This is pretty old news, but it seemed pretty useful to me today. Related to a couple of AJAX problems where I couldn't inspect the current CSS and HTML object stacks, I needed a tool that allow me to inspect them on the fly.

So, I just remembered about the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar Beta 2, installed it and started to see how my page change with every callback.

A couple of days ago I've found this cool add-in for Visual Studio that adds some new functionality to your IDE. The new commands are:

1. A multi project reference manager
2. Collapse/expand all projects
3. Contextual command-prompt-here in your solution
4. Open project folder
5. Different options to change font sizes

All of them seemed really useful to me. So I downloaded and installed it.

Go and check it by yourselft. It's called: CoolCommands for Visual Studio by Gaston Milano

Nothing new, just a quick reference link to HTML and DHTML Reference at MSDN ... I find it quite useful reference when working with client scripting, ajax, atlas, css and so on.

I've recently discovered this Web Development Helper tool... It's similar to the one available for Firefox, but this time it's for Internet Explorer. It allows ASP.NET page and control developers to inspect cache, viewstate, interact with the server side code, view traces, intercept and log HTTP traffic and much more.

I think it's really useful for all of us working actively in the web environment. Already installed on my dev machine.

I just noticed, while writing my last post, that my Google Toolbar has new features I've never seen before that seem fairly interesting to me. As you know, I'm not a native english-speaker-writer, so I need the assistance of spell checkers to help me spell correctly some words I always do wrong.

For this purpose I used to have an IE add-in called ieSpell, included as a link within the FreeTextBox component in my .Text blogging system. But today, I discovered the spell checkers in Google's toolbar, and it solves my problem perfectly. It's integrated in the toolbar I already have, it's updated automatically, it's multilanguage, it checks every form submitted and it's free.

Another interesting new feature I've seen today is the Autolink one... if the sees any text similar to an address or book ISBN it would link directly to Google Maps or Amazon, so you can directly jump to the info you would likely be trying to search. This features is called AutoLink and it supports multiple providers for each type of detectable link.

Just in case you've just woke up from a long long long dream and never heard of the Google Toolbar, you can download and read about it here.

As a development consultant I have to switch projects and technologies as fast as customer requirements changes. I have Biztalk, Commerce, WSE, Sharepoint, SQL Server and a full legion of smaller tools installed in my laptop; under this circumstances, my laptop became a box full of crap from past projects that I can't get rid of; and it's continuously slowing down my system with unused services and files. I tried to uninstall them, and they were successfully removed, but my windows is damaged by so many installations and uninstallations that it cause me continuous software compatibility issues when joining or starting new projects.

I've been looking for a way to increase my productivity without producing a negative performance impact on my laptop. Obviously I'm referring to Virtual PC images; this is not a trivial task, however, because you have to identify the right starting point; a point where you can stop and reinstall a new system inside a VPC to start working with it.

I'm am getting to this point now. As I told before, I switched to a new project so this is the perfect momentum to start working with virtual machines.

I created a Windows 2003 SP1 vpc with Visual Studio .NET 2003, Biztalk 2004 Developer, SQL Server 2000 Developer and Oracle Client Tools. Then, I just installed all the source code, build the project, installed the application and voilá... everything was working perfectly, fast, clean and isolated from other systems. This is what I call an agile point of view for developers :-)

A few tips for virtual machines:

• After installing all the needed software, perform a defragmentation of the virtual disk. Run the Disk Precompactor from Virtual PC SP1 and after shutting down the guest OS, compact your virtual disk from the virtual disk manager.
• Run your virtual machine from command line, avoiding to use resources for the Virtual PC Console. Have a look to the command line arguments in the Virtual PC Help.
• Disable Undo disks if you are using the virtual machine as a developer station.
• Try to avoid Differencing disk.. this is not a tip, it's a personal point of view. I saw this kind of disks are good for space saving, but my experience with them is that they cannot be compacted and they just grow and grow and grow... as an example, installing w2003 as a base OS and trying to install SQL Server 2000 in a differential disk creates a new disk of about 1gb, while if installed on the original vhd it increases size only about 300mb

So this is the beginning of my personal breed of vpc's ... the second one completed in my list is a Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 VPC.

Now, when I have some spare time, I'll have to re-install my laptop as a simple Windows XP for Information Workers just with office applications to have access to web, documents, email, rss, etc... and of course, Virtual PC to host my other development machines.

I have a couple of personal projects started that need to have a source control repository where they can be sure and accessed from everywhere. The original idea was Source Safe, but if any of you tried before to set it up in a remote internet server and access to it through the web then you must understand why I started to look for a better solution

I found Subversion, a brand new source code control based on the same principles as CVS and started as a replacement for the mess on the last mentioned. Subversion was open-source, free and has windows ports. It also have a large community dedicated to its improvement and tool development.

So let's start with this short tutorial on how I started to use Subversion as the code repository for my personal projects and how not to rely on Source Safe for internet based repositories.

1. First, we will need to download the required software to install Subversion, so let's start:

• Download the latest Subversion Win3 binaries with Windows Installer
• Download TortoiseSVN, a Subversion Administration interface that integrates with Windows Explorer as a Shell Extension.
• Download RapidSVN, a Subversion Client application that I prefer to use in client computers instead of TortoiseSVN, although TortoiseSVN also works perfectly.
• Download SVNService, a tool that allows installing Subversion Server daemon as a Windows Service.

2. Run the Subversion installer on the selected server to hold the code repository. This should be as smooth as double-click on the MSI file, so no more attention to pay here.

3. Create a folder in your file system where all the Subversion projects will be stored. This is not really needed, because each project can be in each own folder, but I prefer to have one single folder where the entire repository resides. I created a C:\SvnRepo folder to store my project database.

4. When installation finish, you should start the Subversion Server. This is done by starting the bin\svnserve.exe service, but it’s an ugly way to do it because it creates a command window that you have to minimize; and it would be running only when you are logged into that machine. The best way to accomplish this task is by installing it as a Windows Service with the help of SVNService: uncompress the file you downloaded into the Subversion bin folder and run SVNService -install -d -r c:\SvnRepo in the command window to install the service with the specified parameters (be sure to specify the right path to the folder where you want to create your projects)

5. Start the SVNService from your Windows Services Snap-In and set it to Automatic start-up. This way it would be started every time the server is restarted.

6. Start the installation process of TortoiseSVN on the same server where Subversion is installed. This will allow you to administer your Subversion server, but have in mind that should restart your server prior to use the TortoiseSVN shell-extension to manage Subversion.

7. Go to the Subversión Repository folder you created to store your projects (c:\SvnRepo in this guide) and create a folder to store a Test project. Name the folder TestSubversion. Using the windows explorer in the Subversion server, right-click in the folder you have just created, expand the TortoiseSVN menu and select the ‘Create Repository here’ option. This added a new code repository to Subversion.

8. Try to connect from the Subversion server to the code repository you have just created. Right-click in any place within the windows explorer interface, expand the TortoiseSVN menu and select the ‘Repo-Browser’ option. In the dialog window that appears enter the URI to access your Subversion repository, svn://localhost/TestSubversion in this case. Take in mind that svn:// is the prefix for Subversion URIs, localhost can be replaced by any URL that points to the IP of the server where Subversion is installed and finally, the TestSubversion states for the repository where you want to connect.

NOTE: If your are firewalled, or trying to access from outside the server where Subversion is installed, have in mind that your proxy should allow access to the port 3690

9. You can perform the normal source control operations: view, delete, add, modify, check-out, check-in, etc… To add full projects it’s easier to Import the full project using the Import option from the TortoiseSVN menu.

And if everything worked from within your Subversion server, test it from another computer on the same network, or over the Internet. But you sure have noticed that everything is unsecured yet… So let’s start to secure the code repository:

1. Go to the repository folder you created (in our case ) and open the conf folder. There you should have a svnserve.conf that defines permissions for accessing the Subversion server. This file is quite simple:

[general]

anon-access = none    ## Can be none, read, write

auth-access = write   ## Can be none, read, write

password-db = passwd  ## Filename of users store

realm = TestProject

Now we should create a passwd file to store the usernames and password used to control access to the repository. This file contains a [users] section header and then a single user for each line in the form of USERNAME = PASSWORD, where both username and password are case sensitive:

[users]

Miguel = myPassword

In a couple of days I’ll prepare another article on how to integrated and use Subversion as the SCC Provider with Visual Studio .NET 2003. In the meantime you can find more information on working and administering Subversion by consulting the O’Really Version Control with Subversion book, which is freely available to download.