Mike-Ward.Net

Friday Links #8

Opera 9.51 - Opera is the “other” browser that doesn’t get as much press as Firefox. It’s really fast and is a great alternative.

Intype we trust - Intype is a powerful and intuitive code editor for Windows with lightning fast response.

Paraffin 1.04 - If you’re using WiX, Paraffin can help you automate some of the setup chores. Written by John Robbins of Wintellect so you know it’s good.

Novel Solar Concentrator from MIT - More efficient solar panels by using a relatively simple trick.

Expression Blend and Design - Karen Corby is the Program Manager who worked with the Expression Blend team in developing the Visual State Manager feature. Karen has written four excellent and comprehensive blog posts (starting here) which explain the motivation for VSM, everything you can do with VSM and how it works under the covers, and how to build and skin a custom control. Even if you won’t be writing your own custom control, this is highly recommended material on the subject from someone who designs the platform itself.

ChipIn - The Easy Way to Raise Funds Online - Neat and free web app that allows you to raise money online easily and quickly - without a lot of complicated coding or hassles.

andLinux.org - Run Linux natively inside Windows.

Antarctica Once Abutted Death Valley - Science News has a story of strange bedfellows. It seems that Antarctica was once adjacent to what is now the American Southwest, some 800 million years ago.

Can someone tell me why i shouldn’t drop WCF? - Interesting article on batching WCF service calls.

Bug Shooting - The perfect screen capture utility for windows and it’s free.

Mofuse - Mofuse is discontinuing their pro accounts and giving them away for free. Mofuse is a web service dedicated to create mobile versions of blogs.

Scalable Fabric - Scalable Fabric is a task management system for the Windows desktop. Kind of cool.

Seven Essential Cheat Sheets - Keyboard shortcuts for many popular Web services.

nCleaner - A very nice system cleaning application that competes well with CCleaner.

Firefox Tip - Save multiple Web pages as MHT files. MHT files save web pages and all embedded graphics in a single file known as a Web archive. IE has supported this for years and now Firefox can do the same with this plugin.

Google Docs Template Gallery Launches - It’s about time.