Topics:  Free MS ebooks, Xamarin podcast, cloud server in 55 sec., squash your PNGs, Heartbleed fallout, RDP from Android.

• Former co-worker @_Shakeel passed along some free e-books being offered by Microsoft Virtual Academy.
• @munificentbob announced his free online book, Game Programming Patterns.
• I keep finding more and more Xamarin community resources. This week it was their podcast on SoundCloud.
• Also, useful for cross-platform development: Notes on Using Various PCL Profiles with Xamarin (via @WindowsAppDev)
• Cloud hosting service DigitalOcean advertises you can spin up a new “droplet” (i.e. VM) in 55 seconds, and has what looks to be a pretty reasonable pricing structure.
• Do you know what your TRAQ score is? Online comic Devil’s Panties (“not satanic porn!”) has a good write up about their ad revenue tanking after improperly getting flagged as an adult site.
• If you’re working on web pages be sure to check out these handy CSS tips.
• In the wake of Heartbleed the OpenBSD community is refactoring OpenSSL “one arcane VMS hack at a time.” (via Dan)
• Meanwhile, a security firm reports many Android apps (mostly games) are vulnerable to Heartbleed and most scanning apps are doing it wrong, but don’t tell us which ones are doing it right. (via Re/Code)

Tools, etc.

• Color Scheme Designer is a great online tool for generating/exploring color palettes.
• And while we’re talking design, Scott Hanselman reminds us to squish our image files – Trimage is a handy app to do that on Linux, Windows and Mac.
• Did you know Google has a Remote Desktop tool for Chrome? Well, now it’s available for Android too.

Projects, etc.

• Less than 30 days left in the FoodStats app fundraiser. We’re at $250 now. Pledge as little as a $1 or as much as you feel like – every little bit helps. Or just help spread the word: Use the share buttons on the campaign site or give this easier-to-remember URL to friends, family and those who might be interested: http://tiny.cc/foodstats
• Released an initial alpha version of Commit Message Editor – a simple, cross-platform GUI editor for commit messages in Git. The goal is to provide a light-weight editor with key features useful for writing commit messages. (This was a request from my friend and former co-worker Jonathan.)

Topics: Telecommuting tips, Heartbleed tools, the end of crapware?, Git tutorials, free education, ideas into products, humanize numbers, better Datetimes, a Git GUI.

• The Pluralsight blog has some good tips for those working from home.
• If you’ve been under a rock and haven’t heard, make sure you’ve updated OpenSSL on all your computers.
  • If you’re a LastPass user, they now have a report that will tell you which of the sites you have accounts on have patched the bug.
  • GRC (host of the Security Now podcast) has an online tool that will tell you if your browser is properly recognizing revoked SSL certificates.
• SweetLabs is working with PC vendors to replace OEM-installed crapware with a recommendation-based app store solution, letting developers sell their apps directly.
• The fledgeling OneGet community has apparently pushed to get the repository moved to Github. (via @fearthecowboy)
• Discovered that Atlassian has a nice set of Git tutorials and resources online.
• The Free Technology Academy offers free education in “Free Software, Standards and Hardware“.
• Local developer @EliThompson passed along an interesting new guide coming out soon: How to Transform Ideas into Software Products from Femgineer. Sign up to be notified when the guide is published and you can participate in a free e-mail course to get feedback on your idea.

Tools, etc.

• Wow. Humanizer is a .NET library that provides a mind-boggling array of ways to convert “strings, enums, dates, times, timespans, numbers and quantities” into more human-friendly text. (via Scott Hanselman)
• Scott also recommends Noda Time as a better library than what’s provided with the .NET Framework.
• Looking for a GUI for Git and/or Mercurial? Source Tree is a free download from Atlassian.

Projects, etc.

• Working on something, which I hope to announce the next day or two. Stay tuned….

Topics: MS tech webinar, image multi-tool, call for developers, code review tools, PhpStorm.

• I’m not planning to go to //build, but am thinking about seeing if I can convince work to let me watch the day-long Building Blocks: Initialize() Jump Start to get up to speed on the current state of Microsoft techniques.
• The QUnit website not only has a good Introduction to Unit Testing tutorial, but it’s a great discussion of how and why to organize your Javascript code in a more object-oriented way.
• Job seekers, heard about Freelancer this week from our intern. What I found particularly interesting is that in addition to listing Projects they also have a category called Contests.
• If you’re looking for an open source project to help with:
  • A Mac port of the wonderful AxCrypt for Windows has put out a call for developers. (C#, Mono)
  • The site Up For Grabs maintains a list of projects with “curated tasks specifically for new contributors”. (via @shanselman)

Tools

• Not only might PicPick become my new go-to screenshot tool, but it also has a color picker, magnifier, ruler, whiteboard and more. A veritable Swiss Army tool of quick image management.
• Review Assistant, by Devart, is a Visual Studio extension I plan to evaluate for our team; code reviews are something we want to do, but have struggled with finding the right process.
• For PHP development I continue to be more and more impressed with the PhpStorm IDE. This week I discovered that it includes support for integrating with a number of issue tracking services.

Topics: Incentivizing software issues, free images for your blog, testing Javascript, automating browser tests.

• I think Donay has a really compelling idea, but I ran into a lot of problems with their site just trying to get an account set up. Maybe if more people express an interest in being able to ask for and provide incentives for project features/issues… I hope they can get some momentum going and turn it into something workable. Spread the word!
• Bountysource is another service that lets people set bounties on existing Github issues they’d like completed. Visit my profile.
• GettyImages strikes a good balance between copyright, intellectual property and fair use: Embed images for free in a non-commercial context.
• I’m always looking for ways to increase productivity by automating processes. This week’s NuGet Package of the Week from Scott Hanselman shows how to use FluentAutomation (I love “fluent” syntax!) with Selenium and scriptcs to automate browser testing.

Tools

• There’ve been a lot of windowing enhancement add-ons over the years; the new Preme for Windows looks pretty feature rich, with some useful hotkeys.

Coding, projects, etc.

• Been studying up on the current state of unit testing with Javascript, including Jasmine and QUnit.
  A few good tutorials:
  • Testing your Javascript with Jasmine on Tuts+.
  • Unit test Javascript applications with Jasmine on Adobe’s Developer Connection.

If you’d like to support this blog and the work I do in general, I now have an Amazon Wishlist with hardware, software, etc. that I need. More options and information are coming soon.

NOTE: I’m moving the posting day/time for the weekly roundup to Monday morning. Hopefully that will make it a little more visible as well as giving me the weekend to wrap up the content.

• The current stable version of Entity Framework (EF6) now supports mocking the database context – which is allowing me to update the CtcApi so that unit tests do not require the database.
  • Oh, and if you’re working with the Entity Framework you should be using LINQPad. Even if you don’t use EF, it’s still a great minimalist C# editor/compiler – test out snippets of code outside of the complexity of your project.
• Code for Seattle – “Developers, designers, data geeks, leaders, artists, and idea-makers who help Seattle government and civic organizations adopt open web technologies.” (via Seattle Transit Blog)
• Did you know you can use your Android smartphone to contribute to distributed research projects now? (via GeekWire article)
• Microsoft has a new online source code browser (beta) for the parts of the .NET Framework that have been open sourced.
• Read an old, but interesting interview with the CEO of a very successful, commercial WordPress forms management plugin on how licensing under the GPL has been beneficial for them.
• Game Developerz sounds like a fun new card game – comes recommended by a former boss, co-founder of Humongous Entertainment. Its Kickstarter has a little over a month to go.
• On the job-hunting front, GET /api-jobs looks like a useful stream of API-related job postings from a variety of sources.
• If you’re a C# developer interested in learning – or even just curious about – Python, I highly recommend the JetBrainsTV video Python for the C# developer.

Tools

• Friend of a friend, Robert shared MTR – a better traceroute for *nix. I also found WinMTR; unfortunately there’s not a Chocolatey package available.
• I’m not quite as late to this party as Eli is, but certainly late enough to have missed Scott Hanselman’s post about SlowCheetah. Previews for my Visual Studio configuration transforms? Yes please! (Scott’s most recent blog post is also very much worth reading and sharing.)
• I’ve recently needed to start watching my blood glucose levels. Today I discovered Nutritionix, which provides free nutrition information (including calculators for many restaurants) and an available API. Access to the API includes a free tier and they state that freeware mobile apps can get a bump in that access for no charge.

Projects, coding, etc.

• We’ve been migrating a lot of college sites to a newly-established WordPress platform. This week I’m getting familiar with Gravity Forms to help with that effort. (PHP)
• Been helping out (and working towards the offered bounty) a Stackoverflow user having trouble programmatically writing to Active Directory. (C#)

Just finished watching the ReSharper Secrets video on the JetBrainsTV channel on YouTube. Several good tips there. Definitely worth watching. The presenter spends the bulk of the time talking about Annotations – which are how ReSharper works a lot of its magic and are now available to us for decorating our own code. He closes by sharing a few of his own favorite features he thinks are not very well known. I didn’t know most of them.

• My friend Dan recently asked
  

  Has anyone already written the code to use the AVR on the Gertboard for the Raspberry Pi as a simple GPIO expansion/demux?

  I don’t have an answer for him, but maybe you do, or know somebody who does?

• Seattle to sport one of the first Bitcoin ATMs in the U.S.
• SQRL (Secure Quick Reliable Login) – from Steve Gibson, the host of Security Now – aims to replace username/password login for websites. This is an open project, being worked on by Steve along with fans and followers.
• I’ve used Console2, and fairly recently heard about clink and ConEmu, but sweet monkey sundae! I finally saw a screencast of ConEmu in action. Must start using this!

Tools I’ve recently started using

• Chocolatey is an attempt at a package manager, kind of like apt-get (and I stress kind of), for Windows software. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but I’ve been using it to help ensure my tools are up to date.
• A few of us at work have been using meetings.io when working from home and I like it enough that I’ve recently decided to go ahead and sign up for an account – which gives me a profile page, vanity URL and personal meeting room.  You can still use the service without signing up, however.

Projects, coding, etc.

• Published gist of a DataParameter implementation for ADO.NET. (C#)
• Began work on replacing CtcApi unit test code with database mocks. (C#)
• Submitted class to measure time elapsed for code execution to the CtcApi. (C#)

I’m going to try something new, in an effort to both share things I find out about and write more. Each week I’ll compile a list of cool and/or useful tools, information, tips, etc. and post them here each Friday:

• Listened to a great Hanselminutes podcast interview with Model View Culture – A new media platform covering Technology, Culture, and Diversity.
• Venn diagrams of SQL JOINs. (via @jamesthigpen via @ShawnWildermuth)
• Scott Hanselman also has a good overview of things you shouldn’t be doing, or doing any more, in ASP.NET.
• Did you know that Github will show geo data as maps? And that now you can look at diffs of the committed data to see how the map changes over time?
• Is your government on Github?

Tools

• Windows Firewall Control – more and better control over the firewall built into Windows. (via Security Now, ep 441)
• Need to search a Github wiki? (Searches on Github don’t include wiki content.) There’s an extension for that. (via Stackoverflow)
• Network Monitor Mini for Android floats a minimalist upload/download speed widget on your screen.
• Need a multi-functional calculator? //web2.0calc.com has got you covered. (via @SGgrc)

Steve Gibson, the host of Security Now, has published a new freeware tool; DNS Benchmark.  Like all of Steve’s freeware, it’s a stand-alone executable (great for USB drives) and is very compact – at less than 200k.

I haven’t tried out this final release, but did experiment with an early version.  It’s a great tool for power users and/or anyone maintaining a network.  The primary purpose of DNS Benchmark is to provide speed tests and other information about publicly available Domain Name Servers, since the ones you’re using now may not provide the fastest or most secure service.