Visual Studio 2008 has been out for over a week. I've upgraded three machines (two Vista, one XP) from Beta 2 to RTM, then upgraded a couple of projects. I've also been watching blog posts and listening in at the Twitter water-cooler to hear about other developers' experiences, problems, and recommendations...

Cropper is my favorite screenshot application because it supports plugins. I've published a few over the years - Capture to AVI and Capture to Animated GIF. My favorite plugin is one that I didn't write - Patrick Altman's Send To Flickr plugin . Now that we've got a Cropper build that works in Vista...

UPDATE: A new version of Cropper with these changes has been released. Grab it here: http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/articles/Cropper.aspx Summary Cropper is my favorite screenshot utility, mainly because of the plugin support. It's not really usable in Vista because the graphics compositing changes...

I saw a request on the Notepad++ forums today to add PowerShell syntax support. Notepad++ has a pretty good extension system for adding user defined languages, so I went ahead and put on together. You can grab it from the Notepad++ download area (zip download). Installation information is in the included...

WHAT'S ALL THIS, THEN? Cropper is a great free screen capture program. It has a cool plugin system which lets you send the screenshots anywhere you can write code to send it. I wrote a plugin to save a portion of the screen to an Animated GIF . I originally wrote it for use in a weblog post, but...

A comment on my post about the SQL/e announcement said it sounds a lot like SQLite . The subject warrents a separate post. SQLite is a great embedded database. It's free, open source, small, fast, ACID compliant , and frequently updated. SQLite is an ideal embedded database provided you don't care about...

VS.NET 2003 is about two years overdue for SP1. If you don't want to wait until June (or thereabouts), you can apply to download it early through connect.microsoft.com . In case the word "Beta" gives you the shivers, remember that SP1 is mostly a rollup of hotifxes that have been out for years. When...

Summary : Last.FM is cool, but their player desktop application is pretty horrible. MyLastFM is the beautiful player that Last.FM deserves. myLastFM has always been free, but now it's better than ever and open source . What's Last.FM ? Last.FM is difficult to describe. The best way to understand it is...

I blogged about the DevAge Source Pack this past summer when it was in Beta 1. The DevAge Source Pack 1.0.0.0 has just been released now - download it and try out the demos . The SourceGrid 3 is the star of the Source Pack. It's a full featured Winform grid control with sophisticated features like virtualization...

Cool connection string generator macro from John Conwell : Speaking of useful macros, this is one I've used for a a few years and thought might be usefull. It calls the ADODB Data Link Properties dialog (shown below). After you go through the dialog picking your data source, database, and connection...