Falafel Software showcased ActiveFocus on Telerik's web site. This is a great illustration of what ActiveFocus can do and it can do a lot!  I was the lead developer for the Windows version of ActiveFocus and I have to say, Falafel has really taken this project to levels I never imagined. It is extremely easy to use and richly functional.

You have to see this video - watch the filtering capability on how the graphs interact with the grid - wow!

One thing Lino (the president of Falafel) discussed was how the skins can be customized for different industries. Therefore, the terminology can be customized to a specific industry. I need to add, that for those engaged in Agile development, it would be easy to rename requirements to stories, events to iterations and so forth.  AF also maintains important information like estimated and actual costs and efforts - critical for teams trying to achieve repeatable processes and cost analysis.

You'll hear in Lino's video that the team plans for integration into Microsoft's Team Foundation Server - that's smart!

Falafel software will be showing ActiveFocus at TechEd 2008 in Orlando, Florida in June 2008 and at the PMI Global Congress 2008 in Denver, Colorado in October 2008.

If I sound partial to ActiveFocus, I am. Having conceived the idea, developed its first iteration and then seeing it turn into a state of the art web application by a rock solid team has been exciting to say the least. I am looking forward to using it with my clients and I will be showing how to use ActiveFocus in an Agile (Agile/hybrid) development setting. More to come later. For now, CHECK IT OUT!

I decided to start experimenting with Blogengine.net, an open-source ASP.NET blogging platform.  Installation was brainless.  Basically, unzip the zip file which you download from here into a directory.  You have the option of downloading just the web site or you may download the entire source. I opted for the web site this time.  You'll need to add a virtual directory under IIS. Make sure it is configured for ASP.NET 2.0. The installation instructions are very good. Follow them and you'll be fine.  Literally, it took me less then 10 minutes to get this site going.

After installation I could run the site flawlessly - quite impressive.  First thing was to change the theme as I wasn't too happy with the default.  This was another simple task. Simply login with the username/password, admin/admin. You'll get an extra set of links for maintaining the blog.  I took care of two things right off, I changed the theme and added my own account.  One of the features of Blogengine.net is the ability to have multiple user accounts. 

I logged off and that was it. I had a blog. The next thing I wanted to do was to get it setup with Windows Live Writer (WLW).  This part didn't go so flawlessly. 

I followed the typically procedure of adding a new Weblog account.  I specified that this was another web log service (not one of the defaults in WLW).  The next page asks for the blog's URL and username/password, I entered those and pressed next.  The next dialog (see figure) surprised me because it asked for a provider type.  I was under the impression that WLW would detect all that information.  Further research indicates that this is not necessarily so.  After several attempts, I could not get WLW to detect my blog.  Fortunately, this can be done using the Metawebblog API (one of the items in the drop down). You'll need to enter the path to the api which is in the format:

http://thedomain/metaweblog.axd

so mine was http://camaro/blogengine/metaweblog.axd

After entering that information, WLW detected my blog and from what I can tell, functions properly. I'll continue to experiment with Blogengine.net and will report my findings. I'm going to be looking into adding additional pages (non blog pages) which is a feature I've been wanting in dasBlog but is not there.

If you're like me, and I am, then you appreciate the ease and debugging capabilities of browsers like Firefox.  However Visual Studio continues to use IE even if you've set Firefox as your default browser in your environment.  Gladly, this can be changed, here's how.

1. In the Solution Explorer, right-click over the .aspx page such as Default.aspx to bring up the context menu.  Select "Browse with..."  This will bring up a Browse With dialog (see figure). 

2. Likely, Firefox will not be in the list. Simply press the "Add..." button, browse to the program directory (c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox), and select the program (Firefox.exe).

3. Press the "Set as Default" button with your preferred browser selected in the list.

4. Note, you can even set the default size of the browser window.

This it! 

Need to convert a PDF file to Word? There are a few free online tools you can use that have paid versions.  These are:

www.zamzar.com

www.freepdfconvert.com

Zamzar seems to offer more from its free service.  If you have short 2-page documents, freepdfconvert did a pretty good job of converting my files.   Know of any others?

This is cool. I just discovered that you can create polls with Google Docs. You basically create a spreadsheet to capture the data you want to examine and provide a link to a live form.  You can email this link or put it on a web site as I have done at the bottom of this post.  To make it work, you first need a Google Docs account.  Then, follow these simple steps.

1. Login to your Google Docs account.

2 Create a new Spreadsheet.

3. Select the Share tab.

4. When asked to give a name to your spreadsheet, give it a meaningful name, specific to your poll like "Favorite Browser".

5. In the Invite People area, there is a new option to "to fill out a form."  Select this radio button.

6. Press the "Start editing your form..." button.  This will launch a different window into which you specify the title, question, help text, etc.  Take special notice of the "Question Type." You have the options of selecting text, paragraph text, multiple choice, checkboxes or choose from a list.  The screen will change depending on the option you select.

7. When you are finished, press "Done."  If you are satisfied with the preview, press "Save"

8. Press the "Next, choose recipients >>" button.

Here, you can invite people, specify preferences, copy the link to the form, etc. 

9. Click on "Go to live form" to start entering data.

10. When you open your spreadsheet, you will see your data.

Take my poll on your Favorite Browser here.

In my post on Blogging Newsletters/Email said I would like to present "teasers" instead of the entire text of my posts in email/feeds so that readers would be encouraged to visit the site (something important for those monitizing their sites).  Feedburner uses a feature called Summary Burner to accomplish this.  To use Summary Burner.

1. Login to Feedburner and click on your feed.

2. Select the Optimize tab (see figure).

3. Select the Summary Burner for the View menu (see Figure)

  4. Specify a Maximum Length and Teaser text to be included in your emails (see Figure).

5. Save your changes. Now when users receive your feeds, your text will be truncated based on the maximum length specified. 

I've been wondering if there's any pattern to music I listen to while programming.  I'm considering if there's any connection between the musical genre and type of programming I'm doing. For instance, sometimes I'm developing something simple but tedious and just want to get it done fast. Other times I'm proofing designs, or implementing complex patterns. Then, there's designing/developing the user-interface which takes a sense of both creativity and structure.

Granted, I understand that musical taste is a major component here. Still, just as there are different types of programming, there are different types of music.  By the way, I should probably mention that in my development career, I have met numerous programmers who are also musicians ranging from amateur to professional. Any connection there?

Music I frequently code to:

Classic Rock: Most of it, particularly Led Zeppelin,  Uriah Heep, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, etc.  The key for me here is that I have to be familiar enough with the music so as not to be distracted by the lyrics. It seems I'm listening to classic rock when I'm coding something with which I'm familiar.

Various forms of New age: Enigma is a new age group that mixes in some old world elements like Gregorian chants.  This is great for coding and particularly when I'm coding a complex design. Check out the sustained electric guitar in "Hello and Welcome" off the A Posteriori album.

I'll listen to harsh fast paced dark electronica when I'm in the groove, so to speak. For some reason it seems to keep my coding pace up. Similarly, certain forms of dark hard-edged rock (maybe even gothic) like Flyleaf.  There are other groups, but if I mention them my friends will tell me I'm going to burn in hell. 

I'll often code to classical of course, Mozart's Requiem and Vivaldi's Four Seasons being my favorite.

I'll also listen to hymns and praise music. I particularly enjoy the reworking of hymn melodies by groups like Indelible Grace.

I can code to very specific forms of Jazz like Pat Metheny for instance.

Music I cannot code to (nor listen to for that matter):

I've heard programmers say that they like the upbeat rhythms of of dance electronica.   This doesn't seem to work for me - it's too repetitive. I end up with code like

while (true)

    do something;

Pop - I can't stand this junk with its overly simplistic melodies and cliche lyrics.  If anything, this drives me insane and makes me totally unproductive.

Most Contemporary Christian Music for the same reasons I can't listen to pop.

Rap, too repetitive and since many rap lyrics are angry, I'm thinking it would be a bad combination when I'm having a bad code day...or maybe not.

What music do you listen to when coding?

Providing a way to subscribe to a blog via email is important. Many, and perhaps most people don't understand RSS, atom, XML nor would they know how to set up a reader.  Heck, I hardly understand this stuff.  These folks have no way of knowing about any new posts unless they frequent the blog.

I have been contemplating rolling an email subscription module for dasBlog (and other blogging engines). Then I started investigating further.   There are several such services available all of which have their pros/cons.  Some are: AWeber, Zookoda and FeedBlitz.

First, I didn't look into AWeber after seeing that the starting price was $19.95/mo. I'm looking for a free option so it wasn't worth my time to dig deeper.

FeedBlitz seems to be the front runner in terms of reliability (see this review). it has a free version that places ads in the resulting emails. The relatively inexpensive paid version will remove the ads and I believe will provide some additional functionality.  It seems feature rich, and the account setup was easy.  Once setup, you have tons of options for managing newsletters (specifying RSS feeds for bloggers, scheduling distribution, look and feel, etc). I have not looked into monetizing the emails but FeedBlitz appears to support it. There are two ways to incorporate it into your blog. One is to use the supplied Form based html code. The other is a link that will take the user to a FeedBlitz hosted subscription form. Obviously, the form based code will not work with dasBlog :(. Overall, I really like this service. 

Zookoda was very user-friendly and has a fairly nice feature set. After setup, it takes a day or so to receive a Sender account with which you can start sending emails. Basically, you setup your mailing lists, emails and broadcasts and specify how they are to be distributed. I particularly like that mailing list management  aspect of this service.  Also, incorporating it into your blog uses javascript and so you can have the email entry right in your site if you use a blogging engine like dasBlog. There are problems with this service however. Based on the review above, its not very reliable in that many subscribers never receive the broadcasts. Furthermore, the company is owned by PayPerPost. There appears to be some controversy around this company regarding their advertising model. I prefer to stay away from controversy.

Currently, I'm using FeedBurner which also provides an email broadcast service. It is more than sufficient.  Like FeedBlitz, it uses a form based script so incorporating the form into a dasBlog site is not doable. However, it also provides a subscription link that will take the user to a different screen.  One thing I'm not sure about (I'll have to look into this) is whether FeedBurner will allow you to put a character limit on each post that get sent out in email (both FeedBlitz and Zookoda do). This is important if you are trying to drive traffic to your site if you are monetzing with ads and such.

I may provide FeedBlitz as another option for my site.  Comments on other options/suggestions are welcome.

UPDATE Apr 28,2008: Looks like FeedBurner does not allow for a character limit on the emails sent.  So subscribers will get the full post in thier emails.

I'm always looking for great tools (particularly free/open source tools). Here's one called PDFCreator that allows you to create PDFs from any document that can print to a Windows printer.  Furthermore, it is free because it's an Open Source tool.  It's extremely simple to install and use. After running the installation program, PDFCreator shows up a a printer in your list of printers (see figure).

Here are a list of features directly from the PDFCreator website.

• Create PDFs from any program that is able to print
• Security: Encrypt PDFs and protect them from being opened, printed etc.
• Send generated files via eMail
• Create more than just PDFs: PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, PCX, PS, EPS
• AutoSave files to folders and filenames based on Tags like Username, Computername, Date, Time etc.
• Merge multiple files into one PDF
• Easy Install: Just say what you want and everything is installed
• Terminal Server: PDFCreator also runs on Terminal Servers without problems
• And the best: PDFCreator is free, even for commercial use! It is Open Source and released under the Terms of the GNU General Public License.

I've been asked how I created the headline animator that that I use as my email signature,  like the one shown below:

Xavier Pacheco

It simply, really. Its a feature of www.feedburner.com.  Once you have an account set up you simply navigate to the Publicize tab for your feed and then configure your animator under the Headline Animator section as shown below:

From there you can configure your animator as you like given the various settings.  Have fun!