I recently read that there was an beta version of Windows Live Writer out.  I made a note of it as I wanted to make sure that BlogEngine.NET 1.4 (coming very soon) would work fine with the latest release of this great product.

I had kind of forgotten about the update until tonight as I was working through my testing list and came across Live Writer.  Anyway, once I got it installed and fired up, I was really pleased with what I saw.

The best feature as I see it is the preview tab.  Down at the bottom of the post entry window are 3 tabs.  Edit (which is the typical entry place we are used to), Preview (which shows you what your blog post will look like in your blog), and Source (which as you guessed, shows your html).  The preview worked perfect for me.  I was a bit shocked to be honest.

There is now some image cropping/minor editing as part of the package so I will no longer need to use another program to make minor tweaks to my pictures.  In addition, there are a few new image border options to give things a nicer look as well.

There is a bunch of other things that are new as well.  Lifehacker has a nice overview article that includes the rest of the new features.  It is worth checking out.

I've been asked a few times recently about my Visual Studio look and decided to share about it here.  Visual Studio gives the developer a lot of control over how the development environment looks.  From my experience, only a small percentage of people actually take advantage of it, but it is sometimes nice to change things up a bit.

Finding a Theme

The easiest way to give Visual Studio a "makeover" is to download someone else's custom Visual Studio theme and import it into your environment.  My current theme is based on Ragnarok Grey by Tomas Restrepo.  Tomas is a master dev environment themer and has made a bunch of Visual Studio themes.  That said, the best place to start looking for your theme is likely at Scott Hanselman's VS Theme gallery post.  Scott has put together a nice list of VS Themes along with pictures and links.

Installing a Theme

Once you've found a theme that you like and found a download link, you should have a .vssettings file.  (Note: Make sure you get the file for the version of Visual Studio you are using.  They can be converted, but that is another topic.)

Now, you simply need to import it in Visual Studio.  Luckily, there is a simple Visual Studio wizard to walk you through the process and make a backup of your current settings should you want to go back to what you have now.

The wizard is found under the Tools menu and the option is called Import and Export Settings.  In 3 simple steps, you chose import settings, save your theme (or skip), and then browse out to find your downloaded theme and apply it.

Customizing a Theme

The changes from a downloaded theme can be pretty dramatic and you might want to tweak it a bit.  You might want the font size smaller or larger.  Maybe just a different font.  You might all find that you have some things that just don't look nice.

Head on into options (Tools...Options) and make the changes that you need.  The Fonts and Colors sections gives you a nice preview of what you'll be getting for the different types of items.

My theme

As I mentioned earlier, I've been using pretty much the stock Ragnorak Grey theme.  I have made a few small changes for ReSharper 4.0 EAP.  The theme didn't cover the ReSharper Styles and a few of them were just unreadable.  So if you a ReSharper guy or gal, you'll likely need to check those ReSharper display items and make sure they are readable in the theme you choose.

I recently picked up a new laptop.  After getting Vista installed, I made list of everything I'd need to get started.  Most were from my head as I use many of these things daily, while others I noticed from my work machine, after I had made the list.

Software

• Camtasia Studio - I use this for my screencasts now.  I love this program.
• Daemon Tools Lite - ISO support is always needed, especially around installing time.
• Digsby - This is my IM client of choice these days.  I wish the twitter support was better though.
• FireFox - Do I need to say anything else?  This has its own section below.
• FoxIt Reader - Much nicer than Adobe Acrobat Reader for my needs.
• Guild Wars - One game to rule them all...
• Live Writer - The best blogging tool I've seen yet.
• NotePad++ - My text editor of choice these days.
• Office - Word, Excel, PowerPoint,... you know the drill.
• Paint.NET - A great free .NET based graphics program.
• PDF Creator - Great for making PDFs.
• Skype - IM and Voice chat.  A must have tool these days.
• SQL Server - It is an occupational hazard.
• UltraMon - Multi-monitor support at its best.
• Visual Studio - Both 2005 and 2008 installed.
• VMWare Workstation - I prefer it to Virtual PC.
• Window Clippings - A nice little screenshot maker.
• WinZip - I know there are lots of others but this is what I'm using.  With all the other new stuff on my box, you can consider this my "comfort food" software.
• Witty - My Twitter client of the day.  The current beta works fine or me, but I'm not completely sold yet.  It is .NET based and open source, so I could look into the changes I'd like to see, I guess.

Development Specific Things

• ASP.NET MVC - An alternative to ASP.NET Web Forms in its current state.
• MbUnit - Unit Testing Framework of choice.  (I'm interested in trying xUnit, but I haven't yet.)
• Ragnarok Grey (VS Theme) - My current favorite Visual Studio theme.  Both for VS2005 and VS2008
• ReSharper - A awesome tool.  I've been using the early 4.0 with 2008.  So far, so good.
• Rhino Mocks- Mock objects anyone? While it doesn't need installed per se, I like to have the files in a known place.
• SVN Bridge - The only way to use Subversion at CodePlex.
• TestDriven.NET - Great testing add in
• Tortoise SVN - Great Subversion Client
• Visual SVN - TortoiseSVN that works perfectly inside Visual Studio
• WinMerge - Nice Comparison Utility

Browser Specific things

• IE Extensions
  • IE Developer Toolbar
  • Fiddler
• FireFox Extenions
  • Adblock Plus
  • Download Statusbar
  • Firebug
  • FireFTP
  • IETab
  • Remember the Milk for Gmail
  • Web Developer Toolbar

Well, that is what I've downloaded and setup to start.  I have a lot more stuff installed elsewhere, but I decided to start with the basics and add things as I need them.  I'm sure there will be plenty of adding over the next few weeks.  If I've completely missed something that I shouldn't be living without, you can let me know in the comments.

Over the past week, I've spent some time on the BlogEngine.NET APIs.  Specifically, the Metaweblog API and some similar API calls.  What this means to the average person is simply that the next version of BlogEngine.NET will have some new features to take advantage of in Windows Live Writer (WLW) and possibly other software.  (BlogEngine.NET 1.3 is due out later this month.)

The thing I've been asked the most about is the ability to add new categories from inside of WLW.  With BlogEngine.NET 1.3 (and the current build on CodePlex), you can begin to do that.  Now when you click on the categories dropdown, the top option is a text box allowing you to add a new category.  The category will be added when you publish your post.  I've also added in the ability to control comments (on or off), set the slug of a post and enter an excerpt.  These items can be access by pressing F2 or displaying the properties, under the View menu.

The other big change was support for pages.  Pages have been getting more and more attention in BlogEngine.NET and now you can add/edit/delete them from inside WLW.  To work with Pages in WLW, you can click File, then select New Page.  The window changes a bit as pages have different features in WLW, but from here you can create a new page.  We also support the ability to select a page parent from inside WLW.  The File, Open can now be used to not only pull back recent post from your blog, but also all your pages from your blog.  This should make editing and managing your pages inside of WLW a breeze.

I'll likely post more information on using these new features sometime down the road, but I wanted to write and share a bit of what I've been working on.

As I needed to reinstall my development environment, I decided to try out the recent Subversion access for CodePlex projects instead of the standard Visual Studio Team Explorer and Team Foundation Server access.  The TFS access is just not ideal for me and figured since I use TortoiseSVN at work and for any home projects, I'd like to try to use it for CodePlex work as well.

The CodePlex team has come up with a project called SvnBridge which as the name implies acts as a bridge between the TFS server and any Subversion client.  Running the executable gives a little window allowing you to choose what local http port to your for the bridge and a place to enter which TFS server you need to access.  Once you click Ok, a blue icon appears in the notification area (down by the clock) to signify that the bridge is running.

Now you can use the Subversion client of your choice to pull your data from TFS.  I initially used TortoiseSVN and performed a Checkout.  The server I gave was simply http://localhost:8082/blogengine which is my localhost with the port I specified above and the project name on the bridged server I wish to download.  The initial checkout took a minute to get started by then acted just like I would have expected.  Actually, other than the initial download delay on my projects, I have not noticed any speed issues so far.  (It is not local access fast, but it seems at least as fast as TFS was for me.)

That is really all there is to it.  Once you have done, your initial check out, you are ready to go.  For CodePlex commits, you use your CodePlex username with the _cp on the end just like you use with the TFS access.

One last neat option to the SvnBridge is that it takes command arguments.

svnbridge.exe <TFS address> <port>

You can supply only the TFS address and it will default to port 8081 or you can just specify an address.  I made shortcuts with my ports and addresses so I can quickly get the bridge running when I'm working on a project.  (Unfortunately, I need multiples since I have projects on more than one server on CodePlex.)

My experience as been great so far.  I really prefer to have everything in the codebase with write access by default verses the TFS/VSS model.  In the CodePlex example, I no longer have to wait for the system to check out the files I need every time I need to make a change (especially something small in the web.config or a settings file that I just plan to change back anyway.)

Another thing I hadn't thought about that I really liked about the experience was additional files.  Now I can have additional files in my project without TFS always trying to add them into the project.  New files are not checked in by default and I can leave them outside CodePlex if I choose.

The only downside I can see is the lack of seeing file status inside Visual Studio by default as you can with the TFS setup.  However, VisualSVN gets you around this downside (if you consider it a downside.)  I just wrote about the server piece yesterday, and today I'm mentioning the client.  VisualSVN gives great Tortoise style SVN access right inside Visual Studio Solution explorer.  It is a very nice product and they give free licenses to active open source developers to use for their project.  Without the Open source connection, the product costs $49, and now that I'm used to it, I'm expecting to pickup a license for work as it seems odd to be without it.