Great tools for browsers

Sometimes working with a browser becomes real frustration. Especially if this browser is Internet Explorer. Some simple operation like viewing and managing your cookies can become a real mess. They built in facilities are slow, and not comfortable at all to work with.

NirSoft web browser tools are invaluable in that aspect. It's fast, it's really good, and it's free! Particularly IECookiesViewer just saved me a ton of time and my brain.

WiX, worst toolset ever

So, I suppose sooner or later every developer out there will face the task of writing a installer for his product. I you are working under Windows, Windows Installer seems like a reasonable choice. I'm not so sure about it now.

Now, there is no some sort official tool from Microsoft for making Windows Installer packages. Huh? Seems like that. Presumably I didn't dig enough for that, so far I found just this nonsence.

But then, WiX! Which is infamous for being used to create Microsoft Office 2003 installer. And it's also internal Microsoft product as well. Certanly it's a big YES compared to nothing. It's even integrates into Visual Studio and adds custom projects for creating installers. And you actually start to think that will be a nice journey. But then you try to find some tutorials, examples and documentation. It is awful, all of these. If you add (but I suppose, it's the reason in the first place) that WiX markup is extremenly unintuitive, complicated and confusing then you will understand that frustration means. Contrary to what you might expect, WiX Toolset it's a pretty low-level tool, which must be backed with good documentation and comprehensive and complete examples.

The feedback is thru this mailing-list style forum with horrible desing. The leading toolset man Rob Mensching is rich for caustic comments like this. And, as you can guess from a thread, WiX Toolset is OK with bugs that lasts for more than 2 years.

The thing that finally really, really helped me out was WiX: A Developer's Guide to Windows Installer XML book. And I'm not sure how much more time I would spend in misery without it.

So for me it's official, WiX Toolset is teh worst tool I've ever encountered in all my developer experience so far. It doesn't mean however you shouldn't use it, but unless you are ought to use Windows Installer, you can consider some other tools out there.

P.S. Useful tips on MSI.

XNA tools 2D game developer should not miss

This article data (and much more) can now be found here. I find that blogger platform was not suited well for managing of this kind of list.

---

You may also find useful:
- XNA tutorinals beginner shouldn't miss
- XNA articles beginner should not miss

BizTalk tools: LoadGen 2007

The Microsoft BizTalk LoadGen 2007 Tool is the tool you want for load and performance testing of your BizTalk Server instance. It can do all you want and don't ;-). It's very intuitive and simple, despite being made by Microsoft ;-). One nasty thing, though it uses XML files for configuration it will not work if you add standard (!)

<?xml version="1.0"?>

 declaration at the beginning of the file. Except for that I didn't encountered any problems so far.

P.S. This dead blog is still very helpful if you doing your first steps in BizTalk server performance tuning.

BizTalk tools: Best Practices Analyzer

The BizTalk Server Best Practices Analyzer (V1.2 as of now) is another tool that allows you to nail minor potential problems in you BizTalk installation. It comes from Microsoft, so UI is even worse ;-), but if you really want to analaze and learn your BizTalk installation you definetely need to run it thru this app.

I must add, that such tools allows you to learn about some aspects of BizTalk, which you didn't even thought of before. This is very good in my opinion, it's extends your knowledge horizon and you understand system complexity deeper. You may not need that knowledge now, but you will be prepeared.

BizTalk tools: MsgBoxViewer

MsgBoxViewer is one of that not pretty, but great tools that can gather all valuable information about your BizTalk installation in one place. It'll also provide incredibly valuable recommendations given it found some inconsistencies with your BTS installation. This is very helpful in many situations, from initial BTS tuning to quick examination of unknown to you BTS installations. You should certanly give it a try.You can get MsgBoxViewer here.

Notepad2: best replacement for Notepad

Notepad2 is the best Windows Notepad replacement, period.

It hits the spot: simple, single file, small and blazingly fast app. It's feature set is carefully limited to only most valuable functions. Thus it achived perfect balance: still as small as original Windows Notepad, yet almost as feature rich as Visual Studio text editor. I was quite excited to notice that Scott Hanselman used it in his speech at DevDays, check it out on Channel 9.

You can actually (I did) replace default system Notepad to Notepad2 using safe registry modification method:

1. Create the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\[Wow6432Node\]Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\notepad.exe.
2. Inside the key, create a new string (REG_SZ) value, named "Debugger".
3. Set the data of this new "Debugger" value to the full path to the Notepad2 executable, followed by the /z switch. For example, "C:\Windows\Notepad2.exe" /z

In step 1, if you are in 64-bit OS use additional Wow6432Node.

WMI Explorer: best observer for WMI

WMI "table" and "column" count is overwhelming. So a tool that will let you quick and easily peek at all of this data can be very handy.

WMI Tools from Microsoft are just too slow, ancient and ugly, though it have some unique navigation abilities between related items. WMI Explorer from Advanced Network Software is done right thing. It's just best WMI observer tool that I've seen so far.