Make the manager do the job

I've been away for awhile but that does not mean that I have not been thinking about you. Every day in fact and to prove it I came back with a new tool: the Sitemap Manager.

Ever thought about getting your site on top of all those Google, Yahoo or Bing search results? And then you realized that to get the pages up there you need to somehow convince the search engines that you exist? Well, if this is your problem then the solution is creating an XML Sitemap for your site and the ultimate tool to generate and maintain an XML Sitemap is Sitemap Manager.

Let's start with the basic Sitemap Manager features:
- it can crawl a site
- it can generate an XML Sitemap. So far nothing special but read on for the real improvements sin sitemap generation.
- it can manipulate your sitemap with its own special Maintenance Rules.
- it can upload the sitemap to an FTP location.
- it even has an XML Sitemap validator.

The Maintenance Rules deserve a little extra explaining. I'll start with an example. Let's say you generated your sitemap but you realize that all is well "except this or that should be adjusted". This is where the Sitemap Manager really shines. It allows you to define these Maintenance Rules where you say stuff like "if the URL has the word forum in it then remove it from the sitemap" or "if the URL is the monthly feature page then increase the priority in the sitemap". Once defined the Maintenance Rules are applied automatically every time you re-generate the sitemap making sitemap maintenance completely automatic.

But what can a maintenance rule do? I'm glad you asked...
The maintenance rules can modify any aspect of the sitemap URL such as priority, inclusion, date changed and change frequency given some easy to define targets. A target can be a URL, a content type and even a referrer. There is even a library of commonly used rules such as excluding all binaries.

The Sitemap Manager also comes with an advanced XML Sitemap Validator. This not only confirms compliance with the XML Sitemap schemas but also verifies common mistakes found in XML Sitemaps. The advanced validator checks for:
- Makes sure the XML is UTF8 encoded
- Confirms that not all URLs have the same priority
- Makes sure that all URLs are under the XML Sitemap URL.
- lots of other checks I did not have time to discover

You can find more details on the Sitemap Manager home: http://www.sitemaphub.com/Sitemap-Manager/

The Sitemap Manager is free to try for 30 days without any restrictions. A full license costs $49.99 USD.

Subversion to the max!

I moved from Visual Source Safe to Subversion. I’ll never go back.

Impressions

I was forever locked into the VSS world, always worrying that if I will have to abandon my comfy Visual Studio integrated tools. My early dabbling in the CVS command line world were fun and while the server was great the clients were faulty at best. The few CVS clients at the time (WinCVS and TortoiseCVS come to mind) were unintuitive and lacking key features. Visual Studio integration was buggy. So back I went into my VSS hole.

 

Earlier this month I decided to give Subversion a try. Looking around I discovered VisualSVN and in a few minutes I was setup and ready to commit (pun intended). I am really impressed by VisulSVN. For somebody used to VSS this is the deal! You get great integration with Visual Studio 2008, so much so that I don’t miss any of the VSS features I got used to. For more advanced features you get TortoiseSVN for monkeying around the explorer so you can commit files without starting Visual Studio or doing fancier stuff like creating repositories.

 

I also got the free VisualSVN Server, made specifically for the UI-happy Windows users. No command line configuration happening here, all I need is in a few screens and it is so easy to do I didn’t even read the manual. Not that I ever do that anyway ;),

Price

VisualSVN - $49.

Visual SVN Server - Free
TortoiseSVN – Free

Conclusion

You must have source control software and VisualSVN is well worth the money.

Get VisualSVN and VisualSVN server from here http://www.visualsvn.com/

Get TortoiseSVN from here: http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

 

 

Let out the maniacs!

When it comes to software development you simply have to be a keyboard lover and so am I. I live and die by my shortcuts so when I found this site I was in heaven. All your keyboard shortcuts in PDF format so you can easily print them and post them on your wall for quick reference.

Sample the keyboard shortcuts here: http://www.shortcutmania.com

Are your pages crawling across the network instead of flying? Find out why with YSlow!

Quite often a web site works well on the developer’s machine but when it is deployed to another location it starts to crawl. The reason is most of the time the network latency introduced during the deployment. You can mitigate lots of these performance issues with a range of measures nicely described here: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html. YSlow will automatically detect most of the potential problems described in the previous document and quickly point you in the right direction.

Impressions

YSlow is a Firefox add-on and it requires Firebug to be already installed. So there is some setup required to get things chugging along but it is all worth it. Once you have it setup you will be able to run an analysis on the current page and YSlow will evaluate and grade several potential problems. Grading makes it very easy to see what areas need your immediate attention and it also gauges progress once modifications are implemented. Not only do you get recommendations to improve the speed but each point is linked to a clear and through explanation of the reasons behind the recommendation so you can take an informed decision if you want to implement them or not.

 

You can also run through the rules used the YSlow here manually if you feel that your case needs some more fine-tuning:

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

Price

Free.

Conclusion

If you develop or own a web site then this is a must have, 5 stars!

Get Firebug from here: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

 

 

Find duplicate code with Simian

Find duplicate code with Simian

Impressions

From the developer’s site:

Simian (Similarity Analyser) identifies duplication in Java, C#, C, C++, COBOL, Ruby, JSP, ASP, HTML, XML, Visual Basic, Groovy source code and even plain text files. In fact, simian can be used on any human readable files such as ini files, deployment descriptors, you name it.

 

Sounds too good to pass up so I downloaded a copy. You can only download a tar.gz file, a clear indication that this is not a tool for the fain at heart. I managed to unpack the file and found a copy of the poorly design website inside - monkey and all - along with a bin folder that has the binaries. There are two types of developers targeted here: Java and .NET, I chose to focus on the .NET version so I bravely double-clicked the simian-2.2.24.exe file. A black screen flashed and disappeared. I felt my DOS senses tingling which meant that this was a command line application so I opened a command prompt and ran the EXE again.

 

I won’t put you through all my pain but fiddling with the input parameters I managed to run the application against my code and it printed something like this:

 

…

 

Found 35 duplicate lines in the following files:

 Between lines 848 and 882 in abc.cs

 Between lines 1059 and 1093 in abc.cs

 

…

Found 515 duplicate lines in 31 blocks in 7 files

Processed a total of 1243 significant (2510 raw) lines in 8 files

 

Obvious pain points:

 

No easy way to now get this output into Visual Studio and search for the data. Am I supposed to search by line name?

 

No indication on what is duplicated or how severe the duplication is. If you are looking at 1000 duplicated “things” how do you prioritize? Or should I just eliminate all duplicates?

 

It only processed the current folder and I found no obvious way to make it run on all the sub-folders so if you happen to have a bigger project you can simply forget using this tool.

 

It does not do a duplicate search among all the files or if it does it was not clear how to enable the option.

Price

Free for non-commercial and evaluation purposes
$99 for SOHO users

Other licensing options are available on the site.

Conclusion

Nothing good, 0 stars!

You can get Simian from here: http://www.redhillconsulting.com.au/products/simian/

 

 

Find performance problems quickly and easily

When it comes to performance improvements I noticed two distinct factions: one that would tune every line of code and the other that would never do anything. Somewhere in the middle you will find performance tuning nirvana. Here you will tune only the most relevant areas of the code to maximize performance and minimize the time spent tuning.

It is often said that tuning 5% of your code will take care of 95% of your performance problems and my gut feeling tells me that it is probably true. Finding the relevant 5% is another story. You can certainly comb through tens of thousands of lines of code, pepper your functions with performance counters or simply use a profiler and let it tell you what you need to do. One of the best profilers I tried is ANTS Profiler.

Impressions

ANTS Profiler will make you feel like a performance optimization specialist. After a quick run through your application with the profiler running it will present a view of your source code with performance statistics for each line.  The time to run is displayed for each relevant line and a bar with the relative performance is displayed next to the slowest lines. You can instantly identify the line that takes the longest and if it is a function you can drill down into it to see exactly what line of code is causing the grief.

 

You can profile Windows applications, ASP.NET applications, COM+ applications and .NET Windows services so you should be covered from every angle.

 

ANTS Profiler is very easy to use with intuitive UI and proper options presented along the way.

 

Price

From $295 for the Standard edition up and $495 for the Pro edition. For more pricing and licensing details see the developer’s website.

Conclusion

A good profiler is a must have for any .NET developer and this is one of the best, 5 stars!

Get ANTS Profiler from here: http://www.red-gate.com/products/ants_profiler/

 

Are regular expression painful? Use The Regulator!

If you are like me you tried to avoid regular expressions and came up with the weirdest excuses in doing so. At first contact regular expressions seemed more like voodoo than programming. I wish I had a tool like The Regulator in those days.

Impressions

The Regulator is the missing link for regular expression development in any modern IDE. It provides a great way to develop, test and manage your regular expression code library.

 

Let’s look at some features:

- Intellisense – when you sort of know what you want but you don’t know what you need intellisense will pop up with a helpful list of options and explanations for the token at hand. Immensely helpful and dearly missed in other IDEs when working with regular expressions.

- Syntax highlighting – we take this for granted but it is a great help in troubleshooting problematic regular expressions.

- Code generation – automatically generates VB.NET or C# code. It would be nice to have support for other languages but I am feeling spoiled as it is.

- Performance analysis – compare different versions of a regular expression. An amazing feature and as far as I know unique to this tool!

- Community integration - integrates with regexlib.com to search, import and upload regular expressions.

The overall feel is of a professionally written application, well polished and very useful. I just wish Visual Studio would be as good as The Regulator when it comes to regular expressions!

Price

Free.

Conclusion

If you use regular expressions then you must give it a try, 5 stars!

Get The Regulator from here: http://tools.osherove.com/CoolTools/Regulator/tabid/185/Default.aspx

Also make sure to check out the RegExLib site here for many regular expression samples posted by the community: http://regexlib.com/default.aspx