COmega (otherwise known as Cw since most people don’t have an omega key on their keyboard) is on a long list of stuff for me to look at. But instead of actually coding with it, so far I can just read Steve Maine’s blog. He’s got interesting posts on syncronization and streams, the two big features of Cw over C# (come to think of it, we use the “#” symbol as most people don’t have an actual sharp key on their keyboard). I also learned from Steve that Cw comes with basic VS integration – you get project support, syntax highlighting and some Intellisense. Now I just need a few extra hours in the day.

I’m setting up a new SQL 2005 / VS 2005 VPC. While I’m pretty excited about SQL Express, I want to experiment with some of the features in the full product so I’m installing Express’s big brother. However, there must be some weird issue w/ VPC’s shared folders feature – the setup support files fail to install. If I connect to my host across the virtual network to the loopback adapter then the install works fine. As I said, weird.

On a related note, anyone know a good, simple, free/cheap DHCP server for XP? The one issue w/ using the loopback adapter is that you either hardcode network addresses or use the “Automatic Private Address” (i.e. the 169.254.*.* address). The auto private address works fine, except that it takes a while for the DHCP to time out before assigning the private address. Plus, in XP SP2, there’s an annoying tray icon that pops up to tell you that the loopback adapter failed to get a DHCP address. If I had a DHCP server for the virtual network hanging off the loopback adapter, then I could avoid all that timeout and annoying pop up tray icon stuff.

I love my Olympus digital camera, but it does have one annoying issue. Occasionally, it “forgets” the current time and date. This leaves me with a bunch of images with a corrupt “Date Picture Taken” field (here’s an example). Luckily, Omar’s PhotoLibrary let me hack up a little program to update the date fields in the EXIF header. I couldn’t use JPEG Hammer out-of-the-box becuase it doesn’t handle the corrupt date fields. No matter. My app is a total hack, but since I only need to use it once-in-a-great-while, it’s no big deal.

I’m guessing someone blogged it last week (I gave up on catching up on blogs since I was almost three weeks behind), but there’s now a free home edition of xmlspy. Many of the cool features, including the schema editor, are available. However, the web services support, primarily the WSDL editor, remain only a part of the enterprise edition.

I keep wondering if someone in the community will build a WSDL editor with VSIP, esp. one that supports WSDL 1.1 and 2.0. I know CapeClear has their WSDL editor, but I find the explorer style view much less usable than the xmlspy-style graphical view.

From the one-less-thing-for-me-to-do department, Chris Dix has created a managed wrapped of the WinXP P2P SDK. He also has several sample apps, including a Scoble-inspired MagicFolder. According to his site, Chris plans to extend his library to support web services (WSE custom channels?) which should be very cool.

It’s funny, I used to get really sad when I discovered someone else had built something that I had started building. Especially if, as in this case, theirs was better. Now, I’m just relieved that I can reuse the library without having to build all the surrounding infrastructure. I’m glad I never released my managed P2P wrapper, it would be one more thing for me to kill. Like my HtmlReader stuff. I still get people looking for it even though I killed it a while ago. (Hasn’t everyone figured out they should use SGML Reader instead?)