A couple of Web development tools

I have been recently in contact with a couple of nice tools for Web Development:

• Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar: Internet Explorer's equivalent to Firebug.
• Fiddler: A stand alone tool/IE plug-in. Basically, it allows you to intercept HTTP requests and replies made through Internet Explorer, either directly or implicitly through tools that use IE facilities.
• Firecookie: Yet another Firebug extension. This one adds a new tab for watching cookies. Very cool!

Until next time, may you enjoy extending your Web browser.

Two interesting add-ins for MS Office

If you use Microsoft Office, there are a couple of interesting add-ins which I find interesting.

• "2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS". This provides one of the features which find very annoying not to be in the main product (and one of the cool features on OpenOffice): PDF export support. No need for third party tools such as PrimoPDF. By the way, XPS is a format introduced by Microsoft for XML-based vectorial documents.
• "Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats". Need to view and edit an MS Office document which is in the Open Document format (AKA: "Office 2007 format"), but you have an older version of MS Office. Install this add-in and there you go.

Until next, may you enjoy adding things.

Hyper/Net: MDSoC support for .NET

Earlier this year, I attended the MSc discussion of Tiago Dias, entitled "Hyper/Net: MDSoC support for .NET". The thesis explored Multi-Dimensional Separation of Concerns (MDSoc) for the .NET platform, namely using the C# programming language. The idea is based Hyper/J, a research project abandoned by IBM a couple of years ago. While this may same like a bad start, Tiago's presentation was very good and convincing. Essentially, the MDSoC support is based on .NET's partial classes and some generative programming techniques. This work originated a research paper, with the same name of the dissertation, published in 2006. Also, some of the dissertation's chapters were stripped, as they belong on a possible future PhD thesis. These chapters dealt with the cognitive aspects of the multidimensional separation of concerns.

Until next time, may you enjoy separating concerns, one way or the other.