It seems that I’m not the only one having problems with getting this much praised inline spellchecking to work. As it turned out I was right assuming that the problem is me having non-English windows. Alex, posted nice workaround for this in his comment to Oren’s post. I checked – it works. Thanks Alex.
Category: Free
Windows Live Writer and SubText incompatibility issues
Microsoft released 2nd beta of Windows Live Writer yesterday. That’s good, I used 1st beta to publish my posts and I tried to publish previous post with the new version but there seems to be some API incompatibility issue between WLW and SubText, since when I tried to publish it, it Subtext threw this exception:
Server Error 0 Occurred
Illegal Characters Found at Subtext.Framework.Text.HtmlHelper.HasIllegalContent(String s)
at Subtext.Framework.Data.DatabaseObjectProvider.FormatEntry(Entry e, Boolean UseKeyWords)
at Subtext.Framework.Data.DatabaseObjectProvider.Create(Entry entry, Int32[] categoryIds)
at Subtext.Framework.Entries.Create(Entry entry)
at Subtext.Framework.XmlRpc.MetaWeblog.newPost(String blogid, String username, String password, Post post, Boolean publish)
I guess I’ll stick to beta 1 for now.
[UPDATE]
Seems that it’s not an issue with WLW, but with it’s Digg this plugin, after removing it, everything works the way it should 
Firefox Extensions I can’t live without #2
Well, maybe it’s not the best title since I’m going to write not only about extensions I’ve been using for long long time, but new (for me) as well.
Grab and Drag is one of the latter, I’ve been using it for only several hours and I simply loved it. It does basically what it’s name says – enables you to scroll web pages how you would scroll PDF documents in Acrobat Reader. It doesn’t block links, you can set hot key for temporary disabling this feature, you can make it switch between ‘hand drag’ and ‘normal’ mode after double click and several more things. Actually it does all I would expect it to do, and more.
One of extensions I TRULY can’t imagine surfing without is Tab Mix Plus. It’s one of most powerful customizable extensions, and one of the most useful. Let me say that it’s option window alone, has 6 tabs (many of which have subtabs). It fixes many of shortcomings of standard Firefox. For example? dbclick open tab to clone it (with it’s history), center clink empty space on tab bar, to bring back last closed tab, see loading progress on every tab, better session management, and many many more. You can have in ff2 ‘close active tab’ button on the left side of tab bar (like in ff1.5).
SCSF May 2007 is out!
Smart Client Software Factory v2 (aka May 2007) is out. You can read more about it in David Hayden’s post. Nice new feature is ‘Check dependencies’. Basically it allows you to see, whether you have installed all required products, and if you don’t it will provide you with a link to download page.
Unfortunately I was unable to install this factory. During installation I received following error message:
I guess it’s because I don’t have VB part of my Visual Studio installed. Unfortunately you can’t uncheck installing VB support so I’m afraid my only option is to add VB to my Visual Studio, and try again.
Firefox extensions I can’t live without (part 1)
One thing I LOVE about Firefox the most is tons of great extensions. I try to stay on top of things and once a while I dive into Mozilla’s extensions repository to see if there have been some good additions. I test those that look promising, and during those few years since I started using Firefox I collected some that I can not imagine surfing without (alphabetic order).
Adblock Plus – a must-have for everyone. With addition of Filters it’s my first line of defense against ads. It enables you to filter links, adds, flash and ActiveX from websites using blacklists and whitelists (you can use wildcards, for example *banner* will block everything with banner in name). I absolutely couldn’t live without it.
Aging Tabs – very nice little extension that you won’t appreciate until you use it for some time. Basically if you have open several tabs it will change color of every tab with time, or every time you switch active tab (that’s the mode I use). You can set start color to white and end color to dark gray and you will be able to at one glimpse to see that you opened a tab and didn’t look into it for long time. (Which may mean that you didn’t look into it at all, or just simply forgot to close it).
CuteMenu – adds icons to menus, witch greatly improves readability.
Down them all – download manager with ability to pause, resume, download file faster in several parts. It has this nice option down them all, that opens a window with all links in active site, you can then set a mask, and get many files in one go.
Link Alert – when you mouse over a link it adds little icon next to the arrow, indicating, type of link target (is it a site that will open in other window/tab, is it secured/unsecured site, image, video, torrent, and many more). Very nice.
Roy Osherove vs. Oren Eini discussion about VSTS, TFS and OSS alternatives.
There is a very interesting discussion going on between two great Israeli blogers: Roy Osherove (a.k.a. ISerializable) and Oren Eini (better known as Ayende). It started with Roy’s post, that his company is looking for a developer experienced in VSTS. Then Oren pointed out why he would avoid Visual Studio Team System. In response Roy wrote a post explaining his choice of VSTS. It didn’t take long for Oren, to write a response, where he basically said, that all what Roy wrote above (and more) can be accomplished with other – free tools. As a result, Roy wrote a great post about open source tools. It’s good to read such discussions, where two pure professionals instead of yelling and swearing at each other bring to live some good arguments. I hope it will spread to other blogs, and initiate broader discussion.
[UPDATE]
As expected, Oren wrote (quite long) post to respond to last Roy’s post. It’s getting more and more interesting as they bring new arguments.
[UPDATE2]
As I expected, there are more blogers joining discussion (battle) between Roy and Oren. Check out Bil Simser’s comments and Oren’s response.
[UPDATE3]
It’s starting to look like tennis game: ball flying from one player to another and back. As so, now it was the time for Roy Osherove to speak, and so he did.
[UPDATE4]
Sam Gentile wrote excelent post about XP and being truly agile and commented Roy’s and Oren’s battle. Oren responded to both: Roy’s and Sam’s posts.
Good RSS/Atom aggregator… is there any?
Ever since I started reading blogs, I was looking for good news aggregator. First I used the one built into Thunderbird, since I have already been using it as my mail client. Well, Thudnerbird is very good mail client, but they have much work in the area of feed aggregation. Then I switched to to Sage (Firefox extension) – I threw it away after 2 days. Then I used two other FF extensions with similar effect. I tried SharpReader, I tried several others but every single one had something (or was lacking something) that made me remove it. Then I came across RssBandit, and that’s what I use today. Not that its flawless, I am just tired, and it seems to have the most basic functions i require good aggregator to have, although it misses some of crucial ones that would make it my a very good one. In the meanwhile I used this great tool OMEA Pro. I admit – it had almost all desired features (or even all of them, I might have removed it to soon to check ’em all), but it has one big disadvantage: so called user experience. It’s interface is simply awful, overwhelming, and makes you wanna close it asap. This may be the most powerful feed aggregator, but the custom controls used in its interface simply don’t look well. That’s why I stayed with RssBandit. I however will give OMEA another try, because of one very important feature: message sorting: RSSBandit (and every other aggregator except for OMEA as far as I know) lets you categorize your messages into ‘folders’/feeds period. That’s all. If you are subscribed to a multitopic feed it will blindly throw every message to the same bag. What I would like (and what OMEA provides) is ability to have virtual folders. It works in a similar fashion to email filtering. It lets you create views so that you can say: “Here I want to have all messages from this, this, and this blog that have this tag and this keyword”. It seems so obvious that every aggregator should have this feature, yet none of them has it… Or maybe I am simply not aware?
Krypton Screencasts
Component Factory, makers of free Krypton Toolkit (very nice set of WinForm controls), created several good quickstart screencats showing how to use those controls (here). Worth checking, screencasts as well as Krypton Toolkit