Friday, 31 October 2003

Workflow Patterns

Workflow Patterns

"Welcome to the workflow patterns page. This site serves as a repository for workflow modeling patterns. These patterns can be used to examine the expressive power of a workflow server that you intend to work with or they can serve as a set of ideas how to implement given business requirements having some workflow server already deployed in your organization."



I'm hunting for good works on automated workflow models/patterns and found this site... Very cool.

The Open For Business Project - Philosophy

The Open For Business Project - Philosophy



"The Open For Business Project is an open source software project that provides tools and applications for business. The software is freely open and used by many people and organizations. To enable that it is licensed using the MIT Open Source License. The MIT license allows adopters of the technology to customize, use and even sell it as desired with no obligations other than a release of liability and a copyright acknowledgement for the original source.



The vision of the Open For Business Project is to produce High Quality Custom Enterprise Software which embraces and enables 'The 5 'E's':

Ease of Cost

Ease of Installation

Ease of Customization

Ease of Integration

Ease of Use



Our goal is to make it possible for developers to provide the functionality businesses need for 1/10th of the cost and still make twice as much money."



Interesting...

Thursday, 30 October 2003

Jason Nadal

Jason Nadal: "...the new Command Shell..."



MSH (Microsoft Shell) is looking pretty nice... A REAL next gen command shell

Download details: Autoplay Repair Wizard

Download details: Autoplay Repair Wizard: "The Microsoft AutoPlay Repair Wizard scans your computer devices to find defective AutoPlay settings, and attempts to fix those it finds"

Tuesday, 28 October 2003

Thursday, 23 October 2003

Logging Application Block

More cool free stuff from MS...



"Logging Application Block

Application block that builds on the Enterprise Instrumentation Framework (EIF).



Overview

The logging block provides extensions to the EIF architecture that help to address the common usage scenarios for logging. These include:

• Formatting of event information

• Configurable log levels

• Enhanced information in the published events

• Asynchronous logging

• Reliable logging

• Centralized logging

• Request tracing for Web services

• Metering for Web services

• EIF publisher for Exception Management Block"

Wednesday, 22 October 2003

Texts on SQL (help.net)

help.net



More cool SQL Server info...

Arrays and Lists in SQL Server

Nice article... Very common SQL Server issue...



"In the public forums for SQL Server, you often see people asking How do I use arrays in SQL Server? Or Why does SELECT * FROM tbl WHERE col IN (@list) not work? This text describes several methods to do this, both good and bad ones. I also present data from performance tests of the various methods.



This is a quite a long article, and if all you want to know is how to handle a comma-separated list, then just click one these three quick links depending on which version of SQL Server you are using: SQL2000, SQL7, SQL6.5. If that answer does not meet your needs, come back and read from the beginning. :-)

"



Sunday, 12 October 2003

Ariadne & Ajay Juneja

Something to watch... Could the start of something very cool? I'm looking forward to the C# implementation...



Ajay Juneja blog



"What exactly IS a Natural Language Dialogue System? (ie basically what the heck is Ariadne?) "

http://weblogs.asp.net/ajuneja/posts/31644.aspx



"Ariadne Beta October 2003: released -- NLP for the Masses!"

http://weblogs.asp.net/ajuneja/posts/31618.aspx



"Ariadne Overview:

Ariadne is a Natural Language Processing Platform. Ariadne can enable natural language interactions between users and applications through the use of natural-language speech interfaces. Work on Ariadne is also being done to incorporate gesture recognition in the future.

As a platform, Ariadne can interact with other applications (both locally and over a network) through the use of the other applications API in conjunction with a Java or C# (C# support coming in January 2004) interface. Database interfaces currently work with Java and DAO (Data Access Objects) – support for ADO and SQL Server is also scheduled for testing in January 2004."

Saturday, 11 October 2003

Joel on Software - The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

Joel on Software - The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)



Nice posting about Unicode and characters sets...

FREE - Monitoring, Investigating and Reporting Software for Microsoft SQL Server





"We have one mission at HybridX; provide FREE, monitoring, investigating and reporting software for Microsoft SQL Server. All applications provide a safe environment for Database Administrators, Developers, Business Analysts or End User who wish access to valuable metadata information and/or real-time activity from a Microsoft SQL Server. "



A couple pretty cool SQL Server utilities here...

Thursday, 9 October 2003

Wednesday, 8 October 2003

Sysinternals Freeware - Information for Windows NT and Windows 2000 - PsTools

Sysinternals Freeware - Information for Windows NT and Windows 2000 - PsTools



A great suite of FREE NT/2K tools.



PsExec is just one of these

Sysinternals Freeware - Utilties for Windows NT and Windows 2000 - PsExec

Sysinternals Freeware - Utilties for Windows NT and Windows 2000 - PsExec



Officially VERY COOL!

"Utilities like Telnet and remote control programs like Symantec's PC Anywhere let you execute programs on remote systems, but they can be a pain to set up and require that you install client software on the remote systems that you wish to access. PsExec is a light-weight telnet-replacement that lets you execute processes on other systems, complete with full interactivity for console applications, without having to manually install client software. PsExec's most powerful uses include launching interactive command-prompts on remote systems and remote-enabling tools like IpConfig that otherwise do not have the ability to show information about remote systems."

Friday, 3 October 2003

FileForum | Program Detail - DAEMON Tools 3.41

FileForum | Program Detail - DAEMON Tools



One of my favorite tools to mounting ISO images has been updated to rev 3.41.

Halloween--its origin and is it for you!

Halloween--its origin and is it for you!



My son just asked my "Why do we use pumpkins on Halloween?" So I wiped out my trust Google and found this site...

The Jake-o-lantern part is kind of funny...

Primate Programming(tm) Inc

Primate Programming(tm) Inc



Damn... Looks like I DO have to worry about being outsourced... :)

Thursday, 2 October 2003

The FREEIMAGE Project

The FREEIMAGE Project



" What is FreeImage ?



FreeImage is an Open Source library project for developers who would like to support popular graphics image formats like PNG, BMP, JPEG, TIFF and others as needed by today's multimedia applications."



Coding4Fun: Background Copying (Code4fun)

Coding4Fun: Background Copying (Code4fun)



Nice example for using BITS, Isolated Storage, Data Binding to non-databases, etc

Wednesday, 1 October 2003

The Visual Basic .NET Resource Kit CD

The Visual Basic .NET Resource Kit CD



"Learn to Build a Range of Applications

The Visual Basic .NET Resource Kit CD is an essential aid for new or experienced Visual Basic .NET programmers. Programmers who are interested in creating applications for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, the Web, and mobile devices will benefit from this comprehensive collection of technical information.



Choose Your Learning Style

Do you prefer to dive right in and play with code samples? Or, do you prefer a more guided, step-by-step approach to programming? Regardless of your style, you will find this CD a useful companion to Visual Basic .NET. Organized by your type of application development, the Visual Basic .NET Resource Kit CD contains information for building every type of application. Included on this CD are:



Four ready-to-use, customizable Web applications with source code

Hundreds of useful code samples

Dozens of self paced, step-by-step programming guides

Training videos

Free training content from Microsoft Certified Technical Education Centers

Book chapters from popular Visual Basic .NET titles

Technical white papers, and more

Build Powerful Applications Using Free, Industry-Leading Microsoft .NET Components



Every Visual Basic developer understands the power of creating applications by assembling reusable, pre-built components. In addition to the technical information mentioned above, this CD contains a powerful collection of free, fully functional Microsoft .NET controls, including:



ComponentOne Studio Enterprise

A comprehensive collection of more than 30 high-quality WinForms and ASP.NET Web controls including grid components, reporting components, charting components, data components, user-interface components, and e-commerce components.



Dundas Chart For Windows Forms, Professional Edition

Developed for rich-client .NET applications, this fully-managed charting control gives you all the features of a premium charting control. This functionality combined with incredible design-time support allows for the fast and easy creation of sensational looking charts that have the exact look and feel that you require.



Infragistics UltraWebNavigator and UltraWinTree Controls

UltraWinTree delivers an advanced .NET tree control that surpasses the look and functionality of the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET TreeView control. UltraWebNavigator is the first tool to provide a simple, easy-to-use designer to create menu and tree hierarchies, making it possible for Web masters and non-programmers to build eye-popping navigation systems and outlines visually, without writing code.



Sax Software Corp

Sax.net Communications makes it easy to add scalable serial communications to all your .NET applications. "