Happy New Year!! Yeah, i know its kinda late for that but i only got back last weekend from a nice long holiday back home in India so as far as i am concerned the year is just starting.
It was heartening for me to see that BizUnitExtensions has clocked over 250 downloads and the downloads for the VSTemplates and AddIns are approaching the century mark. I promised before i went on hols that there would be new release of Extensions when i got back and i havent forgotten. There will be one soon. My colleagues have added more extensions and are keen to share them with the rest of the community so I need to add the code in to the restructured library. It shouldnt take long but you never know. I opened VS the other day and promptly closed it, unable to think of anything useful to code as I’m currently wearing my Microsoft Word power user hat. Bear with me for a little while till I overcome my holiday hangover and coding inertia.
I did come across a couple of really nice free tools namely a Flash Saving Plugin for IE and a SWF Opener (and SWF Cache Viewer) all available from BrowserTools. I went hunting for a flash video download tool cos theres lots of good tech videos on many sites but all in flash format and not being able to save them and view them at leisure is a bit of a drag. I found some shareware flash rippers too, but this plugin seems to be the easiest to use and the quality of the original file is more or less well preserved.
I’m starting to look more closely at the Clarius MetaFactory now. I had a look at it earlier and it seemed to be a pretty neat piece of tooling and it does seem to be the easiest entry point into the world of GAT and Factories. I have to get started in migrating my VSTemplates and AddIns into full fledged guidance packages and i have a feeling its going to be an indispensable tool for that. I’ll be writing a series on VSX – (Visual Studio Extensibility) very soon to document my foray into this area.
More soon.
