Sometimes the simplest tools are the best kind. Web developers/designers absolutely require a utility to resize a browser window so they can see what their projects look like under certain resolutions. The best utility for this, which unfortunately does not work in any version after Windows XP, is Sizer. But what if you’re running Windows 7? Or a Mac? Or...

There is no doubt that PHP is among the top web development languages used. I have used it for smaller projects and always used a plain text editor (Notepad++) for development, but if you are serious about PHP coding you need a full blown IDE. If you don’t have one already, check out this article which compares 8 PHP IDE’s. Both commercial and free...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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;...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 qualityDevice compatibility Application...

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...

A lot of people are interested in open source software but don’t exactly know where to find it. A web site that has a very large filebase with hundreds of active projects is SourceForge. It’s been around a long time and is one of the best open source software sites in existence. In the video below I show some simple tips on how to find the software...

This tip is for students who might be interested in download a free full copy of any of the following pieces of Microsoft software:Visual Studio 2008 Professional Windows Server 2003 Expression Studio XNA Game Studio 2.0Simply go to this web site for the details and to get started. Basically, the only requirement is that you have a Windows Live Account...

Google is at it again. This time, they have released what is called Google App Engine. In short, this is a web application platform to allow developers and businesses to host web apps in the cloud (meaning online). Google launched the product in it’s own new blog yesterday. Google’s blog post describes the service quite well: Google App Engine gives...