.net and other musings

Wow unzipping files in Vista is slow! Luckily there are of course many alternative unzipping solutions. WinZip seems to suffer the same performance issues as the default Vista unzipper, or at least it does for me, your mileage may vary of course.

The best one I’ve found is 7-Zip licensed under LGPL. Get it here.

Since I always seem to lose this and take forever to find it (hidden deep down within the Apache project website) here is a link to the VTL reference!

I’ve added a link to my feed (via FeedBurner) and its showing 0 readers, which to be honest makes me kinda sad! I’ve got no idea how many people are subscribed to my WordPress feed – hence the introduction of a feedburner one.

If you could spare a few minutes and update your readers? Mucho appreciado!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/benl

If you’re a Windows user and haven’t tried a proper install of Ubuntu (not Live CD), shame on you! Especially now there’s no excuse not to thanks to Wubi. Wubi is a Windows based installer for Ubuntu which magically installs the OS as a folder on your regular Windows partition. Removing it is as simple as deleting a folder in Windows. Nice.

During installation Wubi will search for an ISO of the alternate Ubuntu 7.04 install disc, if you have it saved locally alongside the installer it will use the ISO, or else go to a default (read slow) mirror to download. I recommend you torrent the alternate install ISO first for obvious reasons.

Compatible with Windows XP currently. No Vista support!

Seems i'm a little slow on this but ReSharper 2.0 has gone gold. I've been using it since the early beta and must say i'm impressed. The main plus to me is finally getting the 'green bar' in VS.NET (TestDriven.net displays test results as text).

I'm not sure why but there's definitely some psychological benefit of seeing the green/red bar when running unit tests!

As well as unit testing support, this new version adds a few new refactorings, editor support for Nant, MSBuild and ASP.NET files.

While we're on the subject of RoR – I've found this Ruby on Rails Reference to be a great help…