jsiServiceManager on SourceForge
I started a project on SourceForge for jsiServiceManager yesterday.
You can find it here.
The currently released version is the same one as on jsiSoft. When I do the next release I will link to SourceForge.
Speaking of the next release…
I have added the functionality I wrote about in an earlier post but I haven’t tested it very well with services. It works as a charm with all my auto starting applications though.
Support free software
Do what you can to support the free software you are using.
I estimate the user base of my free software to about 1000, but over the years I have only been in contact with a hand full of them. It would help me a lot with the future development if I got to know what the users want to have and what they don’t like about it right now. A friendly note or a feature request means a lot to me and I’m quite sure other developers feels like that too.
We, free software developers, spend a lot of time developing our software and some hard earned money to keep our websites and internet connections running.
If you like a product and want to support it go to it’s home page and check out it’s sponsors. That way the developer will get some money and the advertiser will get some traffic. It will benefit a lot of people. You don’t have to donate ‘real’ money but the developer will still get some monetary support and it’ll build your karma.
So the next time you use your favorite freeware; take minute and figure out how you can contribute to it.
FreeMind and the current job
The current job is about defining/refining and documenting a system that is a couple of years old. I was a big part in building it initially but it has grown without much control since then.
As I see it, the main reason it is hard to get a grasp of it now is because there is (or has never been) a central role to consolidate the development. For each little project there has been a new project manager who only wanted to do his part at the lowest cost or him. No one has taken, or gotten, responsibility for all of it. This has led to more than one ugly hack to solve the same issue in different sub projects.
Now they have taken the opportunity to try to figure out what functionality there actually is, and what should be reused or refactored.
This is the first time my deliverables aren’t code. Starting with a blank sheet is always hard, but I remembered FreeMind, a free mind mapping tool. It helps a lot with the blank sheet syndrome since one can start dumping information in it and organize it later. Of course that is possible in any other text editor, but the graphical metaphor of FreeMind helps, at least me, get over the writers block.
I haven’t run FreeMind in Vista before so it was not very pleasant to discover that all file operations on new files failed. I solved it by copying one of the document that came with the install. When I double click it in my favorite file manager it starts FreeMind and I can save changes to ‘old’ documents. It is apparently a known bug so I will keep recommending FreeMind to any one who wants to listen.
I used to build my documentation for logview4net in a commercial competitor called Mind Manager. I think I will start using FreeMind for both logveiw4net and jsiPodFetch in the future.
Free storage online
Now that Microsoft offers 500 MB free storage with their beta of Live Drive it is worth noticing that Diino offers 2GB for free.
I have not tried both services yet, but since Microsoft doesn’t accept all submissions to their beta I think you should give Diino a chance. At least Diino is out of beta.
Either way, it doesn’t hurt to use the storage at both Microsoft Live Drive and Diino since they are both free.
Sharpdevelop, resources and compiler error
When I moved logview4net to SharpDevelop I got the dreaded CodeDomSerializerException in the WinForm designer. It complained about resources not existing.
Since everything worked in Visual Studio and the application compiles and runs I started looking for other things. After some digging around I found that the properties in the typed resource class was declared internal. I changed the modifiers to public instead and now the WinForm designer works again.
New release of logview4net (7.28)
I just made a new release of logview4net.
New features are:
- A StdOut / StdErr listener
- A block ignore action
Goto jsiSoft.com to download it.
CHANGELOG:
7.28
Fixed: Add an IgnoreBlock action that should have an IgnoreStart + IgnoreEnd pattern
Fixed: Make it possible to ingore events on pause instead of caching them.
Fixed: Make the cmd-line parser use the StdOut-listener for .exe-files
Enabled the StdOut listener
Fixed a dispose bug on all listeners.
Moving to SharpDevelop from Visual Studio Express
In light of the recent controversy of using plugins in Visual Studio Express and getting some inspiration after listening to the DotNetRocks episode with Christopher Wille on SharpDevelop I thought I should give SharpDevlop a chance again. I am working on two utilities that I plan to release as shareware and as I do not want to rely on tools supplied by my employer I have been using Visual Studio Express until now. I haven’t done any real work in #Develop yet, but I’ve got both projects up and running.
The first thing that bit me was the lack of a typed dataset designer. I was on the way to move that structure into a List<T> anyway so it doesn’t bother me that much right now. I’ll write about the progress of each project this week.
Soundpedia a replacement for Pandora?
I just found out about Soundpedia. A free music service based in Singapore that is open for us non Americans.
I haven’t figured out how to make it mix by itself, but it took less than a minute to get some nice music in my ears.
Free music online
Since Pandora closed the doors for us Europeans I have re-found BBC Music. There is a hole lot of free music to listen at.
If you know some Swedish you can go to Sveriges Radio they make most of their shows available online for free. I’m into reggae an listen mostly to P3 Rytm
If you know of more free music sites please let me know.
