't IsGoud

Google collects not just the bits and bytes on the internet but it also  publishes a great deal of the data collected in the real world. This so called Geo data is used in applications as Google Earth, Maps and Sketchup.

Last Thursday Google organized the first Dutch Geo Developer Day. I attended this Geo Day together with 250 other "Geo Developers". During  this day we heard more about the new features in the Google Maps API. and other Geo applications.

At AnAppADay, Dana Hanna mentioned a search engine for developers named Krugle.

I followed the link, did a basic search and I must say it looks really good. You can refine your search based on language, on project and some other criteria. Impressive!

On the other and we have the recently launched Google Code.

Code.google.com is a site for external developers interested in Google-related development.

It's hard to compare the two sites. Both are search engines but Google's focus is narrowed down to their own software development. In the presentation of the search results Krugle scores again.
Of course this is only a first impression of these sites but for now Krugle is my first choice.

UPDATE:
Google not only searches it's own code base no it can actually search throug all public sources with their "other" search engine Google Code Search.

Dana Hanna aka the Software Jedi is writing one application a day for a period of one month. He writes;

"May the world benefit from the purposeful destruction of my personal life."

You can follow the results of his work at AnAppADay. Only four days left to complete his quest.

The software development department where I work writes all software in a Virtual PC environment. Depending on the project this can be Windows 2000 with Visual Studio 2003, Windows 2003 with Visual Studio 2005 or even Linux with Eclipse.

The desktop machine where the Virtual PC with the development environment is running is still a basic office machine with the regular office applications and Virtual PC 2004. Based on the project the development environment is chosen. Sources are stored in a central SourceSafe repository. So it's very flexible.

Recently Microsoft released the white paper "Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 Development and Debugging". This document gives a lot of tips and tricks an explains in detail some of the more advanced areas. It's a must read for developers who want to start developing with Virtual PC but also a great startpoint for those that just want to try out Virtual PC.

Console is a command line client with some interesting features like; tabs, shortcut keys, transparency and a lot more ...

For example four tabs with four different command prompts:

With the release of Windows Vista six new TrueType fonts will be released. The fonts have exotic names like Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas (monotype), Constantina and Corbela. These six new fonts are optimized for Clear Type.

One of these fonts -Consolas, a monotype font- is made available for users of Visual Studio 2005 (Download here 4.3MB Note: Visual Studio 2005 is a requirement!).
Consolas is intended for use in programming environments and other circumstances where a monospaced
font is specified. The installation package sets the default font for Visual Studio to Consolas.

Everybody who has read codesamples in whatever language will encounter the famous words "Foo", "Bar" and "Foobar". Did your mind wander of on trying to find the meaning of these words? I remember it confused me as I was looking for a deeper meaning.

Well last monday my colleague Michiel send me this link to the Etymology of "Foo". I first couldn't believe it. There is an actual RFC document on these words.

Wesner Moise posted about a development talk given by Scott Guthrie.

Scott Guthrie's provided a behind the scenes walkthrough of how software is built at Microsoft, showed the real schedule, design docs, code, test plan and cases which were used and how they were built.

Scott Guthrie is founder and product unit manager of the ASP.NET and VS Web Tool teams at Microsoft.

Great article on the inner workings of ASP.NET from Rick Strahl:

This article looks at how Web requests flow through the ASP.NET framework from a very low level perspective, from Web Server, through ISAPI all the way up the request handler and your code. See what happens behind the scenes and stop thinking of ASP.NET as a black box.

Sometime ago I was browsing some weblogs and found some really nice tips on how to enhance your commandline experience.

• Use F7, shows commandline history
• Use pushd and popd
• Change your prompt to $P$_$+$G, displays the pusd stackdepth and gives you a full line for your commandline input
• Another wild prompt: [%computername%] $d$s$t$_$p$_$_$+$g

The “Productivity Enhancements” in Visual Studio 2005 are just overwhelming.