The Blog

Exploration Of Thought

Thoughts on autonomy, self direction, digital business and life.

• Complexity and Staying Up To Speed

  Feeling overwhelmed by how fast software moves? Practical advice on picking a niche and using blogs, podcasts, and screencasts to keep up.

  Donn Felker – May 25, 2007

• Wireless Rest Areas

  Driving cross-country, I found highway rest areas in Louisiana and Texas with free wifi, clearly signposted. Worth a search before your next road trip.

  Donn Felker – May 19, 2007

• Simplifying Database Modeling in Visio 2002/2003 through SQL Generation

  Visio 2002/2003 can't forward-engineer databases, so I used the Orthogonal Toolbox plugin and a custom XSLT to turn ERD diagrams straight into SQL DDL.

  Donn Felker – May 11, 2007

• New Version Notepad++

  A new Notepad++ release brings multi-file recursive search/replace, an NppExec script runner, clickable links, and Aspell spell-check support.

  Donn Felker – May 9, 2007

• Temporary Projects in Visual Studio 2005

  A hidden Visual Studio 2005 option lets you create in-memory throwaway projects that never touch disk or clutter your recent projects list.

  Donn Felker – May 8, 2007

• C# Microsoft MapPoint 4.5 Geocode (Latitude and Longitude) Class

  A C# geocoding class built on the Microsoft MapPoint 4.5 SDK, for developers who want an alternative to my Google Maps geocode class.

  Donn Felker – May 7, 2007

• Good SharePoint HowTo Videos

  A short list of solid SharePoint how-to videos from Microsoft and DNR TV covering search, InfoPath forms, content types, and the Business Data Catalog.

  Donn Felker – April 26, 2007

• Unit Testing .NetTiers Processors with Dependency Injection

  How to unit test tightly-coupled .NetTiers Processors by injecting a CountryService through the constructor instead of the database.

  Donn Felker – April 17, 2007

• Tree Surgeon Development

  I've joined the Tree Surgeon open source project, now on CodePlex under Bil Simser, to help build out its dev tree and build tooling.

  Donn Felker – April 16, 2007

• The .NET Developer Search Engine

  Dan Appleman's SearchDotNet.com is a custom Google search scoped to expert .NET sites, cutting through generic noise when Google fails you.

  Donn Felker – April 13, 2007

• Codeplex is down?

  This morning, I went to log into Codeplex and I got the dreaded YSOD

  Donn Felker – April 12, 2007

• 

  Keyboard Shortcuts for TestDriven.NET

  How to bind a keyboard shortcut in Visual Studio for TestDriven.NET's Run Tests command, so you can stop right-clicking to run your tests.

  Donn Felker – April 6, 2007