Web developers who are formatting/debugging web sites for Internet Explorer will be interested to know that there are developer tools built into IE8.

Internet Explorer 8 simplifies the process of debugging by including developer tools out of the box and making those tools easy to use. Instead of having to find, download, and install a separate debugging application, just press SHIFT+F12, or click the developer tools icon in the command bar.

Basically, this just incorporates the IE7 add-on from Microsoft, which had to be installed separately, into the new browser. Additionally, there is a step through debugger available for tracking down bugs in your javascripts. This is type of tool is incredibly powerful and useful.

Again, while IE may not be your browser of choice, web developers always have to make sure their pages look good in all the major browsers because you don’t know what your visitors will be using.

Today’s tip is specifically for developers, system administrators, tech support people, etc. who utilize Microsoft’s SQL Server. While SQL Server is incredibly powerful and the provided Management Studio (Express for the free edition) is an excellent tool, a function which is missing is the ability to search all tables in a database for a text value.

While this can be accomplished quite easily via a simple query if you  know the tables you want to search, but what about searching the entire database? If this sounds like something you need, check out this script. I have used it quite a bit and it works very well.

Basically, you just copy the procedure and run it in the database you want to search to create the store procedure. Then run the stored procedure like you would any other. Of course, this can take some time depending on the size of your database, but overall it accomplishes exactly what it says. The author has tested this on SQL 7 and 2000 and I have personally used this on SQL 2005, so I don’t see any reason this would not work on SQL 2008 as well.

You have probably seen several tips in the past relating to the excellent Notepad replacement Notepad++, however today I am going to write about another open source text editor which is geared towards editing source code: Scintilla.

As well as features found in standard text editing components, Scintilla includes features especially useful when editing and debugging source code. These include support for syntax styling, error indicators, code completion and call tips. The selection margin can contain markers like those used in debuggers to indicate breakpoints and the current line. Styling choices are more open than with many editors, allowing the use of proportional fonts, bold and italics, multiple foreground and background colours and multiple fonts.

Scintilla runs on Windows, Linux and Mac so everyone can run it. As with most developer tools, it all comes down to personal preference as the features are usually pretty standard across the board. The more choices you have, the better right?

One of the most beautiful things about the internet is that anyone can develop a program, post it on a web site and charge for it. And if the program is good at whatever it does, people will readily pay for it.

"But I know very little about programming", you may say.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist. All you need is a decent text editor that recognizes typical programming code (like Notepad++, which is free), and then choose whether to use an SDK or API for whatever it is you want to program.

SDK: Software Developer Kit. An example is the Microsoft Office Developer Center. Lots of stuff with plenty of how-tos. SDKs are available for almost any popular application out there. Just do a Google search for "[program name] SDK" and it probably exists.

API: Application Programming Interface. For most people this is easier than using an SDK. And the best part is that you can use your web site (via PHP, Perl, MySQL and so on) as the testing grounds.

APIs are what make new and interesting things happen with a lot of different web sites.

Two examples: YouTube API, Twitter API.

Using YouTube as an example, be examining the Getting Started page there are things just about anyone can do even with the most basic of programming knowledge. And once you get familiarized with that you can move on to bigger and better things.

Another example: World of Warcraft API.

If you play WoW, you’ll learn things about the game by studying the API that you never knew before. And you may be able to put together the "ultimate" add-on that players would be willing to pay for. You never know unless you try.

SDKs and APIs are by nature openly available because software makers want you to program stuff for their products. When you do, this increases sales/popularity of their software and can also make you some money in the process. It’s a win-win situation.

The only thing you truly have to spend is time. Programming, especially for the beginner, is a slow learning process. But once familiarized you’ll be able to do some amazing stuff.

You wanted "hands-on" learning without spending anything? Well, it doesn’t get any more hand-on than this concerning making your own programs/applications.

This tip may only apply to a few of our readers, but I thought I would pass this along because it is a great way to have either a SharePoint development platform or deploy a SharePoint environment in small/home installations.

Typically, the way you roll out a SharePoint environment is via a Windows Server, as this is included with the product. While this is the only way I would recommend deployment for any production environment, it may be cost prohibitive for some people. Instead you can install SharePoint Services on Windows Vista. The linked article explains exactly how to do it with screenshots and detailed instructions of just about every step.

Again, this is a great alternative if you are just looking to get started with SharePoint without the investment in a Windows Server machine.

If you do any development using Microsoft SQL Server, a really useful tool available is SQL Profiler. This tool allows you to see queries submitted to the database which is useful for measuring performance, fine tuning as well as tracking down and debugging errors. Unfortunately, this tool is not provided with the SQL Express series, on the full and developer versions. This is no problem when you have Profiler for Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 Express Edition.

This free utility is open source and does exactly what the enterprise tool does, but does not have all the bell and whistles. For the price though, you can’t beat it.

From the Engineering Windows 7 blog from the post Engineering the Windows 7 Boot Animation:

From a design perspective, we know that the visual presentation of a feature plays a key role in the user’s perception of performance and quality.  Our objective was to make Windows boot beautiful and was inspired by our Windows 7 personality of light and energy; and the way these forms reveal themselves in nature became our design palette.

What does this mean? It means it’s spruced up a bit.

Here’s the Vista boot screen:

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:76ad5217-d5f5-482a-85c1-2c84e14e178d&amp;showPlaylist=true" target="_new" title="Windows Vista boot animation">Video: Windows Vista boot animation</a>

And now the potential Windows 7 boot screen (no sound as of yet):

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:6b58ad0b-c45e-425e-b2f9-4bb2953f9420&amp;showPlaylist=true" target="_new" title="Windows 7 boot animation">Video: Windows 7 boot animation</a>

To note, the blog article specifically states that the Win7 boot anim is absolutely not the same ol’ 640×480 schtick that’s present in Vista. It will be 32 bpp along with better resolution and optimized performance code.

This is just a glimpse into the fact that Microsoft is taking the user experience very seriously, even when you first start your computer.

Said honestly, this does look better than Apple’s Mac OS X boot screen which is nothing but a plain Apple logo on white background. While that may not be a big deal for most people, bear in mind that Apple puts a very large effort into design and style. To have Microsoft actually have something that looks better than Apple is rare. The current revision of the Win7 boot screen as seen above makes OS X’s look old and obsolete.

Yesterday I posted a tip for people looking to get into programming, so today I am going to point .Net developers to a tool I have found incredibly useful: Exception Reporter.

ExceptionReporter is a .NET component (C#) that adds error reporting capability to .NET WinForms applications by displaying detailed information about an Exception (message, sysinfo, assemblies/versions, inner exceptions etc). It also allows the application user to e-mail, print or save exception information.

Exception Reporter is an absolute breeze to use and it works in both C# and Visual Basic .Net. There are numerous screenshots on the web page and the provided documentation explains how to integrate it into your code. From experience I can tell you, this tool is invaluable because it allows provides your users with a dummy proof way to send you the error information you need in order to troubleshoot.

All in all, this is a fantastic resource for handling exceptions in .Net. I have integrated this into several of my programs and couldn’t be happier with the results.

If you are looking to get started with programming, you will probably hear many different language suggestions as which one is the ‘best’ one to start with. While most people will probably say Java, I believe Visual Basic .Net is the better alternative. Regardless of which tool you start with, a full programming language can be intimidating because there are so many libraries and namespaces you have to be aware of. As an alternate, check out Microsoft Small Basic:

Small Basic derives its inspiration from the original BASIC programming language, and is based on the Microsoft .Net platform. It is really small with just 15 keywords and uses minimal concepts to keep the barrier to entry as low as possible.

The key here being 15 keywords. This allows you to focus on the most important aspect of programming (outside of documentation): design logic. You may think what is the point with starting here, but a simple ‘guess the number’ where you type in a number and see a response of higher or lower is key to learning the fundamentals.

While Small Basic will not be for everyone, it is based on .Net so it provides a gateway into a full programming environment where you can do just about anything.

Something every developer should have handy is a chart of the ASCII character code table. If you do not have resource for this already, check out the ASCII Table web site.

This site is very straightforward and includes both the standard ASCII set as well as the extended character codes. While the chart is ‘protected’ from being able to simply save the embedded image, a simple bookmark is really all you need.

Being somewhat of a scripting and automation “pundit”, I try to automate any and everything which I have to do on a regular basis. One limitation with this, however, is if a certain program requires keyboard and/or mouse events to continue, it really cannot be scripted using command line batch scripts. Of course, that is until I found AutoIt.

AutoIt is a free “scripting language” which lets you manipulate keyboard and mouse events. You can write up a script to open a program, run a certain operation and then close. This script can then be run from the command line (hence automated) via AutoIt’s command line utility.

Of course, using this tool requires you to learn the scripting language, but the payoff is huge as virtually anything can be scripted.

If you do development work, often times it is beneficial to compare the difference between new and old source files to see the changes made. While you could do a visual inspection of each or use the ‘FC’ command line tool, a much faster and more helpful way is with WinMerge.

WinMerge allows you compare difference between files and then easily merge them together. WinMerge offers lots of features such as regular expression searches and archive file support, but the biggest benefit is the most obvious one of being able to visually inspect differences using colorations.

WinMerge is completely free and is a great tool for developers (or anyone who deals with lots of text files) to have around.

A while ago, I wrote a tip about the Visual Studio Express editions and how I recommend them for any level developer. Well, Microsoft now has their 2008 editions of the Visual Studio Express family of products available for download.

These free products are truly world-class and I would still recommend them to any level developer. Yes, the Express editions do not come with all the features of the Standard and Professional editions, but unless you want to do Office Business Application (OBA) or Sharepoint development (among other enterprise development), you probably will not notice the difference.

I would recommend Visual Basic to those new to development as it is a powerful and easy to learn platform for development (.NET 3.5). The intellisense is much improved over the 2005 edition which makes it much easier to learn.

Yesterday Chris Flores, a director at Microsoft for the Windows Client Communications Team, wrote at length about what’s going on with Windows 7.

A few things were brought to light about how Microsoft does things concerning the Windows operating system, such as:

The six dimensions of quality

• Device compatibility
• Application compatibility
• Reliability
• Performance
• Battery life
• Security

All of the above cover just about everything concerning a desktop computer or laptop. You’ll notice that these six items are not called tiers because that would denote importance of one over the other. The terminology is applied to state “all this stuff counts.”

Questions answered

Is Windows 7 going to be a major release? Yes. Not “maybe,” not “this will be an add-on .” Flat out yes, it will be a major release.

Will Windows 7 be using a new kernel? No. It will continue to use the same kernel architecture used in Vista. Some may think this sounds bad but it’s actually good because it means anything designed for Vista will run on 7 and won’t require a workaround.

A “solid foundation”?

The only thing Chris said that really made me say “Um.. excuse me?” was:

Windows Vista established a very solid foundation.. ..on subsystems such as graphics, audio and storage.

This says to me “The guts of the OS are great, but everything else was.. unfinished.”

When Windows 7 arrives it will actually be finished this time around when it becomes generally available.

This is not to say Vista doesn’t work. It does work. But for many it just doesn’t work well.

Showing progress

According to the article, the Windows team is on schedule concerning the OS development. This is a whole lot better than before where Microsoft kept delaying Vista over and over again.

Microsoft appears to be committed to releasing major releases of the Windows operating system sooner than later to keep up with the pace of future technologies.

But we’ll see what happens when release time is near. We’ll be watching.

[Source: Windows Vista Team Blog]

Developers who use database back ends are probably used to having nice graphical environments in which to build and maintain their databases. Many of the popular choices (MySQL, SQL Server, etc.) have readily available environments, but one simple and easy database, SQLite seems to lack in this area. No longer with the SQLite Manager Firefox extension.

This awesome plugin gives you a graphical development environment to build, maintain and query SQLite databases. This tool has everything you would expect. You can read many of the features available on the project’s homepage, but if you are a developer, enough was probably said already.

Again, SQLite is a very attractive database for smaller development projects due to it’s ease of use and lightweight footprint. Now that a development environment is ready available via a simple browser plugin, there are no excuses not to use it.