.NET Blog - Chris Frazier Style

Okay, so I haven't posted for a while and you don't care. Established.

But you've gotta check this out, for real. Francesco Sanfilippo has been putting in work on www.url123.com , an asp.net link shortening solution.

Right, there are a lot of them out there, but this makes it so easy for me to shorten a url...I don't have to have the site open or even remember the name. How do I do this? Easy - bookmarklets.

A bookmarklet is one of those things that is so simple, it's beautiful. Scenario: I'm chatting with someone on msn messenger, talking about NUnit. The nunit-gui comes up in the conversation, and I want to point them to this post but decide that the url is too long for the messenger output. Since I've already added the bookmarklet, instead of this person seeing this [ http://weblogs.asp.net/jsgreenwood/archive/2004/08/16/214901.aspx ] they see this [  http://url123.com/hsz4u ].

All I did was hit a button on my browser! That's it! nice...

CodeSmith r00l3z.

I recently did my semi-annual "house cleaning", where instead of just getting rid of all the accumulated crap I've got on my dev box, I repave and start over. I did this with the idea that I wouldn't install anything without needing it first. Heh, maybe I can keep my start menu down to one column this time ;).

So the need arises for CodeSmith - I need a custom collection, and I want to do it from VS.NET. Well, I head over to my \bin folder, and there's codesmith, waiting with a .bat file to re-register itself in VS.NET (vsnet2003_register.bat). I didn't have to reinstall, I just ran the batch file and I've got a custom collection. Thanks, codesmith :)