Just launched Simply Track Time - early days yet as I am still ironing out all the usability issues and consistency bugs. The main problem I am finding now after about a year of playing around with different interfaces, wording, terminology is that every now and then I find a better way of expressing an idea and I have to go back through the program and ensure that I have updated the same idea everywhere.

So Simply Track Time is a desktop application that works standalone and it doesn't require any connection to the internet or any other network for that matter. It is intended to make recording time on the computer as intuitive and easy as recording it on paper.

Oh yeah just to fly in the face of fashion it is a bog standard Windows Forms application. ( No Silverlight here. )

You can have a look here www.simplytracktime.com

Well the Eurekster Swicki looks like it has gone down so www.dot-net-search.com doesn't work anymore. Really makes you wonder about the model of free hosted software solutions. I mean just because the company that hosts the service is not able to run the product - does that mean that all the partners ( yes - this is everyone who put the product/widget on their site ) should also lose their hard work. The dot-net-search ran for 3 years and received between 2000 and 3000 hits per day.

All in all I thought it was a pretty good offering and other people apparently also found value in it. I'll have to think about what I do with the domain now - wonder if I can use some other search engine in the same way.

I have moved the swicki on to its own domain http://www.dot-net-search.com This'll be interesting to see how the traffic is affected. Currently we're getting 2000 approx hits per day.

HTTP Error 404 - File or Directory not found error message when you request dynamic content with IIS 6.0.

This is a real pisser because there is no log entry to explain why you are getting a 404. However this page offers a solution: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315122

What really annoys me about this is that the problem could be any number of things - security etc and you really have to be a server admin to even know where to look.

Cruise Control and Nant/Csc are a great way to automate the build of a web application that is file system based. You compile the application to a dll and then run unit tests against it. You can integrate this with your source control and use continuous integration as part of your development security blanket. I find this invaluable as I am often enhancing production systems.

All was going well until I added web references to the web application. The file that you would expect to find Reference.cs in the Web References folder is not present. It appears that this file is not generated when adding web references to the file system based web applications.

This page Using Web Deployment Projects with Visual Studio 2005 offers a little bit of explanation.

The web application builds correctly in Visual Studio. It also builds with MSBuild. So luckily I was able to edit the cruise.build file to swap from using Csc to MSBuild.

Found this very helpful article about getting Apache to serve ClickOnce deployments. Interesting concept this but as Apache usually is much cheaper to find hosting on this can really help.


Paul Clements has this post:

"...

The simplest way to do this is to add the following lines to a .htaccess file in the folder containing the ClickOnce files:

AddType application/x-ms-application application
AddType application/x-ms-manifest manifest
AddType application/octet-stream deploy

..."

Thanks Paul that really helped me out.

So right now the windows application I'm working on in requires an About Form - you know the modal dialog that pops up when you click the Help | About Menu. The big question is what do I put in the about box ?

Seems like a good place to start is to see what other people have done.

Firefox has a simple about box just enough information to tell the version and make trademark claims pretty clear.












... while Visual Studio 2008 is surprisingly straightforward as well - definitely more corporate - and scope to include long lists of installed components.










I'm probably erring on the Firefox side of things at the moment.