TwitterKeys is among hot topics of social µ-blogging sites these days. In fact TwitterKeys plays the role of smilies in chat world. It’s so funny to express your emotions using a Unicode character like ♫. By reading the above link (by Boris) you will learn how to use TwitterKeys bookmarlet to copy/paste these lovely symbols in your twits.

But I think this bookmarklet is suitable for those who use their browsers to update status on µ-blogging web sites. Usually I use Google Talk or Y! Messenger bots to update my status (I use Ping.fm bot) so if I don’t have a browser window open I should open one, click on bookmark and wait for popup then use it. So I decided to embed all those symbols in a Word document and put it on my desktop to access it easier.

If you like to use this small (27 KB) word document download it here.

 

Independent developers who don’t work in a team may think that source control is not necessary for them because nobody else works on their projects but this is a big mistake!

Before I lost some source codes which was on my previous dead laptop I didn’t feel I need source control for my projects but after that incident I started to research about possible source control approaches for .NET developers and Visual Studio and in this post I want to share results with you.

There are two main source control systems: Concurrent Versions System (CVS) and Subversion (SVN). I was looking for a system that covers the following specifications:

• Free technology.
• Free Ad-on for Visual Studio.
• Free server to host source codes.

My choice was SVN which is initiated by CollabNet Inc. because it’s free and open source and also has an official ad-on for Visual Studio which is offered by CollabNet. AnkhSVN is a very good free tool to implement all source control activities right inside Visual Studio. You can download it for Visual Studio 2008 here.

By now, you have the technology and tools to control your source and take care of them but there is one another requirement. You need a server that supports SVN to host your source codes and absolutely you look for a free one Assembla is a good choice because it offers a free package as well as paid commercial packages. One you register, you can define various workspaces with unlimited team size in your free 250 MB storage space.

You’ve almost done, now you can start Visual Studio, open a solution or project, right click on it and add it to SVN. It’s so simple and easy.

In Assembla you can receive source control comparison (Diff), source history and many more features.

In brief, you have to take these 2 steps:

1. Download AnkhSVN.
2. Register at Assembla.
3. Start protecting your code inside Visual Studio!

 

One of the basic but important security issues in web development that you should pay attention to is SQL Injection. Recently HP released a free tool called Scrawlr to test such vulnerabilities.

This tool checks your pages using a simple crawler or Google query and find any SQL Injection problems. This tool can only check issues on GET parameters.

You can check up to 1500 URL in each web site using this free tool.

Download: https://download.spidynamics.com/Products/scrawlr/

 

A few days ago, I found some free time to study some articles and documentation about .netTiers. I tested it on some of my previous projects and result was great. Professional software architecture in generated code, smart code generation based on database tables and columns, ease of use, etc. are amazing features of this open source template for CodeSmith.

.netTiers official website has a documenation you can read online but how I searched, I couldn't find any offline version of this documentation to download. So I saved all documentation sections as HTML files and also created PDF version of each page. You can download this documentation in a compress file here (3.7 MB).

 

AjaxLoad is a good website for you to generate eye catching loading indicators in gif format. Just choose your desired indicator type from a list, choose background and foreground colors and click on Generate It!, then you can see a preview and download it as a .gif file easily.

 

In a recent post I pointed out to a tool introduced by Scott. This tool is Code Style Enforcer that is actually a plugin for DxCore and guides you write your codes in standard way. The coding rules in this tool is based on what IDesign has defined. Personally I'm among those programmers which coding standards is so important to them, so this tool seems to be amazing for me but in my first use I found out that many automatic namings that Visual Studio performs for you is not standard!

For example the first alert your will receive from CSE in an ASP.NET code behind source is Page_Load; CSE says that Page_Load has illegal characters and when you fix, it is converted to PageLoad (A Pascal Case name for a protected method).

I think that these naming conventions are same to what Microsoft suggests, so what is the reason of this automatic namings in VS ?

What do you think?

 

Scott Hanselman, like past years, introduced a 2007 list of developer and power users tools for Windows. If you are familiar with his cool lists you can enjoy his fresh 2007 version of it and if you didn't hear anything about his list before its time to take a look at it.

In addition to those tools I've ever been using, I downloaded these tools in my first look at list and I will read list exactly later!: Query Express, CollectionGen, Code Style Enforcer, Microsoft BPA, Resource Refactor.

Thanks Scott, you are an angel!