At work we've decided to do away with our home grown intranet and upgrade it to Sharepoint Portal Server 2003.  I like the idea plus I'm going to be on the team to get it up and running - nothing wrong with playing with some new technology.  Anyway, Andrew Connell has a list of Sharepoint Resources and a Sharepoint MVP Blog Directory.  I know I'll being reading over this in the coming weeks.

I've installed and coded for Plumtree Portal for a client but this will be my first attempt at Microsoft's product.  I'm pretty excited to see what they have in common and how they are different.

 

I found myself over at Roy Osheroves's blog looking for information his tool "The Regulator".  I saw that he has a new tool he calls "The Amazoner".  Basically a little tool that you can use to generate associate links to books on Amazon.  I don't do this really that often (or at all) but I know a lot of people do.

He wrote it in VB.NET and .NET 2.0 with two versions.  One is just the executable and the other has the source code.  He says that everything is setup using his associate ID at Amazon so be sure and change the settings to use your own.

This will be something to look at especially for side projects where licensing and footprint size can be an issue.

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A while back I read Scott Mitchell's post, Another Great Use for Gmail, about filtering all of your e-mail through your Gmail account.  Most do it for the SPAM filtering or archiving but I've got one more - disk space.  The reason I decided to give this a try was to keep all of my personal e-mail together, easier to find with search and labels, and take advantage of the storage space that Google gives you.

I blogged last year about the great guys I use for my e-mail service provider.  They are still great but there are a couple of things that I'm now looking to Google for.  First, my provider's webmail interface is either IlohaMail or SquirrelMail...ick.  Don't get me wrong, the functionality of basic e-mail is there and works good but that's about it.  Second, I have limited space to support my accounts plus a few others.  Everyone else removes their messages from the server as they are downloaded to Outlook but I leave mine on the server so I can have access to them from the web.  If I don't keep up on deleting messages I'll eventually use up all of the space in just a few days.

Now, I forward everything to my Gmail account.  When a message hits Gmail it's archived and a label is attached to it.  I enabled POP access to my GMail account so I can get my personal e-mail delivered to my Outlook inbox like normal...and still have a copy online and I don't have to remember to delete it to save space.  All is good for now and hopefully it will keep up.

Note:

In writing this post last night I went looking for trackback links etc.  In doing that I see that Scott wrote an update to his previous post, A Neat Idea, but a Poor Implementation.  He is using rules within Outlook to forward his mail while I'm actually doing it at the server level and avoiding those issues.  He mentioned doing this as well and I think this is the best approach.    I've actually disabled downloading e-mail from my primary POP server so the only mail that is downloaded to Outlook comes through GMail.

I love the first four Rocky movies.  Installment five was kind of a let down even though I did like seeing, what I thought, was the ending to the story.  I read a report today that Stallone has announced that they will be bringing back Rocky for movie number six titled “Rocky Balboa”.  Not sure what I think about it just yet.  I'll wait until it filmed and had some reviews written but my first impression is “what else is left?“

According to Stallone, filming is planned for an early 2006 start -- both in Philadelphia and Las Vegas. Yes, Rocky will go back into the ring and Stallone (who's now 59) says he is negotiating with former heavyweight champion Roy Jones Jr. to sign on as his ring opponent, Mason Dixon. The rest of the cast is expected to be filled with unknowns.

Jeff is pimps his IDE so I thought I would show mine off.  Nothing special but not ordinary either.

Here is the rationale behind my decisions:

• I changed the font to Proggy Clean.  It is cleaner but sometimes I switch back to trusty Courier New.
• The background is 234/235/220.  It's easier on the eyes than bright white and provides a good contrast to the text colors.
• Like Jeff, I highlight the strings so I can see them but I do rely on the quote matching feature of ReSharper too.
• I changed fields to Maroon from ReSharper default of purple.  I didn't like having that much purple.

That's about it I think.  The other colors there are all defaults of VS.NET 2003 or ReSharper.

I didn't get to go to PDC but I'll get to see a lot of PDC goodness.  Since we've installed and support Plumtree for one of our customers I was able to attend Plumtree's ADC.  It should be a lot of good Plumtree developer stuff especially with them releasing their G6 versions in the near future. I'll try and post about some of the cooler features of G6 that I saw last week.

In a project I'm given the full path to a file, could be nested n depths, and need to return its parent directory and the file name.  I've never really liked doing string manipulation like this as I tend to get lost in the whole addition/subtraction piece of knowing where I am in the string.  Anyway, after few minutes of tinkering I came up with this:

Joel linked to this thread on the topic of web-based aggregators and discussed one specific reason why he's not sure he's ready for the switch.  My  primary reason for using Newsgator online is that it is online...as close as the next browser.  I don't do a lot of cool stuff though but it works for me.

The reason he mentioned that he doesn't think he'll switch to online is that he likes to flag articles as he's reading them so he can come back later.  I do the same thing and I can do it with Newsgator.

When I'm reading feeds, I always keep one eye open for stories to use in the next RossCode Weekly, and I flag them for later using Outlook's flags. I've also used FeedDemon, and it has the same flagging type capabilities. From what I can see, Newsgator Online (or the others) don't offer that same ability - I'm not talking tags - I'm talking about being able to use private follow ups that I can go back and look at later.

Well, Newsgator online does provide that but in the way of folders.  There are two primary folders "My Clippings" and "My Feeds".  "My Clippings" is the one where you can save off articles to keep and read later or just to "flag" as something you want to keep track of.

When reading an article there is a little icon and you use that to save it to your clippings.  If you have multiple folders a context menu pops up with your list of folders.  Select it and now it's saved in your folder. 

There is an "Organize Folders" area that you use to add/update/delete folders and move your feeds around in them.  Anywho, that's my two cents worth on the topic.  No, I don't really have a “RCW” folder - it was for demo purposes only.  :-)

This is a good article on the concept of how and why to use automated unit testing plus it shows some of the new testing goodies in VS2005.

I'm still getting my feet wet with TDD and not even with VSTS but this is still a good article.  Thanks Scott.