WalkMe is an online tool that allows you to create step-by-step guides that show your customer, or really any website visitor, how to do what you want them to do. It inserts little instruction bubbles that guide your user to the next task. This is a very nice tool for building walkthrough and tutorials for a website.

From their site:

WalkMe enables website owners and app developers to easily create multiple interactive on-screen Walk-Thrus that help users to quickly and easily complete even the most complex tasks.

Users receive clear and error-proof on-screen instructions, displayed as sequential balloon hints within the website or app, while they perform the actual process from start to finish.

Have a look on their site.

other posts

Free SQL Server Tools

Tools for Web developers

Tool of the day: SharpKeys

Tool of the day: CopySourceAsHtml

How To: Create an Outlook 2003 addin With Visual Studio 2005

How can you can make your site run faster? Google has launched a firefox extension called Page Speed which webmasters can use to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

Page Speed is available as an open-source Firefox Add-on. However it requires another addon to work called Firebug, which integrates with Firefox and lets you edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Page Speed will perform several tests on your web server configuration and front-end code based on a set of best practices for improved web page performance, and will then provide helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance. It will not only make your site faster, but also reduce your bandwidth and hosting costs.

Here is how a sample site speed test error report looks like

While you give your site a try with Google Page Speed, you can also check out Yahoo! Yslow, another Firefox extension that works with Firebug to identify website speed performance issues.

Other Posts:

Tools for Web developers

8 easy tips to drive traffic from search engines to your site

What are your customers saying about you online?

Open DBDiff is an open source database comparison tool for SQL Server 2005 that generates synchronization SQL. It has options to customize the comparison and SQL generations. The database differences are identified at a high level. The synchronization SQL it generates can be copied to a query tool to be executed after you review it.

Open DBDiff can synchronize:

• Tables (including Table Options like vardecimal, text in row, etc.)
• Columns (including Computed Columns, XML options, Identities, etc.)
• Constraints
• Indexes
• XML Indexes
• XML Schemas
• User Data Types (UDT)
• CLR-User Data Types (CLR-UDT)
• Assemblies
• Triggers (including DDL Triggers)
• Synonyms
• Schemas
• File groups
• Views (Including SCHEMA BINDING option)
• Functions (Including SCHEMA BINDING option)
• Store Procedures
• Users
• Roles

When you are using such tools, always remember to double check the generated SQL script for anything suspicious that may harm your environment.

Other posts:

Free software tools for students

My 6 favourites file hosting services

Tools for web developers

Tool of the day: Copy source as HTML

Today’s portable app is not a simple application but a full featured database engine: SQLite. SQLite is a software library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine.

From SQLite Website:

SQLite does not need to be "installed" before it is used. There is no "setup" procedure. There is no server process that needs to be started, stopped, or configured. There is no need for an administrator to create a new database instance or assign access permissions to users. SQLite uses no configuration files. Nothing needs to be done to tell the system that SQLite is running. No actions are required to recover after a system crash or power failure. There is nothing to troubleshoot.

SQLite just works.

For those who didn’t heard the SQLite name before and have some doubts on the stability and performance of this engine, don’t fear.  This is probably the most widely deployed database engine as of today. Here are some stats on where SQLite is currently used:

• 125 million copies of Mozilla Firefox [1]. Firefox 3 uses Sqlite for bookmarks and history.
• 20 million Mac computers, each of which contains multiple copies of SQLite
• 20 million websites run PHP which has SQLite built in. [2] We have no way of estimating what fraction of those sites actively use SQLite, but we think it is a significant fraction.
• 300 million downloads of the Skype client software and 100 million registered users [3]. All recent versions of the Skype client use SQLite internally.
• 20 million Symbian smartphones shipped in Q3 2007 [4] Newer versions of the SymbianOS have SQLite built in. It is unclear exactly how many Symbian phones actually contain SQLite, so we will use a single quarter's sales as a lower bound.
• 10 million AOL subscribers use SQLite in the AOL email client that comes bundled with their subscription.
• 10 million Solaris 10 installations, all of which require SQLite in order to boot.
• Millions and millions of copies of McAfee anti-virus software all use SQLite internally.
• Millions of iPhones use SQLite
• Millions and millions of other cellphones from manufactures other than Symbian and Apple use SQLite. This has not been publicly acknowledged by the manufactures but it is known to the SQLite developers.
• There are perhaps millions of additional deployments of SQLite that the SQLite developers do not know about.

Other Portable software posts:

Portable software – Part 1 (Developer tools)

Portable software – Part 2 (Graphic tools)

Other posts:

Chuck Norris Programming facts

What is a portable program ? : A portable program is a piece of software that you can carry around with you on a portable device and use on any other computer. It can be your email program, your browser, system recovery tools or even an operating system. The coolest part about it, is that all of your data and settings are always stored on a thumbdrive so when you unplug the device, none of your personal data is left behind.

This is the first of x posts on different portable software/tools.

• Nvu : Easy-to-use webpage editor. Simple alternative to Dreamweaver and Microsft Frontpage
• Server2Go : Apache webserver
• InstantRails : Contains Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all preconfigured and ready to run.
• Putty : Telnet and SSH client
• Follow-Me IP : Displays your external IP address
• XAMPP : Integrated server package of Apache, mySQL, PHP and Perl. Just Unzip and Run
• HTTP File Server : Simple and easy-to-use file server for personal file sharing.
• CurrPorts : Lets you view a list of ports that are currently in use, along with applications that use them
• Quick’n Easy FTP Server : Portble FTP Server.

The Office Labs at Microsoft gave us a nice (and free) product.

Community Clips is a free tool that can be used to do screencasts and help videos.  It integrated directly in the quick access bar in office 2007 applications and can also be used outside of these applications with the tray icon it creates.

It generates very lightweight .wmv files and is really easy to use.

At the office, we use an Outlook addin (that I originally developed in Visual Studio 2002 targeting the 1.0 .NET Framework).  Finding that technology to be a little obsolete (all of our others internal applications are on the 2.0 Framework), we’ve decided to migrate it to 2.0 and add some news features while we’re at it.

The migration and installation went fine at first on my Vista development PC but I couldn’t get the addin to load on the users computers (that are on WinXP).  Every thing I tried, didn’t work and the addin couldn’t load at all.  What I ended up doing is a complete rebuild of the application using VSTO SE (Visual Studio Tools for Office Second Edition).  Since everything works well now, I’ll share with you every resource that I came across about creating an addin with VSTO.

1. Get the prerequisites:

In order to deploy a VSTO addin, you need the following prerequisites installed on every user’s computer:

• The 2.0 Framework
• Office 2003 (or only Outlook 2003 for an Outlook addin)
• The VSTO runtime
• Office 2003: Redistributable Primary Interop Assemblies

2. Code the addin:

Pretty straightforward step, depending on your company’s requirements.  I’ll write another article about that part soon with some code examples.

3. Prepare for deployment:

In order to prepare for the deployment of your solution, you need to set the code access security policy for your assemblies.  To do so, you need to do the following tasks:

• Get the “SetSecurity” project here and add it to your project.
• Sign your assembly (or assemblies) in the Signing section of the project’s properties.  All you need to do is to check the Sign the assembly check box and create a new strong name file.  You need to make sure that every assembly that you deploy is signed (including the SetSecurity.dll assembly).

 

 

• Add the SetSecurity project output to your deployment project and add a custom action for Installation, Rollback and Uninstall.

In the custom action data for the Install custom action, you need to enter the following data, replacing “OutlookAddin” with the name of your addin:

/assemblyName="OutlookAddin.dll" /targetDir="[TARGETDIR]\" /solutionCodeGroupName="MyCompany.OutlookAddin" /solutionCodeGroupDescription="Code group for OutlookAddin" /assemblyCodeGroupName="OutlookAddin" /assemblyCodeGroupDescription="Code group for OutlookAddin" /allUsers=[ALLUSERS]

For the Rollback and Uninstall, all you need to provide in the custom action data is:

/solutionCodeGroupName="MyCompany.OutlookAddin"

That’s a wrapper of about everything useful I found in my research.  I hope this helps you!  If there is something you think would be a good addition to this article, feel free to email me at: stan AT stanbiron DOT com.

Some more useful resources:

• If you don’t have VSTO as part of your Visual Studio Installation, here is the link to download it separately.
• If you code on a Vista PC and you use Visual Studio 2005 (with the Vista service pack), you won’t be able to debug into a VSTO addin for Office 2003.  Microsoft has issued an hotfixto resolve this problem.
• If you can’t get the addin to work on the target computer, you can use this really great Outlook Addin Checker that looks for missing registry keys, prerequisites or Code Access Security policies.

• There is a two-part article on MSDN for every step needed to deploy an VSTO addin or document customization: part 1 and part 2.  These article are somewhat long but every bit of information for the deployment part is there.  They also explain how to set custom deployment conditions to ensure that the prerequisites are installed.

Today, I’ll introduce you to some tools that I like a lot and that have improved my productivity and efficiency in both my job and my day to day computer use.  I ordered them with the ones that I like the most first but I suggest you to try them all to see if some are of more use to you than me in your particular context.

Disclaimer : I have not been paid in any way to endorse these products.  Some of them are free and, for those that cost money, I personally think that their price is right for the functionalities they provides.  I have bought all these tools with my own personal money.  Also, all of these tools have a free evaluation version so you can try them out and see for yourself if they are worth the cost for your situation.

DevExpress Productivity Tools :

CodeRush and Refactor! are my best picks so far.  They are both really easy to use, have a fast learning curve and integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio (all versions except for the express editions).

CodeRush is a template based code generation tool that speeds up the development process by providing a lot of useful and easy templates.  There are templates for properties, methods, classes, NUnit in both VB.NET and C#.  There are also navigation tools, selection tools and a lot of others interesting utilities.

Both of these tools are totally extensible via the DXCore free plug-in. In fact, CodeRush and Refactor! are really just a load of DXCore templates (and by “a load”, I mean that there are over a thousand individual templates that you can use).  And if there is something in particular that you want to automate, the sky’s the limit with this tool.  I will post some of my favorites customizations in the near future.

You can see these tools in actions on the DevExpress Web site here.  If you never tried these tools, I suggest strongly that you give CodeRush and Refactor! a try.  Trust me, it will be worth it.

Here’s a convenient Download Link (Evaluation version)

Slickrun

Slickrun is a free utility that replaces the over used Windows+R key combination, the quick launch tool-bar and the start menu.  This little tool can hook-up and “override” the Win+R key to give you a simple command line that can be used to start any program.  With features like Magic Words and auto-completion this became rapidly (for me at least) the standard way to start any piece of software that I use more than once a week.  It even have the option to track your mouse position and appear right besides it so you don’t even have to move your eyes to the bottom left corner of the screen to see what you are typing.

This tool have the notion of “Magic Words”.  These words are just aliases to executables where you can specify startup command line parameters.  For example, C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\OUTLOOK.EXE becomes “mail”.  Doubled with auto-completion, starting a program became almost instantaneous.

That’s it for today, I’ll write some follow-ups to this article with more tools and utilities that made my life and my work so much easier.