no graphics designer, so my graphic editing needs are pretty mundane. Still, I need to crop, resize, recolor, reformat, enhance, distort, and do all those other fun things to images from time to time. I also need to mock up web pages and graphics. I could buy Photoshop to do this, but I don’t have to, because I have Paint.NET — and it’s free!
Paint.NET is a free, open source image editing application for Windows. It has a fantastic feature set and is rock solid — I have never had it crash, become unresponsive, or otherwise trash anything on my system, and that’s after using it for months (and using it on my 4 1/2-year-old underpowered home PC to do some image editing for Christmas cards).
If Paint.NET can’t do what you want out-of-the-box, then you can extend it. It offers a plug-in architecture, and there’s a nice collection of community-written plugins available to download.
Hats off to Rick . . .
→ Read More: Who needs Photoshop? I have Paint.NET!
Posted on October 9th, 2007%
William of Bug this! Technie Journal writes about how he likes Vista’s start menu search feature, which lets you quickly find programs in the start menu (Tools that save you headache on trying to find your program in 100+ items start menu). I also liked the feature, and I agree with him in that the feature is not good enough to warrant a Vista upgrade. However, while he found a solution in Colibri, I prefer Launchy.
What does Launchy let you do? To understand, let’s look at some ways to open Remote Desktop Connection:
Click Start, then All Programs, then Accessories, then Remote Desktop Connection.
Press Windows-R to open a command prompt, then type mstsc, then press enter.
Press ALT-Enter, type rem, then press enter.
#3 is Launchy in action. You can mistype commands, and it’ll still find reasonable matches — type reno and you’ll still likely find Remote Desktop Connection. Multiple matches? Choose from a drop-down list that puts the most . . .
→ Read More: The ultimate launcher: Launchy
Posted on September 7th, 2007%
I’ve been a fan (and user) of Paul Wilson‘s O/R mapper for some time now, having contributed to code generation templates, a service library, and a private Subversion repository for registered owners. I’m happy to say that, as of today, Paul has decided to release his O/R mapper as open source, and I’ve been given the honor of being its caretaker in the process.
The open source release of WilsonORMapper will be hosted on Google Code at http://code.google.com/p/wilsonormapper/. I expect to check-in the first official open source release over the next few days, once I clean up a few things and make the necessary license changes to the source. The code will be released under the New BSD License, which is one of the most permissive open source licenses out there.
Thanks to Paul for all his work over the years and for releasing this wonderful product to the community, and for giving me the go-ahead . . .
→ Read More: Wilson’s O/R Mapper going open source
Posted on September 5th, 2007%
I received the following email today:
We’d like to inform you that your project submission has been approved and we’ve added WilsonORWrapper to our index…
What does this mean? You can search the WilsonORWrapper repository from Koders.com. Maybe someone will find it useful…
. . .
→ Read More: WilsonORWrapper now part of Koders.com
Posted on August 3rd, 2007%
I am working on a project where I have to import data from thousands of text files. These text files vary in formats: they use different delimiters; they use quoted identifiers never, sometimes, or always; they sometimes have missing end-of-row columns. Importing these took a combination of custom scripts (to clean up and reformat) and XML format files for SQL’s BCP (bulk copy) command… until I found FileHelpers.
FileHelpers by Marcos Meli is a .Net library which provides services to import and export text in delimited and fixed-length file formats. It takes a unique approach to the file import problem:
You write a class, giving it properties to store the data in the text file.
You apply attributes to the class and properties, describing the format of the file and applying import rules.
You import the file using a single command, which creates an array of objects populated with the data from the text file.
With support for custom converters, null types, optional fields, before/after import events, extensive . . .
→ Read More: FileHelpers: the .Net way to import text files
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