October 2006 - Posts

Netbeans 5.5 Released!

My favourite Java IDE (ok so Eclipse is great but I prefer Netbeans for quick and dirty stuff - like assignments!) Netbeans 5.5 just got released with a brand spanking site new design which is alot better IMHO.

Only a few days ago I downloaded RC2 - and had to register at Sun to download it but now there's no such deal. Checkout some of the cool new Plugins available too!

Visual Studio Powertoys and top Enhancements for VS.NET 2005

As a daily abuser of VS.NET 2005 I havent been able to function without some extra Ooomph (== IDE Enhancements)...

A couple of days ago MSFT released the VS.NET IDE Enhancement PowerToys, some of these were previously shipped with the VS SDK but now come seperately (not too sure but I've had these installed for atleast a couple of months).
  1. Source Code Outliner
    The Source Outliner tool is a Visual Studio extension that provides a tree view of your source code's types and members and lets you quickly navigate to them inside the editor.
  2. Visual C++ Code Snippets
    The Visual C++ Code Snippets tool lets you insert snippets in your code by using a pop-up menu that contains programming keywords. VB.NET and C# languages have this functionality in Visual Studio 2005.
  3. Indexed Find
    The Indexed Find tool is a Visual Studio extension that uses the Microsoft Indexing Service to provide improved Search capabilities to the integrated development environment (IDE). It sends the results of a search to the Output Window.
  4. Super Diff Utility
    The Super Diff Find tool is a Visual Studio extension that compares text files. It uses color coding and graphics to show the difference between the files in deleted text (red), changed text (blue), inserted text (green).
  5. Event Toaster Utility
    The Event Toaster tool is a Visual Studio extension that notifies users about specific events within the Visual Studio IDE.
Download the VS.NET Powertoys and give em a go:D

While on the subject of Enhancements there's a great article with the Ten Essential Tools for VS.NET that may be of interest to some of you, I only wish the VSMouseBindings was available for VS2005 (I miss using the MS Explorer mouse and being able to map back/forward buttons to move around VS.NET!). More cool addons are available on the GotDotNet Developer Powertoys workspace.

My other love is Refactor! from DevExpress...

Goodbye ATI.com, heeeellooo ATI.AMD.com

A couple of months back I gave my initial thoughts on the ATI + AMD merger and my fears for what may become of their merger. Well as of today the merger is considered a done deal with AMD making their newest adopted kid on the block ATI feel cozy in the AMD subdomain system (ATI.com redirects to ATI.AMD.com). There's also the formal announcement of Fusion which is (in simple terms) where the CPU & GPU are on the same slice of silicon. This should make things interesting for the NVIDIA camp as well as how the combination will work (Eg. I avoid *any* integrated video card boards - unless its a server-box - purely because of the speed - no need to worry GPU will do the work - and the shared memory issues), will they somehow have a seperate video memory chip/controller on the board or use the onboard memory? How would the combination work in terms of Cross-Fire, can you still have addon cards? Will ATI (oops AMD-ATI) continue building addin cards (even though they may be used on non-AMD boxes)... Oh so many questions and so much time before we'll know anything.

Just another brain dump. Sad to see ATI go, but oh well.

October the month of releases!

Wow what a month October is turning out to be. We had the Internet Explorer 7.0 release, today Firefox 2.0 went live (yes I jumped the gun! but see the overview), Fedora Core 6 just hit the streets and soon Ubuntu Edgy will release - one more sleep for that one. Almost forgot that Windows Defender also went live this month!

Whats more MSFT have finally overcome their final hurdles and are reaching the home straight. Very interesting month!

VIVIDAS: Swinburne - Let's get on with it.

Well suprise suprise Swinburne has joined the Vividas streaming gang (I swear I had no part!).

Its an ad to promote the uni with the all to familiar phrase of "Let's get on with it"...

Watch Clip

Internet Explorer 7.0 Final Released!

Quick note that IE7 final has been released! Go download it, Firefox 2.0 should be out very soon too!

VISTA: Its almost hear, are you excited?

Some of the features that didnt quite make the cut in Vista RTM are outlined in a post on hte Shell Blog. Nice to see some good old fashion humour floating around now that Vista is close to RTM...

But what is seriously juicy is the new DirectX 10 Gaming goodness thats coming...

Google Code Search... Wow!

Google has just released "/*Code Search*/" allowing you to instantly search piles of source code instantly! Whats great about this nifty Labs project is that we can use some intelligent filtering techniques to get exactly what we need - and something Google stuff always seem to have, lots of extensibility and options.

Go try it out!

At the moment theres not as much code in there (mostly for legal reasons I guess) as Koders or Codase but knowing Google it shall multiply and expand soon!