Need an XPath test application to quickly manipulate your query and see the results? Easy enough to write one of these yourself, but why spend any time on it when someone already has done it has it out there for free? I'm certain there are better ones out there, but here is a link to one on CodePlex that has worked for me in the past: XPath Tester

Microsoft Image Composite Editor is a free tool that is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. You shoot a set of overlapping photographs of a scene from a single location, and Image Composite Editor creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all your images at full resolution. Then save your stitched panorama in a wide variety of formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to multi-resolution tiled formats.

 I'd like to give this a try at some point. Noting it here for later reference.

Once I finally get around to looking at photo editing and organizing, something that is increasing in priority as I take more and more pictures with my digital SLR, I need to take a look at what Microsoft has to offer in this department, in particular, their Pro Photo Tools application. This posting is to serve as a reminder for me to check this tool out.

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2

I recently came across a handy tool that I thought I would share. It is called SpaceMonger. It gives a very nice graphical display of exactly where all of your data is being stored on your hard drive. Most of the time it is easy enough to know where to go to free up space, however, recently I had a drive that I had trimmed most of the fat off of and I still needed to clear up more space. This tool helped me to find some "hidden" cache directories that windows had storing 6GB+ of data that was not needed. Anyway, worth a shot if you are having trouble figuring out where to find the large chunks of useless space being used on your hard drive.

Republished from wiki.asp.net:

ASP.NET 2.0 introduced the ability to take an application offline simply by adding a file named App_Offline.htm to the application root folder.  ASP.NET checks for the presence of this file and, if it exists, stops the app-domain so the application cannot run.  In addition, ASP.NET returns the contents of App_Offline.htm to the requesting browser instead of issuing an IIS error message.  This provides a very neat and user-friendly method of taking an application offline for maintenance or updates.  To return the application to operating status, simply delete the file from the root of the application.

There are two issues to be aware of in using App_Offline.htm.  The first is that it is located in the root of the application, not the root of the web site.  So if your site is at www.sample.com and your application is at www.sample.com/application, you will need to place this file in the /application folder.  Placing: the App_Offline.htm at www.sample.com/App_Offline.htm will result in the application still functioning.

The second issue is that Internet Explorer issues friendly errors so as not to alarm the end user, and if the content returned from a request is less than 512 bytes, Internet Explorer will show its own error message instead of the contents of App_Offline.htm.  You could just stuff App_Offline.htm with hidden content in a comment block, but a better choice would be to provide a descriptive page, along with helpful information such as alternate sources for the user, an estimate of when the application will be available or even contact information for users who continue to receive the message.

Visual Studio (all versions) uses the App_Offline.htm file while publishing the application to a web server.  This means that if you have a problem publishing the application and your application stops functioning, there may be an orphaned App_Offline.htm file in your application folder.

I am came across this on Channel 10 and I am reposting it here so that I can take a look at this software when I have time. Sounds quite interesting.

AutoCollage is a new photo mashup tool from Microsoft Research Cambridge which allows you to automatically create collages from a collection of your photos. The software cuts out interesting parts of the photos in your collection and pieces them together following natural features as boundaries between images. The photos are then blended together using sophisticated computer vision technology as well as other software which does face detection, object recognition, image blending, and other graphic techniques. The end result is a collage created from your very own photos. 

Although the software is doing pretty complex stuff on the back end, the front end is surprisingly easy to use. You just point it to a folder containing your photos and click a button - that's it! AutoCollage will then goes to work. When the collage is complete - a process that only takes a few seconds - your resulting image can be printed, emailed, or set as your desktop wallpaper. 

For great results, it's suggested that you use 7-30 photos for the best performance, but the software defaults to 12. AutoCollage works on both Vista and XP SP2+ and is available as a free download from here.

Sysinternals:

The Sysinternals web site was created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to host their advanced system utilities and technical information. Microsoft acquired Sysinternals in July, 2006. Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications.

Dell just amazes me with the ways that it finds to customize the internals of their PCs such that one cannot buy hardware from the open market. I've had this issue with power supplies for Dell before where the Dell case makes it very difficult to find a power supply that will fit in it. The latest on this front is the CPU fan. The 3-pin connecter that is used to supply power to it from the motherboard has a custom casing to it that prevents the use of a normal 3-pin connecter. My solution? Get out the wire strippers, take the connecter off of the defunct cpu fan and splice it on to the new fan. Appears to have worked just fine.

From wikipedia: 

In discussion of the type system of a programming language, an operator from types to types is covariant if it preserves the ordering, ≤, of types, which orders types from more specific ones to more generic ones; it is contravariant if it reverses this ordering. If neither of these apply, the operator is invariant. These terms come from category theory.

In software-engineering terms, this distinction is important in considering argument and return types of methods in class hierarchies. In object-oriented languages such as C++, if class B is a subtype of class A, then all member functions of B must return the same or narrower set of types as A; the return type is said to be covariant. On the other hand, the member functions of B must take the same or broader set of arguments compared with the member functions of A; the argument type is said to be contravariant. The problem for instances of B is how to be perfectly substitutable for instances of A. The only way to guarantee type safety and substitutability is to be equally or more liberal than A on inputs, and to be equally or more strict than A on outputs. Note that not all programmming languages guarantee both properties in every context, and that some are unnecessarily strict; they are said not to support covariance or contravariance in a given context; the behaviour of some programming languages is discussed below.

I recently ran across an issue that took me a while to finally work through. I have a web page that generates a PDF document and streams it down to the browser for viewing. Pretty simple, common functionality. I've done it before without issue. I threw the page together tested it locally in VS and it worked fine. I then copied the page into an existing website (Team System Web Access) and tested from there. What was returned was the pdf document appended with a number of extra bytes that was actually a copy of another area within the document. After a great deal of searching, coding the solution in many different ways, changing IIS7 settings, I finally came to the resolution. In the web.config file for TSWA, it had a compression module that was being used. After I removed that module, the file then came down correctly.

I guess the larger question here is how to get it to work with that compression module still in play. I doubt I will even try that as the module is specific to TFWA and there is not much information available on how it is performing its compression. For reference the line I removed was: <add name="CompressionModule" type="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WebAccess.CompressionModule" />