Microsoft Offers Visual Studio for Free ?!?!

Sorry, but I have a new and improved version of this post over at my new blog. You should check it out.

Free Screen Capture Utility - MWSnap

MWSnap is a must have if you do any sort of documentation. As the title of the blog says, it is a free screen capture utility, and allows you to grab only sections of your screen, and save or print them. This utility is just full of neat features, including a color picker, automatic saving of captures, and automatic printing.

One of my favorite features is that when you use the Ctrl+Shift+A shortcut key, a little zoom window pops up which is zoomed in to the cursor's location, so that you can make really accurate selections. No more thin lines around the pictures for your documentation.

Thanks Mirek, you wouldn't believe how much time this has saved me.

Free Word Processor?!?!

I just saw a blurb about Writely on GeekBrief.TV, and I had to check it out for myself.

Maybe there are a few reasons why this isn’t huge news, I mean after all, doesn’t Open Office have not only a free word processor, but also a whole office suite for Free? Well, yes.

Doesn’t Open Office let you access your documents securely over the internet from any computer? Well Ye… er… No.

Zap! That's the ticket! I guess Google has gobbled this application up, when they gobbled up a company called “Upstartle” (what a cool name). Here is nice little blurb about from Jen Mazzon, although this post is pretty old, March was so months ago. The post says that Writely has a wait list, but right now if you have a Google account, it will let you sign up for it.

I guess that not only is Writely a free, but it is also a collaborative product. Is that cool or what?

I so have to try it out. I’ll post more as I move along.

2007-01-26 Update: Well, quite awhile ago, writely was officially pulled into the Google Family, and is now called Google Docs and Spreadsheets. It isn't a bad product, especially since they integrated spreadsheets in there too. It is missing some features that you may have come to expect from a word processor, but still, it is free, and widely accessible.

I haven't checked on it in a little while, but when Blogger Beta became the official blogger, I wasn't able to get it to work, and then I was, and then I wasn't. I have since started searching for other blogging tools. Want to see if it works for you, try "When getting new features means old features don't work anymore". There is a good link to an article with instructions that worked (sometimes) for me.

Free ScreenCapture Utility

If you write instructions and/or documentation, then I guarantee you will like this Great little Screen Capture Utility, especially if you are on a budget.

As far as I can tell, it doesn't stay memory resident, and when you hit the capture hot key (Ctrl + Shift + A by default), you get this handy little zoom window, so that you can get a nice clean capture that you will not have to crop later. Then you just copy it, and paste it into your documentation program and you are good to go.

Of course, the price is right, it is free! Go ahead, give it a download.

WSUS is here!!

WSUS is here!!

I for one, have long been waiting the release of the new update services from Microsoft. I had played around with SUS, and never had much luck with it. So now that it is out, I have downloaded it, and will try to start using it in my network.

For a little back story, SUS is Software Update Services, Microsoft was planning on giving it the ability to update not only windows, but also office and other MS apps. For some reason they didn't want to continue using the name SUS, so they were going to rename it Windows Update Services, I guess they didn't check out what the acronym sounded like. I heard many complaints along the line of "I don't want to be called the WUS administrator". Anyway, it looks like they went with Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), which is better, but I think it is a little misleading. Oh well, as long as it works.

The install went pretty smoothly, with the dialogs screens explaining what is going on. WSUS uses MSSQL for its database, it offers to install the SQL desktop engine, but I already had it running on that machine, so it created a database for itself, all on its own.

It looks like the default is to download all languages for the selected updates. I changed this to only download the English updates, to conserve on disk space. By default, Critical updates and security updates are approved automatically. This was ok for me, so I will leave it as is for now. There were several types of downloads which are not synchronized, and I included pretty much all of them, such as feature packs and security rollup packages. I did not however, include drivers. I bet that would eat up some serious disk space.

After the install, I set up the group policy for a few machines. You can test it out by running wuauclt.exe /detectnow from a command prompt, and then the computers should show up on the WSUS machine. It allows you to create groups of computers for administration.So far it all looks pretty neat. It looks pretty easy to work with, I will be playing around with it over the next few days, and I'll make sure to post anything interesting that I find.