http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html

I use regular expressions as often as the interval it takes me to forget most of the useful regex stuff I learn. Everytime a situation comes up that I should use regex I have to try and remember everything I knew about regex. Well, this tutorial explains regular expressions in such a way that I'm hoping it will stick with me longer this time.

To go along with this tutorial I couldn't very well not post an awesome regular expression utility. My personal favorite is The Regulator. It links in with the Regular Expression Library so you already have access to tons of regex. If you haven't heard of it, it's worth checking out. Another tool that I sometimes go back to using is Regex Designer which is made specifically for .NET applications. It has an option to generate some code stubs for you which saves some time.

Live.com
This is the new start.com from what I can tell. Very similar to NetVibes where you can create your own home page and put all the content you want on it. I've never been a fan of these pages. Sure it's nice to have a single place to look at for all your web information but it still requires me to go to the page and check if anything is new. I prefer the model where something notifies me that there is an action to be performed.

Windows Live Safety Center
An online tool to check for virii and perform a "tune-up" on your PC. I'll pass on this one.

Windows Live Mail
This is going to be the new Hotmail apparently. I'm assuming this is what Kahuna got named to. There are a bunch of videos on channel9 showing some of the new features. From what I saw it looks a lot more simple than the current hotmail and also chalk full of AJAX functionality.

Windows Live Favorites
I'm guessing this was suppose to compete with del.icio.us but let's be honest, del.icio.us is too awesome. WLF has a limit on the number of bookmarks you can add so I couldn't even import all my del.icio.us bookmarks, strike one. WLF does not let me add bookmarks easily. To add a new site you have to either click the "Add favorite" button, paste the URL, enter the description and put in some keywords. You can also drag a link to the window. This requires that I keep this window open all the time. No deal. Strike two. You can share bookmarks but I don't see how I can find other peoples bookmarks or where my public URL is for sharing bookmarks. Strike three. WLF seems like it will work OK for non-geeky people to sync bookmarks for home and work. Granted there is no export feature so good luck getting all your bookmarks out of this tool if you ever decide to switch. One thing I will give it though is the AJAX functionality worked pretty slick.

Windows Live Messenger
Not active yet but sounds pretty promising. Sounds like it will have some Skype functions but probably won't be as good as Skype. They were advertising how it will have new emoticons and crap like that. I wish they would ditch that stuff and keep it more simple as a chatting, IM, voice client without all this other fluff.

Windows OneCare Live
A utility for keeping your computer safe, firewall, virus scanner etc etc. It's still not active but I won't use it so I don't really care.

Windows Live Search Mobile
This isn't live yet either but it sounds pretty cool. I'll stick with google on this one though.

Most of these new offerings have MSN spaces to go along with them. It feels a bit more personal when you can see who is behind each new feature. All the blog links are on http://ideas.live.com/ if you want to check them out too.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/jeffreyvanneste

Onto Flickr, I've been avoiding trying flickr since I figured I would either not be impressed with it or I would love it and would be unable to resist paying for an account. I was always under the impression that the free account enforced smaller picture sizes. I don't know where I got that idea but I had it. I have been using Zoto which offers a lot of space but everything else I haven't been impressed with. The tagging features are pretty weak, the photo uploader caused me issues, and it just doesn't have the finesse of flickr. Anyways, Flickr makes it super easy to integrate with a blog, lots of bulk editing features, adding notes onto photos is really cool, and the photo uploader worked without any issues for me.

If you haven't tried these services out and you have a blog then give them a try.

• In the property publish settings you will need to set the Installation URL to the URL you will eventually put the ClickOnce application on. In my case, http://www.bunnyhug.net/ClickOnceTest/. The publishing location can be whatever you want to test with. I used my local IIS.
• If you want your application to check for updates you will need to click the Updates button and set the Update Location to the URL you want to check for updates with. Once again in my case it was http://www.bunnyhug.net/ClickOnceTest/.
• So now build and publish your application to your local IIS or whatever you selected for the Publishing Location. Upload the resulting files to your web server so they will be in the proper folder to match the Installation and Update URL.
• One last thing to do, since I doubt your web host have the proper MIME types set you will need to add the following to a .htaccess file in the folder you uploaded your published files (or use this example.htaccess file):

  AddType application/x-ms-application .application
  AddType application/x-ms-application .manifest
  AddType application/octet-stream .deploy

This allowed me to hit http://www.bunnyhug.net/ClickOnceTest/ and install my Click Once Test application. It should look something like this in IE:

When I tried in firefox I got a bit different result:

For firefox I had to click the Install button which downloaded the Setup.exe file. After running this file manually it installed the application just like clicking the Install button in IE did.

So that should be all to get ClickOnce applications deploying from a non-IIS server. The downside is you will have to upload your files manually after you publish locally each time. If you have FTP access to your host you can make this a bit easier by setting up the Publishing Location to the FTP location that matches your Installation and Update URL.

Download

And yes, if you haven't heard, VS2005 and SQL Server 2005 are out for MSDN subscribers. The redistributables for .NET 2.0 can be found here:

Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package (x86)
Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package (x64)

And the SDK links:

.NET Framework 2.0 Software Development Kit (SDK) (x86)
.NET Framework 2.0 Software Development Kit (SDK) (x64)

Update: I found out about this link after this post, http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/downloads/updates/default.aspx has all the downloads for pretty much anything .NET related on Microsoft's site.

"A very simple program that lets you set the default web browser in Windows. Select the browser you want, and the program will modify the required registry settings."

So now the links work great. I tried finding other people having this issue on forums but I had no luck. Hopefully this helps out some people.

What I wanted to be able to do from the build machine was tell another machine to upgrade to the new version without having to connect to any of the application servers. The problem here is remote execution of any commands on the application servers, so I started my research. I searched in google and found various programs that offered remote execution but some required installing software on the application server (not desired) or cost a lot of money. I first tried RemoteExec (about $120USD/license) which seemed to be the one that showed up in most of my searches. When I tested it out locally it worked great but as soon as I tried to execute programs on other computers on the network it was very unreliable. One time it would load up the program and the next time nothing would happen. With that and the lack of command line support (or at least as far as I could tell) I decided it was time to find something else.

In the end I found a wonderful program by sysinternals called PsExec (freeware too) that did everything that I wanted (and it actually worked). Nothing needs to be installed on the target machine at all. The only requirements are you need to have port 139 and 445 open on the target machine and you need administrator access. Since I haven’t decided for sure which installation package I will be using to bundle our deployment files into I wanted to make sure that a couple of them worked correctly. My first test was using MSI files. I was unable to use the copy file option from PsExec (-c) with MSI files so in the end I had to put the MSI file on a shared folder on the network. Since I was accessing the network I needed to specify the user for PsExec so I would have the proper network credentials. Here is how the command should look:

psexec \\TargetMachineName -u DomainName\UserName -p Password 
msiexec /i "\\SourceComputerName\SharedDrive\Setup.msi" /qn

When I tested a NSIS setup file it worked much easier as the copy file option worked fine.

psexec \\TargetMachineName -c NsisSetup.exe /S

Another nifty thing I discovered with PsExec was the ability to specify multiple computers to execute the command on. There are 3 different ways you can do this. "psexec \\* -c NsisSetup.exe /S" would execute on every machine in the domain. "psexec \\Machine1,Machine2 -c NsisSetup.exe /S" would execute on Machine1 and Machine2. "psexec @ComputerList.txt /S" would execute on every machine listed in the ComputerList.txt file.

I found a good article on Windows IT Pro which gave a good description of how PsExec works:
"PsExec starts an executable on a remote system and controls the input and output streams of the executable's process so that you can interact with the executable from the local system. PsExec does so by extracting from its executable image an embedded Windows service named Psexesvc and copying it to the Admin$ share of the remote system. PsExec then uses the Windows Service Control Manager API, which has a remote interface, to start the Psexesvc service on the remote system.

The Psexesvc service creates a named pipe, psexecsvc, to which PsExec connects and sends commands that tell the service on the remote system which executable to launch and which options you've specified. If you specify the -d (don't wait) switch, the service exits after starting the executable; otherwise, the service waits for the executable to terminate, then sends the exit code back to PsExec for it to print on the local console."

• Windows IT Pro Article on PsExec
• PsTools (which include PsExec) Official Forum
• PsExec Website
• PsTools Website
• Download PsExec
• Download PsTools
• AppDeploy Website

.NET Webservice Studio is a tool to invoke webmethods interactively. The user can provide a WSDL endpoint. On clicking button Get the tool fetches the WSDL, generates .NET proxy from the WSDL and displays the list of methods available. The user can choose any method and provide the required input parameters. On clicking Invoke the SOAP request is sent to the server and the response is parsed to display the return value.

So now I can just load up the .NET WebService Studio, paste in the locacation of the .asmx file and then enter the data in to test the method.

DPack is a FREE collection of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 and 2005 tools. DPack is designed to greatly increase developer's productivity, automate repetitive processes and expand upon some of the Visual Studio features.

DPack includes various browser tools that allow the developer to quickly narrow the search down to a particular class, method or assembly type. DPack includes greatly enhanced numbered bookmarks feature, various code navigation tools as well streamlined surround with feature, and much more.

Home page and direct download link

Resharper does a lot of what DPack does but a couple of the nifty features from DPack that I like:

• Creating bookmarks with CTRL+SHIFT+number and then CTRL+number to jump back to that line.
  
• ALT+up or ALT+down will jump to the next or previous method defined.  If you press ALT+Home it will jump to the parent class or namespace at which point you can press ALT+up or down to jump to the next class or namespace in the file.
  
• Surround blocks of code with if, switch, property, region, etc blocks.  I like the surround with region one.  As far as I can see there isn't a keyboard command for this but you can still add a button to your toolbar.

It also provides a search tool for finding a method or class like Resharper does but DPack doesn't have the initial load time that Resharper does.

Sounds like Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, and BizTalk 2006 are all slated for the week of November 7, 2005.

http://codebetter.com/blogs/john.papa/archive/2005/06/07/64193.aspx