RikWare had another problem with its commenting system. This only happened in some cases but should be all fixed up now so come back and comment on all those recent posts :)

In preparation for my impending completion of my PhD and subsequent move into other places I recently read Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality. Amongst other things the section on David Allen's Getting Things Done stood out to me. I'd heard of GTD before, but I tend to associate this type of thing with Brad Goodman and hence hadn't taken too much notice of it. However, when I read Bob's overview of GTD what stood out to me is how close it was to what I was already doing to improve my productivity.

Since I liked some of the ideas that came with GTD I decided I'd join the cult and see if I liked the rest of them. So for the last few days I've been searching for a method to keep my lists of things.

First I tried just using Google's online spreadsheet but found that painfully slow for cutting and pasting. Then I found BaseCamp. It worked ok but didn't have the ability to associate anything extra on the lists like time estimations or contexts. Then I found Nozbe.

Nozbe is another of the endless stream of beta web 2.0 apps, but specifically designed for supporting GTD. It lets you keep multiple lists and associate contexts with each item in the list. I could think of a few things I'd like added to it, but all in all I'm pretty happy with it. It could do with a method of deferring things till a certain date and just a basic scratchpad to jot ideas down before organising them but I'm not the only person to think that so hopefully it'll come soon.

My PhD supervisor, Wayne Kelly, is on Channel 9! He's giving an update on the Ruby.NET project - http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=295197 There were some other interviews on the day so I expect we'll see something from Joel, John and Joseph soon.

BTW, the room he's in for this interview will be populated this Friday by the poor souls who decide to listen to my PhD defense.

I noticed this article on The Code Project this morning. It provides wrappers to make windows forms controls appear with the new Vista styles (when used in Vista). The nice thing is that they degrade properly for use on older versions of Windows.

The other nice thing is that it provides a version of the Command Link control for use on Windows XP (see picture below). Command links are a nice addition in Vista which I've already had a few uses for. In fact I had already started my own implementation in windows forms because I hadn't found any acceptable solutions. From my quick glance at this article it looks like I might be able to throw that away and use this instead.

Command Links

Other Vista vs XP Controls

The end of my PhD is in sight and my post-PhD plans include the possibilty of some microISV action. So I need an auto-update plan for a WinForms app. I'm using WiX to deploy the app originally since the app includes fancy things like windows services, not just xcopy.

Basically I need it to grab a WiX generated patch file. Stop the app (after prompting the user) and prompt for admin credentials (if necessary) before starting the patch.

I've been looking around and I can't find any auto-update solutions I can use out of the box. So it looks like I'm going to have to write my own :( or at least adapt one of the current solutions.

Anybody got some better ideas?

After ongoing problems with my host's email service I've finally decided to search for other options. Yesterday I migrated my mail server to use Google apps. Basically this means that when you email anybody @rikware.com it actually gets delivered to Google and I access it through the typical GMail interface. Hopefully this will stop those random bounces I seem to give with my own provider. As a little side benefit the email will now come from my address and not have my GMail account as the "sender".

Only one downside at the moment. The GMail Notifier doesn't work for Google apps so I have to find a replacement for that (or whip up something quick myself).