April 2004 - Posts

FREE XDN Professional for .NET Bloggers during May 2004
29 April 04 02:11 PM | CSharpener | 1 comment(s)
Suffering from a fit of generosity, Mike Schinkel, president of Xtras.Net, has made an offer on his personal blog of a free XDN Professional membership (http://www.xtras.net/xdn) during the month of May 2004 foranyone that blogs about .NET frequently. If you are a .NET blogger, see Mike's post for how to get your free XDN membership.
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[XML] XMLPatterns.com
22 April 04 01:29 PM | CSharpener | with no comments
I recently came across an oustanding reference site on design patterns for creating good XML. The site is XMLPatterns.com. The content has already been very helpful to me and I recommend this as a useful reference link.
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[Tools] QuickGraph
19 April 04 10:02 AM | CSharpener | 1 comment(s)
The MbUnit Testing Framework uses QuickGraph, a generic .NET graph library. It appears that QuickGraph is now bundled with MbUnit. You can find some additional information about it in the original CodeProject article, QuickGraph: A 100% C# graph library with Graphviz Support, and in the .NET Wiki article, QuickGraph Generic Graph Library for .NET. I think QuickGraph has usefulness beyond its presence in MbUnit, so I am posting a little about it here.
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[Tools] MbUnit, "an evolutive Unit Test Framework for .Net"
19 April 04 09:44 AM | CSharpener | 3 comment(s)
MbUnit is an alternative Unit Test Framework for .Net that includes some evolutions from NUnit and adds some additional features and fixtures. Specifically, some of the new features add benchmarking, performance testing, and "Model-based Testing." MbUnit is the new name for NPerf and represents a significant evolution from that code base. It seems this project had another intermediate name, "GUnit." MbUnit is an ongoing Open Source project and the team is looking for Algorithm writers, GUI designers, Test writers, and Documentation freaks.
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[Tools] More on PDF: iTextSharp
09 April 04 08:26 AM | CSharpener | with no comments

As mentioned in the comments to "[Tools] PDFCreator," iTextSharp is great for software developers who want to create Adobe Acrobat PDF files on the fly in .NET code. For downloads, etc., please see the iTextSharp SourceForge Project Summary Page. Please note that PDFCreator is *not* a .NET class library; it is a standalone PDF creating utility that installs on your machine as a printer. You simply print to it. Use iTextSharp, or something like it, if you want to generate PDF from code.

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[Tools] PDFCreator
08 April 04 08:05 AM | CSharpener | 2 comment(s)

Yesterday, I found a cool new tool you might find useful. PDFCreator is an Open Source (GPL) tool to easily create PDF files. I have wished for such a free tool for quite some time, now. While I do not normally need the full power of Adobe Acrobat, it is nice to be able to easily create PDF files while browsing or working in my normal applications. PDFCreator installs to work like a printer, so it is very easy to print up a PDF from whatever document you are in at the moment. You can even print PDFs from your web browser. Software developers may find it handy to output syntax-highlighted code directly from VisualStudio.NET (or whatever favorite editors you use) to a PDF file. You can also combine multiple documents into one PDF.

You can download PDFCreator from the PDFCreator Source Forge Site.

IMNSHO, this project is a great contribution to free software. I sent out a big "Thank you!" to Philip Chinery and Frank Heindörfer, the registered project admins on the SourceForge site, and their helpers!

The help file says this:

What's is PDFCreator?

PDFCreator is an open source application that can create PDF's from just about any program that prints using windows printers. With PDFCreator you can create PDF's, Postscript and Encapsulated Postscript files, create images from your documents, combine documents and much more.

Features
  • Create PDF's from just about any program that prints using Windows printers.
  • Create documents in the following formats: Portable Document Format (PDF), Postscript (PS), Encapsulated Postscript (EPS), PNG, JPEG, BMP, PCX, and TIFF.
  • Combine multiple documents into one PDF.
  • Password protect and apply up to 128 bit encryption to your PDF documents.
  • Automatically save PDF documents with current settings without being prompted for information And much more!

PDFCreator is released under the term of th GPL (GNU General Public License).

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[Tools] wxWindows Name Change to wxWidgets
07 April 04 11:22 AM | CSharpener | with no comments

After being "approached" by Microsoft, the current "hosts" for the wxWindows open source C++ GUI framework are changing its name to wxWidgets. See the Name Change Page for details. Julian Smart and Robin Dunn will cease using the name wxWindows by August 2004.

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[Graphics] Is Blender Insufficiently Appreciated?
07 April 04 10:29 AM | CSharpener | 4 comment(s)

This is a bit of a plug for Blender, a fantastic Open Source project that is perhaps the most under-appreciated project on the net. What is Blender? Well, it is just "the open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Available for Windows, Linux, Irix, Sun Solaris, FreeBSD or Mac OS X."

I guess nobody likes great free 3D image building and animation software anymore!

You will find more information at blender3d.org and you should be aware of the Blender Foundation, which is now responsible for this impossibly cool GNU GPL software. You can contribute to this project either with code or financially (via the Blender Fund).

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