How am I tracking my feeds?

I did a bit of a mamoth link fest today with my blog clippings post. I’m actually using Internet Explorer 7.0 to ferret out the posts that I am interested in. What I do is open up the feed panel then spin through them all. If I find a post that I am interested in I open it up in another tab. What I end up with is about twenty or so thumbnail windows.

The next step is saving all these windows into the favourites as a tab group. That way if I accidentally close the browser window I don’t loose all that good research.

The family and I are heading out camping tomorrow so I probably won’t post much over the weekend, g’night!

Blog Clippings #1

I’ve got a bucket load of blog posts that I caught up on this morning which are link worth, along with a few links that came in via e-mail – so, here is my first ever blog clippings!

1.       Humorous post comparing programming languages to women. Not sure if I agree with their assessment of my runtimes most popular languages.

2.       An interesting discussion on whether the Web 2.0 bubble will burst with some arguing that it isn’t a bubble because companies like Google are actually profitable. Dave Winer suggests that when it bursts we might not hear it because so many of the companies are private. My thoughts are that these online businesses are now getting woven into traditional economies and that any decline in Web 2.0 business will be driven by standard economic factors (did they build a product that nobody wanted?). I suspect that if most people just shut up and got on with it everything would be OK, it’s only when people look down that they get dizzy.

3.       Got an IM today from Martin Woodward who let me know that it is his second anniversary of joining Teamprise, and that they have shipped version 2.0 of their Team Explorer stand-alone and add-in products which enable Eclipse to talk to Team Foundation Server. Congratulations!

4.       Andrew Coates is out recruiting young programmers by showing them how to build online games on the web. Very cool stuff! What about Phrogram (the language formerly known as Kids Programming Language)?

5.       James McCutcheon also noticed that the SciFi channel had kicked off!

6.       Could Gemalto .NET devices be the physical transportation media for InfoCards? Looks like it! (PDF)

7.       Nick Randolph recommended that I check out RikReader as an alternative visualisation of the Microsoft Feed Store. Frank also links to a wicked cool 3D universe visualisation of the Feed Store called UniveRSS.

8.       I completely agree with Andrew Matthews about debugging concurrent applications. In fact Visual Studio 2005 got a little less stable in some circumstances (lock-ups) than Visual Studio.NET 2003. I think that we should have some kind of visualisation like the allocation graph in the CLR Allocation Profiler. It would be really good at identifying memory contention between threads which can have a huge impact on performance.

9.       IBM proves why ASP.NET is better for Web 2.0 development than JSP. Sorry, I couldn’t resist, that API is just too much hard work when compared with the Microsoft AJAX offering.

10.   A new version of line rider with an erase feature.

11.   David Lemphers proves that Frank is a freak boy (as if there was any doubt).

12.   I’m going to need to choose between this conference (Designertopia) [via David Boschmans blog) and the MVP summit next year. I think that Designertopia will do more for my creative juices.

13.   Spare a thought for fellow ASP.NETter Doug Reilly [via Jason].

14.   Nigel Watson points out the Australian Architecture Forum. I find it interesting that there is going to be a discussion of Web vNext in there because my gut feel is that in the enterprise space most people are still talking about WS-* exclusively rather than considering the mashup possibilities of REST-based architectures.

15.   A discussion about Microsoft’s agility, starting with the Start menu.

That is enough for right now. I notice that a whole bunch of other feeds have updated so maybe there will be a enough fuel for Blog Clippings #2?

How to build your own PowerShell manual with one simple pipeline.

Let’s say I wanted to build an instant manual for the Cmdlets which happen to be installed on my machine. I could use the following pipeline.

Get-Command | % { $_.Name } | % { Get-Help $_ -full }

Then you just need to pipe it to a file or a printer.

TIMTOWTDI: There is more than one way to do it with PowerShell as well.

TIMTOWTDI has been the catch cry of Perl hackers for as long as I’ve been familiar with the language and the interpreter. With PowerShell being an interactive shell first and foremost it is obvious that it would offer the same services.

Today I was reading a PowerShell mailing list and one of the posters asked how to permanently modify the PATH environment variable. I thought for a moment then jumped into action. My feeble attempt is attached.

I then looked back at the other responses which had come in, and there was this little gem attached:

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable(“Path”, “$Env:Path;C:\Directory”, “Machine”

I should have known this since I am a .NET developer, but I automatically jumped into Cmdlet/Provider space. There is definitely more than one way to do it with PowerShell J

AddToPath.ps1