I’m kind of a tool freak, and when mouse gestures were added in some browsers, I really felt they added value.
I was interested in using gestures in more applications (like Visual Studio) and found the tool ‘StrokeIt’. It is a great tool, fast, accurate, highly configurable and when I introduce it to team members they tend to giggle. So that’s all cool.

However, it does not work well with UAC and X64, much to the dismay of many users on the strokeIt forums. The tool hasn’t been updated since 2005, so that does not bode well.

Now I have found gMote and it is everything I could ever ask for (well, except for a more fun name).
It works very well and has a very nice workflow for defining gestures and assigning tasks for it. I already setup gestures for navigating tabs, paging up and down, minimizing windows and closing tabs/windows.

One tip: I used to use the right mouse button to draw gestures, but that seems to work less reliable. Instead, I now use the middle mouse button.

Go and download gMote now! I couldn’t be happier.

I installed IE8 beta 2 yesterday and it rocks. It is much faster than IE7, seems rock stable (fingers crossed) and has all kind of nifty new features. It has taken away my need for Firefox at the moment.

In FF I had a button that allowed me to subscribe to a blog in google reader and it works in Internet explorer as well:

javascript:var%20b=document.body;var%20GR________bookmarklet_domain='http://www.google.com';if(b&&!document.xmlVersion){void(z=document.createElement('script'));void(z.src='http://www.google.com/reader/ui/subscribe-bookmarklet.js');void(b.appendChild(z));}else{location='http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/'+encodeURIComponent(location.href)}

Basically, you can navigate to a page with a blog in it and just press this bookmark. It will open up reader and it will show you the feed it finds.

But, given those cool accelerators in IE8, I thought it would be a nice exercise to create an accelerator that I can click when I am on a blog.
Here it is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<os:openServiceDescription

    xmlns:os="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">

    <os:homepageUrl>http://www.google.com</os:homepageUrl>

    <os:display>

        <os:name>Subscribe to rss feed </os:name>

        <os:description>View the feed in google reader</os:description>

    </os:display>

    <os:activity category="Blog">

        <os:activityAction context="document">

            <os:execute action="http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/{documentUrl}" method="get">

            </os:execute>

        </os:activityAction>

    </os:activity>

</os:openServiceDescription>  

Since the accelerator api will not recognize an url like this: http://www.sitechno.com/Blog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss as a ‘Link’, I had to use the document context. When you install this accelerator, you can navigate to the actual feed and then rightclick anywhere in the page. There should be an option to ‘subscribe to rss feed’ and hitting that will take you to google.

These accelerators have potential: it was very simple to write this and it is well integrated into IE. I hope they extend it so we can get accelerators to work on more ‘stuff’!

Install googlereader subscription accelerator

I'm working on a sweet project at the moment using both WPF and WF. One of my custom activities has a property of type Type, where it would be cool for the user of the activity to be able to use the designer to select a type, just like what happens in the WF designer when I choose a type. However, no type picker popped up.

So I went googling and found that Daniel Cazzulino also ran into this problem and created a fantastic little project to harness the power of the real WF typebrowser. He writes about it on this blogpost and later moves the project to code project. You can find the article and his download code here.

However, as you can read in the comments, something was broken. Looking through the code, although small, made me not want to waste time on understanding the System.ComponentModel namespace in that much detail at this point (although, when working with WF, you will soon need to customize property pickers, so I will have to look into it someday soon).
Daniel himself points to the Patterns and Practises entlib library: they offer the same functionality. I downloaded their sourcecode, and I'm quite sure they just used Daniels code and improved upon it a bit. However, with all the Entlib references, the project felt a bit heavy.

What I have done is rip out all the references to entlib that I do not care about, used a few files from Daniels original solution and worked around a few shortcomings. Nothing fancy, I just hacked at it until it worked.

Now, since I have used some code (without license) by Daniel and code by the Entlib group, I'm not sure if I can publish a derivative without getting into problems. However, I've read their license, and I think it's okay.

You can download the project here, don't ask for changes because I'm not interested in spending more time on it. All credits go to Daniel.

(Also, find out how to create your own typefilters in his post).

Have fun with it. Leave a comment if you find it useful.

I've completely rewritten the RssBandit to Grazr converter, so that alphabetic order is used. That looks way nicer, doesn't it?

Program.cs (4.49 KB)

People that know me, know that I love Resharper. They now have a 2.0 version for Visual Studio 2005 and my bet is that I will love it as soon as I try it. But there was always one thing that I disliked about Resharper: the caching of the solution took ages on big projects.

Visual Studio 2005 gives us some refactoring tools and code snippets. Although they lack the power of Resharper, they will do for me. But what I can not live without is the fast code navigation that Resharper brought us. Their type navigator works instantly and that feels so incredibly smooth and silky, I just can't do without.
The last couple of months, I have used a new free tool that brings the instant navigation power without the caching costs. DPack has been pushed to the limits and performed incredibly.

Of course, I still miss a few Resharper features, such as 'find all references', which is light years ahead of the Visual Studio offering. But the speed of which my solutions now open does seem to make it up.

Try it, you might like it.