Fernando Zamora

Recently I've been involved in helping with coordinating an event.  Actually I am not involved with the coordination but since I am the techy in the circle, you guessed it, I am tasked with anything and everything related to technology.  This could be something as simple as creating a word document.  Yes a word document can be considered a technology task to some at least in my circle.   I have found that helping out with these types of tasks usually brings up all kinds of ideas to mind.  I always start out very excited because I start thinking that I will create this thing to fill this need.  Unfortunately a brief search I discovered that what I need is already available.  These ideas pop-up because real people trying to do real things tend to trigger real ideas.  In this effort I realized that one of the critical things necessary for coordinating the event was to create some sort of web presence.  At first I decided to cr...

Derek Bailey , of Los Techies , came out to talk to the Central Texas Dot Net Users group about this tool named Albacore .  I will not even attempt to summariz e the features and capabilities of Albacore .  It appears to be an awesome tool for a variety of reasons.  It does not use XML It uses Ruby and as such it is a first class citizen, unlike NAnt The syntax is extremely clean and readable. If you have to do any type of automated builds, it seems that this will save you tons of time if you use this instead of NAnt Prior to the engagement I had read Derick's article, Building .Net Systems with Ruby, Rake and Albacore , about the subject in this month's CODE magazine.  Let me tell you that the article does do the Albacore libraries justice.  The article is well written but for someone who does not know Ruby, the article went over my head. Derick did an outstanding job of taking us through all the steps in getting Albacore up an...

Lately I've been working extensively with XML, XSDs, CSS, HTML as well as JavaScript.  Why all the technologies at once, you ask.  Well I am in this XML graduate course.  The class name is XML and it covers it from every angle.  Like I said it covered pretty much every aspect of it, to include DTDs and XHTML. I've been having a blast in the past few days.  I can't believe I have been coding for so long without touching much of these technologies.  I had forgotten how much fun all these things outside of C# were. At first it was a little painful, I must admit.  The lack of familiriaty with the tools made me feel like I was handicapped at times.  I have built so much of a dependency on Visual Studio and the Plug In tools like R# that using plain text editors or other tools is quite laborious. After I got past most of that pain and became more acquainted with the languages (XSL, XPath, CSS, JavaScript), programm...

Ok, so I didn't think that WinDirStat deserved it's own blog entry and I wasn't going to enter it but since I quickly exceeded my Tweet limitation.  Here it is: I discovered WinDirStat the same day I discovered one note. You can find WinDirStat at http://windirstat.info/ . If you are not using this tool you should be. WinDirStat helps you identify where your hard drive space has gone. It also has some features to help you clean it.   WinDirStat categorizes your file comsumption into nice little compartments complete with color coding to enable you to quickly see where the biggest folders are.   All the different file types are color coded against a map view so you can easily see which types of files your query area contains. The best part about WinDirStat is that it is completely free (as in free beer). Enjoy!

So I am sitting at my desk today and as I am doing some research I decide that I need to take some notes.  My first thought was to pull my paper notepad and jot down some notes.   I am simple guy so I use notepad quite extensively for many simple tasks.   However, as I've gathered more and more information I have come to realized how inefficient this method of storing notes is.  For one I tend to forget where I stored something. For another I also tend to forget what I named a filed. So I though "Hey what if there was a notepad tool that could handle the management of notes for me". No not like the windows notepad.exe but like a real notepad where you could take notes on one page and save them.  Then you could come back to them, search them, re-read them, back them up, etc.  It would be extremely cool to delegate the management of files to something other than myself.  I started talking to a co-worker about it and he said "I'm sure that thi...

I have recently checked in a new project into code google. The project name came out of a play on words File Mover but since fimo would make the i sound kind of strange in my opinion. I changed the spelling to two e's instead so that the i could only be pronounced one way. Anyway, the concept behind Feemo is simple - to allow me to perform tedious repeatable folder manipulation tasks quickly and easily. I was recently inspired by Martin Fowler's talk on Domain Specific Languages(DSL) and therefore I decided to create it in a way that the DSL can specify the instructions and then the FeemoRunner can take over and process them. If you are interested in something like this, take a look at the project. Currently it is not ready for delivery it still has quite a way to go before it can be used but I project that I can get enough going to perform some of the basic operations like processing the clean folder commands and move folder commands in the very near future. I am also enr...

So not everyone can afford to shell out the money for the professional version of Visual Studio. That should not stop anyone from pursuing their passion or even satisfying their curiosity of developing in the dot net world. Recently a friend requested that I coach him on learning C# and OOP for a program that he wants to write. He has been programming, but his experience is mostly with a procedural language of some sort, classic VB and VBA I believe. He does not have Visual Studio Professional so he decided to go with C# 2008 Express Edition. Just so that I could coach him appropriately, I figured that we both needed to develop in the same environment. That way we could both work on the same project. This is mostly because C# Express projects cannot be opened by professional editions of Visual Studio and vise versa. You normally have to port over your projects manually from one to the other. You do this enough times and it becomes somewhat of a pain. Therefore we decided to stick with ...