Turn your laptop into a wireless Access Point

There are a couple of use scenarios where I find useful to providing wireless access from your laptop:

• Creating a network “island” without a router;
• Sharing internet access to other laptops where only one wired point is available;
• Providing network and internet access to your PDA where no AP is available. My favorite usage :)

Here are a couple of tools:

• Virtual Router (Codeplex)
• Connectify

Please note: at least for Virtual Router, there’s a (short) wireless network card short compatible list.

Visual Studio 2010 Launch

It seems like we’ll have to wait for the launch in Vegas. April 12.

ASP.NET MVC 2

Here a great little yesterday’s news: ASP.NET MVC 2 is RTM!

Here’s the link for the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, where we can install MVC (among others). Be sure to uninstall the previous versions.

Fences: will I finally cleanup my desktop?

Here’s a cool utility to arrange your desktop into nice little “folders”: Fences. I just love the way it hides your icons: just double click!

Outlook Social Connector

The all-new Outlook Social Connector connects you to the social and business networks you use, including Microsoft SharePoint, Windows Live, and other popular third-party sites, so you can get more information and stay in touch with the people in your network without leaving Outlook.

For now we only support LinkedIn, but Facebook, Windows Live and mySpace is comming soon. On problem, though, is the lack of 64 bit support.

 

Here’s a sample:

 

And here’s my sample on a 64 bit box (disconnected from LinkedIn):

Postponing reinstalling your Windows

As much as I like to pave my Windows machine every now and them, it’s not always possible. So every now and then, I run this cool utility from sysinternals: Autoruns:

This utility, which has the most comprehensive knowledge of auto-starting locations of any startup monitor, shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and shows you the entries in the order Windows processes them. These programs include ones in your startup folder, Run, RunOnce, and other Registry keys. You can configure Autoruns to show other locations, including Explorer shell extensions, toolbars, browser helper objects, Winlogon notifications, auto-start services, and much more. Autoruns goes way beyond the MSConfig utility bundled with Windows Me and XP.

Autoruns' Hide Signed Microsoft Entries option helps you to zoom in on third-party auto-starting images that have been added to your system and it has support for looking at the auto-starting images configured for other accounts configured on a system. Also included in the download package is a command-line equivalent that can output in CSV format, Autorunsc.

 

Sure you’ll still have to make sure to have your disk regularly defragmented. As last resource before totally paving your OS, I can always rename my user folder, log in and copy the documents I need.

Shutter count on EOS

Here’s a cool utility: EOSInfo.

I’ve only used it on EOS 50D and it works. I’ll have to install a driver on my Windows 7 x64 so I can use it against my old 10D – I’m curious to know it counts camera or shutter cycles. If I could choose, I’d definitely go for shutter – I buy shutters like most people buy printer tonners :)

Monitoring battery

I’m looking for a better tool to monitor my battery life-cycle. I’m trying out BatteryBar free edition, and it looks ok so far. Do you know a better free utility?

 

Status popup show detailed information about your battery's status

Battery is discharging with 2 hours, 46 minutes of battery life remaining. Battery is charging with 46 minutes until the battery is fully charged.

Running VMWare vSphere on Windows 7

Here’s a cool link to patch VMWare vSphere in Windows 7.

Generating FLAC

I’m in the process of getting rid of my physical CD collection into a media hard drive. As I don’t want to compromise the quality of the conversion, I’ve chosen FLAC.

I’ve looked for some advices from my friends the music specialists, and here’s their advice:

Ripping	Playing
Exact Audio Copy	Foobar2000

A not-so-usual porting: XDepend

Normally this works the other way: from Java to .NET. But this time it worked the other way around. NDepend, a cool code analysis tool has been ported to the evil brother side as XDepend.

Here’s an old review I posted about NDepend.

Hope this will the start of a bigger trend – except from IDEs, tools and libs normally goes from Java to .NET world.

URLizer

Sometimes we need to download a file, not open it with an application. A common scenario is downloading mp3 from a given URL. Here’s a simple site to URLize your link so you can “save target as”.

Convert a Word .docx file into PDF for IEEE Xplore

Though IEEE PDF eXpress accepts Word documents, I rather convert them to PDF so I can preview the final result. Most references out there on the web use Adobe print driver, but I prefer to use Word 2007 “Publish as PDF”. To embed the fonts please make sure to check the ISO 19005-1 (PDF/A) compliant option:

<update>

Please do it at your own risk, IEEE usually advises:

Print to a PDF Printer or PDF Distiller. Do not use any conversion wizards built into your word processor or "save as PDF" as they might add PDF bookmarks and Web links. Bookmarks and Web links are currently not allowed by IEEE library.

</update>

Team Foundation Server Power Tools

Team Foundation Server Power Tools is a set of enhancements, tools and command-line utilities that improve the Team Foundation Server user experience.

Team Foundation Server Tools include:

• Team Foundation Server Power Tool Commands (tfpt.exe)

• Build Notification

• Process Template Editor

• Check-In Policy Pack

• Team Foundation Server Best Practices Analyzer

• Work Item Templates

• TFS Server Manager

• TFS Users

• Alert Editor

Particularly valuable is the Team Foundation Server Best Practices Analyzer, which includes both pre and post install checks.

TFS to TFS Migration Tool

Here’s a cool tool I have to test one of this days: TFS to TFS Migration Tool.

Beware of the limitations:

• 1) This tool is limited to migrating only Version Control items, Work Items, and the links between them. Other portions of Team Projects are not migrated by this tool, including Reports, Team Build data, and Sharepoint content.
• 2) Work Item IDs and Changeset numbers will not be preserved during migration. New IDs are assigned sequentially as items are migrated, so any references to these IDs will be invalid after migration. As work items and changesets are migrated, the links between those items will be migrated correctly, despite the ID changes.
• 3) Timestamps on work item revisions and changesets will be updated to the time of migration. Any work item fields that store date time information will have their values correctly migrated, but the time of the revision will not be migrated. The most significant impact this has on a system is in reports that rely on a time dimension (i.e. Bug Trends, Code Churn). Because the migration typically occurs over a much shorter time span than the original operations, the time axis in such reports will effectively be compressed.
• 4) Some branching and merging scenarios may not be migrated correctly. While there have been efforts in the latest release to make the migration of branches and merges more robust, there are still a large number of cases which have not been tested. The release notes contain some additional information about the branch and merge cases with known issues.

<update>Here’s a known problem</update>

TestDisk: saving a lost disk

A friend of mine lost access to his laptop disk. Here’s the tool that saved his day, restoring the partitions table: TestDisk. It’s an open source simple command line utility available on a bunch of OS, and included on LiveCDs distros like GParted LiveCD, Knoppix and Ubuntu-Rescue-Remix.

<update>

TestDisk assured access to the partitions, but on this case Windows didn’t bootstrap. Here’s what really saved the day: this was a Windows Server 2008 installation, so no repair is directly available. He had to execute the repair shell from the Windows 2008 DVD:

bootrec.exe /FixMbr
bootrec.exe /FixBoot
bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd

The solution came from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392 and http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447626+1242927835089+28353475&threadId=1255163

</update>

wakoopa usage

Here’s my wakoopa.com usage:

Considering my main focus is to consolidate our offering and producing quotes, and that I shouldn’t even have Visual Studio installed, the first place is hard to explain... :S

TFS: undo checkout on a non-existent machine…

We had this problem: someone checked out exclusively a file on a development workstation that doesn’t exists anymore: how to undo checkout it?

The solution was as simple as it should be: on “Team explorer” all we had to do was:

1. Workspaces

2. Workspace

3. Working folder

4. Remove

Cloud services are here to stay

And now anti-virus are moving into to cloud! Though a little skeptical about network usage and privacy issues, it will be probably better for security sake: the security surface and updates that impacts on your desktop are isolated from the virus scanning itself. More, the always-connected model can speed up virus detection, and will definitely guarantee updated virus database. And guess what: it’s free :)

PS: pity it doesn't support x64…

What Software are people using?

Here’s a cool social network: Wakoopa, aimed at discovering and sharing what applications people are using. Not for tinfoil hats, I’m afraid :)

I’m given it a try, let’s see what it finds…