I’ve always been a big fan of FxCop even though I’ve had my share of problems with some of the rules. The new beta version fixes all that. It works much better with ASP.NET which the previous versions didn’t do very well at all.
There are also some new rules to help you write better software. Especially two rules are popping up everywhere and those are the Specify StringComparison and Normalize strings to uppercase rules.
The Specify StringComparison rule helps you to do string searching in a better way by always specifying a StringComparison enum when you do string manipulation such as IndexOf and LastIndexOf etc.
The Normalize strings to uppercase rule makes sure you use ToUpper or ToUpperInvariant when you normalize strings. It is more efficient to upper case a string than to lower case it.
The design looks very much the same as the 1.35 version with some minor tweaks here and there. It also supports .NET 3.5. Overall, it’s a really good application and a much needed upgrade. You can download it here.
In the last couple of days I’ve done some screencasts on how to use BlogEngine.NET. I know there are many applications available that can record my screen and audio, but I didn’t really want to go look for any of them. Many of them come with a price tag and then I’d have to learn how to use them afterwards.
I remembered the time when Windows Server 2003 was in beta and I was running it as my main operating system. It came with a wonderful application called Windows Media Encoder. So instead of looking for newer and maybe cooler screencast recorders I just downloaded the old Windows Media Encoder which is free. It is outdated by now, but it’s easy to start using it and it produces fairly good quality videos.
The only problem is that it cannot edit a video after it finished recording it. So I gave Windows Movie Maker a go. The result was not good, not good at all. When I imported the video, did nothing and saved it again, the quality dropped immensely and the size of the file tripled. I still find it odd.
From this experience I’ve learned that Windows Media Encoder is good and Windows Movie Maker is not. I’m planning to do a lot more videos so it might be about time I started looking for alternate recording tools and editors.
