Sometimes technical, sometimes not, never a kitty

The October BADNUG meeting will be held October 26, 2006 at Communifax HQ in Cranberry Township, PA.  Our speaker will be Regional Director Mike Snell, discussing testing with Visual Studio Team Testm.  Mike’s book “Visual Studio 2005: Unleashed” was recently published, and this will be a great chance to interact with an expert in Visual Studio 2005.

Topic: Automated Testing using Visual Studio Team Test and Team Foundation Server

Description:
Automated testing has finally been added to the Visual Studio lineup! In this session we will cover these new tools from front-to-back. This includes demonstrations on creating and executing unit, web, performance, load, manual, and ordered tests. We will also cover the Test Manager interface. Finally, we will look at reporting test results using Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.

This will be our last meeting for the season—we’ll resume again in January.

The September BADNUG meeting will be this Thursday (Sep 28),  from 6-8 pm at Communifax HQ.  Eric Kepes will discuss WiX.  The Windows Installer XML (WiX) is a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code.  It's also one of the first (if not the first) open source tool from Microsoft hosted on SourceForge (project at http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix/).

If you need to deploy desktop applications to your user base or clients, WiX is one good option for customizing the installation process.

The first two By The Community, For The Community projects have been released.  Brendon Schwarzt brings us an Extended Club Site Starter Kit, and Curt Christiansen brings us ITracker, an inventory tracking app.  More information on each at http://www.asp.net/Default.aspx?tabindex=6&tabid=50.

Scott Hanselman reports that dasBlog 1.9 is released.  Previous version is 1.8, so this looks like a minor upgrade, but after you read the list of all the new stuff, you'll wonder what constitutes a major release.

I received the following e-mail from Brian Bischof today:

It's been a long time since I sent out a newsletter because I've been busy writing a new book, "Crystal Reports XI Encyclopedia, Volume 1".

I'm a few chapters from finishing and I'm making the chapters available online as I finish them. The first four chapters have been posted so far. You can download each chapter for free and read it before the book is in the bookstores.

I also want to thank everyone who has linked to my website and helped generate a lot more traffic. So I'm posting new articles as well.

Read tips and tricks for
* Formatting numbers as percentages
* Efficient use of global constants
* Getting rid of the red "X" icons on ASP.NET pages
* and much more!

If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ve seen me recommend his Crystal Reports .NET Programming book almost endlessly.  If that’s any indication, then his newest book will be an invaluable Crystal Reports XI Reference.

Banned Book Week is the last week of September (coincidentally, so is my birthday), and Google Book Search is highlighting a number of challenged or banned books.  I was surprised to how many of the books on the list were required reading in my rural Kentucky school district (not so rural anymore, but was 20 years ago).  Plus, I'd read many on my own.  I do remember some attempts to have books banned, and even one book burning (I think it was Tom Sawyer), but that met with no success.

I'm curious as to the reasons for why some of these books are being challenged.  OK, I get why some folks may not want Lolita rolling around a middle school reading list.  But apparently I missed something in James and the Giant Peach, which I read as a kid.  If anything, many of the books should be required reading just for the sake of not repeating some of the horros of the past.  I can't really imagine a world without Salinger, Vonnegut, Faulkner or Steinbeck, and I'd hate for any kids I might have one day to live in such a world.

Hat Tip: Download Squad

Lightbox is that cool photo-opening javascript/css combo.  You know, the one where the page is greyed out and the image is overlaid on the page.  If you haven’t seen it, go to http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/ for a demo.  While you’re there, download it.

Once you have the download, unzip it.  Upload the JS, CSS and IMAGES folders to your dasBlog root.  If you have an images folder there already, just add the images to that folder.

To add the scripts and CSS to your blog, you need to find the theme.  Figure out which theme you’re using, and drill down in the Themes folder, and open your theme’s folder.

Find the homeTemplate.blogtemplate file, and open it in Notepad.  In the <HEAD> section, add the four includes (three JS and one CSS) as specified on the Lightbox sit  You can cut and paste from the sample page in the ZIP if you’re lazy.

That’s it!  All you need to do is activate your links with ‘rel=”lightbox”’, and you’re good to go.

There is a workaround to get Picasa to index a photo collection on an Netgear SC101.  The trick is, you have to set Picasa to save imported pictures in the root of the photo drive--go Tools >> Options >> General.  Click the Browse button (next to "Save Imported Pictures In"), and click OK.  Picasa will then index your entire drive.

Another option you have is to use the Import functionality, and import your folders from your Netgear drive.  This requires much patience, and the application may claim to be "Not Responding", but it's just loading information from the drive.  If you have a lot of photos, this can take a while.

I still can't get Picasa to add additional SC101 drives via the foler manager, so it's a good thing I have a partition dedicated to just photos.