I’m a big fan of keeping my hands on the keyboard as much as possible and having real quick easy ‘one-touch’ access to my favorite apps, web sites, and tasks.  It’s just amazing how much more productive one can be when using the keyboard instead of the mouse.  Think of any common app you use...

TechSmith, makers of my (up to now) favorite SnagIt and Camtasia have created the Jing Project , a new screen image & video capture tool.  It is slick, simple, easy, and fun.  I just installed it and am loving it.  Right now it's complete FREE, thanks TechSmith.  It hooks up to...

This is one of my favorite new blogs, http://www.howtogeek.com/ .  It rocks with tons of great tips and reviews on cool little tools.  Lowell does a great job reviewing tools, tricks and tips, and his blog is well organized and looks solid. I've been having a fun time trying out some new tools...

Download ShellExec ( source code ) Here's a really simple but surprisingly useful little tool. It performs a shell execution of a command. That's it. Some applications only allow you to specify an executable to run as opposed to a file or URL. This is because they spin up a new process from the executable...

In my quest to blog a little review of most of my favorite apps, I come to SnagIt by TechSmith. SnagIt is a fantastic screen capture tool that lets you do two key things very well: Capture Just What You Want Annotate the Capture Capture Just What You Want In SnagIt's main form you can select to capture...

To Do List management on the PC has been a long time struggle for me to find the right app. A few weeks ago I posted what's proven to by my #1 most popular post yet (and it isn't even "technical"), Task Management Software . Well I'm happy to say I think I've found the answer! Out of the dozens of apps...

The ability to quickly and easily search for work items using a little search box seams to be a popular Team System wishlist feature. Teamprise has a Java Team Explorer client, which they say they make sales because of their search capabilities alone. This plugin puts a little search box right into Visual...

Latest Update, WinDirStat (6/18/08) Found a newer and better tool!  WinDirStat is also free and shows a nice graphical chart of the types of files and folders. Update for Windows Vista I've been using Vista now for awhile and the tool below does not support Vista.  I've been using TreeSize...

What's better than free bits to make life better? As in life I'm refering to a developer's life in code. I was just digging around and found these golden nugets to share. The last two are non-Microsoft apps I've used for awhile. XML Notepad 2007 A little app for working w/ XML ASP.NET AJAX Add AJAX power...

All of us geeks know ways to tweak our PC in various ways, but there are just so many entry points that I wanted to do a post on them.  The most popular PC settings, designed for the average user, are of course available through the Control Panel .  This post is about settings beyond just the...

The Logitech Harmony Remote Controls have got to be some of the coolest, best TV/VCR/DVD/Audio/MMPC/X-10/XBox/etc remote control ever. They use a USB connection to the PC for programming, can learn from other remotes, support practically every device under the sun, they look sleek and elegant, and are...

Download: Insert Formatted Clipboard for WLW Setup WLW Beta2 Update: WLW Beta2 now support pasting formatted clipboard contents so I was going to pull this tool. But for some reason this tool still produces better results (as far as I can tell). So if you're not happy with the default paste results,...

Get SlickRun ( download now ) I'm a keyboard guy. Give me shortcuts. Let's see how long I can go w/out touching the mouse. To this end, for years I've wanted an app that would let me type short commands to access files, folders, programs, web pages, write email, etc. I started writing my own app (called...

Get a lot of spam? My personal address, noah@coad.net , gets about a 1,000 a week, but I don't see a single one of them. If you don't mind getting spam, this isn't for you. If you find junk mail annoying, and the viruses, identify theft (from phishing ), and flooding of your inbox that comes with it...

Do you find that you need to frequently change your screen resoltion? I do several times a day and some reasons are when: doing demos, showing my laptop screen to serveral people at once, switching between monitors, recording/capturing the screen, connecting to projectors, etc. It is a bit of a pain...

Yup, I was a big BlogJet fan, until I started using Windows Live Writer a few weeks ago. Honestly, I was disappointed with the version cycle time of BlogJet, no new version in quite awhile. Windows Live Write feels like a real v1 product to me, but I'll admit it is a good one. Download Windows Live Writer...

One of my favorite apps, that was worth the time to share with the blogsphere, is WinKey . It is a very simple little freeware app that lets you assign commands (win apps or console apps) or folders to that handy little Windows flag key. Being a keyboard junky, I love this app. I assign my most common...

Download details: Virtual PC 2004 SP1 Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 is now free! I’m sure many of you are well aware of this, but I just found out that it was free to the public. WAY COOL! I use this app almost every day here at MS. It is great to be able to run a completely virtualized PC environment...

Here are two project templates that I created and use on an almost daily basis that I packaged up to share. About a year ago I posted one of my project templates for VS03.NET, “ Creating Quick Tests in C# ”, that became the top VS add-in download on MSDN for a while. This is v2 of that, now...

I’ve been looking for awhile for a way to back up my blog by capturing each post in a nice, MHTML archived HTML format. My collegue Rob Caron pointed me in the direction of a tool, Blog Crawler , created by Calvin Hsia . I tried out the tool, and it worked great on my blogs.msdn.com blog, but...

I was checking out an MSDN Magazine post on “ Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now ” and came across this great VS Plug-in for managing window layouts, VSWindowManager PowerToy . I use a laptop for development, and while it has decent resolution (1400x1050), I’m...

This is a cool little plug-in from DonXML for VS that lets you run XPath statements against the currently opened XML document. I’ve been waiting for something like this!! I write a lot of XPath and this sure makes testing the expressions sooooo much easier. Thanks to Jason Haley for posting...

I’m at TechEd 2006 and getting a lot of slack from my fellow community memebers on the lack of posting I’ve done on my blog. Shesh, it’s been pathetic! No posts in like, forever. Sooooo, I’m trying something new, BlogJet . We’ll see how this works out. I’m hoping it...