Contents tagged with tools
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How to make screencasts in optimized animated GIF for free
I have been using animated GIFs to show short screencasts in my blogs and articles. Animated GIF is supported by all browsers and supports virtually any website in the world where even Flash is blocked. A picture is worth a thousand words, and an animation is worth a thousand multiplied by [frames in animation] words. So, I have been looking for a complete free solution to capturing screencasts and then converting it to animated GIF and then heavily compressing it.
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Website diagnostics page to diagnose your ASP.NET website
Whenever you change web.config file or deploy your website on a new environment, you have to try out many relevant features to confirm if the configuration changes or the environment is correct. Sometimes you have to run a smoke test on the website to confirm if the site is running fine. Moreover, if some external database, webservice or network connectivity is down, it takes time to nail down exactly where the problem is. Having a self-diagnostics page on your website like the one you see on your printer can help identify exactly where’s the problem. Here’s a way how you can quickly create a simple self-diagnostics page in a single page without spending too much effort. This diagnostics page tests for common configuration settings like connection string, ASP.NET Membership configurations, SMTP settings, <appSettings> file paths and URLs items and some application specific settings to confirm if the changes are all correct.
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Open Source WPF UML Design tool
PlantUmlEditor is my new free open source UML designer project built using WPF and .NET 3.5. If you have used plantuml before, you know that you can quickly create sophisitcated UML diagrams without struggling with a designer. Especially those who use Visio to draw UML diagrams (God forbid!), you will be at heaven. This is a super fast way to get your diagrams up and ready for show. You can *write* UML diagrams in plain English, following a simple syntax and get diagrams generated on-the-fly.
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Windows 7 64bit works!
Windows 7 64bit finally works! This is the first 64bit OS I could really use in my daily acitvities. I tried Vista 64bit, it was unreliable. It would show blue screen right when I am about to make a presentation to the CEO. Until Microsoft released SP1, Vista 64 bit was not usable at all. Then came Windows 7 beta. I immediately tried the 64bit version of Windows 7 beta. It was even worse than Vista. It would crash every now and then – waking up from standby, trying to do livemeeting share, switching screens, plugging in external USB drives and what not. So, I patiently waited for the final version to come out before I get on installing it on all my laptops. Happy to say, the final version works perfectly on HP tx2000 Tablet PC, DELL Vostro 1500, DELL Inspiron 1520. Once you do a full windows update and install some drivers here and there, it all works perfectly. And let me say, Windows 7 is beautiful. I found back the joy of working on computers again!