First public Release of PhotoImporter

PhotoImporter is a small tool for importing digital photos from memory cards to the local hard disc. During the import PhotoImporter groups the photos in days (so called PhotoDays) and asks the user for descriptions of that days. That’s it, not more not less Your critics and comments to the tool are most welcome…

Download PhotoImporter 0.3 here

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Requirements: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
Tested under Windows XP Professional SP2, Windows Vista

Cool Tool: Copy Source As HTML

When I was trying to post some source code in wordpress (or any other publishing system with browser based rich-editors) I ran into serious problems with formatting of the code. The worst case was that the code was so fractioned by the editor that the layout of the blog was totally broken.

After a little search in the web I found a cool tool for Visual Studio Developers: CopySourceAsHtml (CSAH)! With this Add-On available for both Visual Studio 2003 & 2005 you can grab the code directly from within the Visual Studio editor and paste it as HTML into the source code view of your blog editor.

The Add-On has several config options to make it suite your needs. For me this is the best (and most stable) solution for publishing my source code snippets on the web. Maybe you have a better one? Tell me in your comments…

You can get the tool here:
http://www.jtleigh.com/people/colin/software/CopySourceAsHtml/

Create an MD5 sum of a string

Use this little static method to create an MD5 hash from a string instance:

/// <summary>

/// Create an md5 sum string of this string

/// </summary>

/// <param name=”str”>the input string</param>

/// <returns>the md5 hash of the input string</returns>

static private string GetMd5Sum(string str)

{

// First we need to convert the string into bytes, which

// means using a text encoder.

Encoder enc = System.Text.Encoding.Unicode.GetEncoder();

 

// Create a buffer large enough to hold the string

byte[] unicodeText = new byte[str.Length * 2];

enc.GetBytes(str.ToCharArray(), 0, str.Length, unicodeText, 0, true);

 

// Now that we have a byte array we can ask the CSP to hash it

MD5 md5 = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider();

byte[] result = md5.ComputeHash(unicodeText);

 

// Build the final string by converting each byte

// into hex and appending it to a StringBuilder

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

for (int i=0;i<result.Length;i++)

{

sb.Append(result[i].ToString(“X2″));

}

 

// And return it

return sb.ToString();

}

Rock & Rule

without words…

Enable Visual Styles on Windows 2003 Server

Why? Imagine you have a development system (in my case on a VMWare Virtual Machine) based on Windows 2003 Server (don’t ask why I have a server OS for developing applications ). When developing and designing Windows Forms Applications with the standard look and feel you will be surprised about the disrupted design when your application runs under Windows XP.

weiterlesen…

First Screenshots of my new tool: PhotoImporter

After some days of trouble getting the application running on Windows Vista, here are the first preview Screenshots of my new tool “PhotoImporter”. This tool is intended to import any photos on a memory card when it is inserted in the card reader.

View the Screenshot Gallery

Using Get-Member for learning Powershell

One of the most powerful commands for learning-by-doing users is Get-Member. This command dumps out the members of the different object types that come out from several CmdLets.

PS C:\Users\achim> dir | Get-Member

With this command you get all members of System.IO.DirectoryInfo which is the returned object type of the dir-command. This information helps you in creating statements like foreach-loops and such stuff. For example you now know that each DirectoryInfo-object has a member named CreationTime:

dir | ForEach-Object -process { echo $_.FullName $_.CreationTime }

A little trap in using operators

Yesterday I ran into an ugly trap on Powershell. I tried to concat two strings directly in an echo statement but the result was somewhat confusing:

PS C:\Documents and Settings\Achim Schrepfer> echo "foo" + "bar"
foo
+
bar


But then I remembered the good old times of Bash Shellscripts and found out the right way for string concatenation:


PS C:\Documents and Settings\Achim Schrepfer> $output = "foo" + "bar"; echo $output
foobar
PS C:\Documents and Settings\Achim Schrepfer>

Ed & Fred

You may ask “who are Ed & Fred” and what have they to do with Espresso (see the post-category). Well Ed & Fred are two squirrels and play the mascot for www.nuss24.de. This is an online portal for delicacies from coffee and espresso over fine roasted nuts right up to chai tea and chocolate.

weiterlesen…

Illy Espresso

A few weeks ago I bought a box of this sort of espresso coffee. Normally I use whole beans but in this case I wanted to try out the finely ground coffee. I think that Elly would taste very fine but my espresso machine has not enough power (i.e. pressure) for this fine coffee powder. So next time I try the whole beans or I buy a new Espresso machine