My Development Computer 2017

Here are the essential tools I put in my seven years old personal laptop for my application development during evening and weekend as of July 2017. Most of them are open source and free. My other development machine at work is much better and powerful than this (Intel i7 CPU and 16GB RAM).

1. Mozilla Firefox
2. Google Chrome
3. Notepad++ is a free  source code text editor.
4. WinMerge for compare and merge files.
5. 7-Zip (Compress and decompress files)
6. KeePass the free, open source, light-weight and easy-to-use password manager. I don't need to remember password for each web sites or applications.
7. Python 3.6  This programming language is powerful and fast. According to TIOBE Index for July 2017, Python is one of top five popular programming languages. 
8. LibreOffice is a powerful free, open source and cross platform office suite. I used it on other PC Windows, my MacBook Pro, and Ubuntu Linux.
9. SQL Server 2016 SP1 Developer Edition SQL Server Developer Edition is a free download for Visual Studio Dev Essentials members and for development and testing only, and not for production environments or for use with production data per Microsoft SQL Server blog
10. Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2017 (Free version for an individual developer or small business, not for corporate)
11. Microsoft Visual Studio Code. This is free, open source, and runs everywhere. It loaded faster than Visual Studio.
12. Git for Windows. It's a free and open source distributed version control system.
13. Node.js® is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine.
14. VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
15. Greenshot is the most awesome tool for making screenshots you can get on your Windows PC. It's is better than built-in application Snipping Tools. I can blackout or obscure portion of screen easily.
16. FileZilla® Open source FTP software.

In addition to C# and Microsoft SQL Server, I will spend my spare time to work on Python and Node.js.

How to disable Adobe Flash in FireFox, Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer

Adobe Flash is a nice product and essential tool to surf the web. However, it have big security issues recently. Many security experts recommend not install it. I cannot get rid of Adobe Flash since sometime I need it. So, I make a change to browser to enable them on demand.

Firefox: Type "about:addons" on address bar or Ctrl-Shift-A to manage Add-ons and set "Shockwave Flash to "Ask to Activate"

Google Chrome: Type "chrome://plugins/" on address bar

Safari: Go to References -> Security -> Click on "Plug-in Settings..." next to "Internet Plug-in" check box.

Internet Explorer: Internet Options -> Program -> "Manage Add-on" button

Using Visual Studio 2013 Preview and Team Foundation Service

Back to Microsoft Windows stuff. To maintain my program skills, I alway learn a new thing, practice what I learn and review what I did. This time I work with ASP.NET by using Visual Studio 2013 Preview on Microsoft Windows 8.1 Preview with Microsoft Team Foundation Service, a free TFS on the cloud.

Learning ColdFusion 10

Temporary hold my current projects: Microsoft C# ASP.NET MVC and Google Android Demo App for a week to try out Adobe® ColdFusion® 10 Developer edition and MySQL 5.6.12. I love the opportunity to learn a new thing.

Install Adobe ColdFusion 10 Developer edition on Microsoft Windows.

Install MySQL 5.6.12

Using GitHub on Windows for version control.

Error when add the StoreManagerController on MVC Music Store Tutorial Part 5

When I followed the MVC Music Store Tutorial using Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web on Windows 8, I got this error:

Unable to retrieve metadata for 'MusicStore.Models.Album'. Using the same DbCompiledModel to create context against different types of database servers is not supported. Instead, create a separate DbCompiledModel for each type of server being used.

No idea. Let google for a solution. Here a solution from ITorian (http://www.itorian.com/2012/10/unable-to-retrieve-metadata-for.html) :

After I delete this line in web.config, it worked: 

     connectionString="Data Source=|DataDirectory|MvcMusicStore.sdf"

     providerName="System.Data.SqlServerCe.4.0"/>

Thank the author of ITorian.com.

Want to use AJAX in Classic ASP 3.0 web application?

You have a Classic ASP 3.0 web application and would like to utilize the latest web technology AJAX. How? Here a good tool: ajaxed. It's not only good but it's great since it's free and is open source.

Make sure you're using "include virtual" instead of "include file" when you got this error message like below. For security reason, do not use parent path.

IIS Links

Using NET STOP and NET START commands to force IIS services to re-read the registry
How to load balance a Web server farm by using one SSL certificate in IIS 6.0 and in IIS 5.0
Internet Information Server returns IP address in HTTP header (Content-Location)
FIX: IP address is revealed in the content-location field in the TCP header in IIS 6.0
Coding Horror
PC Magazines: Top web sites