Windows on ZeroSharp

My essential web applications and iPhone apps

Tue, 18 Sep 2018 09:27:00 +0100

This is part three of a series of posts about the software and tools I find invaluable. See Part 1: essential applications and Part 2: Visual Studio tools. In this post I’m covering the online applications and iPhone apps I find indispensable.

Gmail

Does the job.

Lastpass

Everyone needs a password manager.

Pinboard (and the PinSwift iPhone app)

The best bookmark tracking tool. Simple, fast, powerful. The best mobile app for it is PinSwift.

My essential applications

Fri, 07 Sep 2018 15:23:00 +0100

This is the first in a series of posts where I list the applications that I use and enjoy the most. See part 2 and part 3.

A bit of preamble, my most powerful machine is a Windows-only desktop with lots of RAM and an SSD drive. I use it almost exclusively for development.

I also have a Macbook Pro which is configured to dual-boot Windows and MacOS. The Windows machine is more or less a mirror of my main development machine. The Mac is where I do all my document editing, Word, blogging, etc. I also use it for my occasional forays in to iPhone development or other non-Windows experiments.

Boxstarter and checksums

Thu, 22 Sep 2016 21:04:00 +0100

I’ve blogged before about using BoxStarter to efficiently provision a new development machine.

This is working very well for our developers. Maintaining the installation script takes a bit of effort but the benefits are worth it.

Recently, the chocolatey developers have been making things more secure and recent versions now require a checksum with any downloaded package. For now, there seems to be some difficulty using Install-ChocolateyVsixPackage within BoxStarter scripts.

Provisioning a new development machine with BoxStarter

Tue, 25 Feb 2014 15:29:00 +0100

I’ve been playing around with Boxstarter to configure my entire development environment with hardly any user intervention.

Here are the steps:

Install Windows 8.1 on a new machine.
Login.
Open a command prompt and enter the following.

START http://boxstarter.org/package/nr/url?http://bit.ly/1kapDXI

That’s it!

Boxstarter will self-install via ClickOnce, asking for various confirmations and ultimately it will prompt you for your login password. (This gets saved and encrypted to allow for unattended reboots and re-logins during the installation). Then the real magic begins. Boxstarter downloads and installs all your tools and configures your environment, rebooting as necessary. An hour later your full development setup is installed, including Visual Studio 2013, any VS extensions, any other programs and tools, all the browsers you need, all critical Windows updates, etc. You just saved yourself a couple of days of work and a lot of hassle.

How to recursively change file ownership

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 17:40:00 +0100

I recently ran into some file ownership trouble after cloning a bitbucket repository.

The following script saved my bacon.

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# FixOwnership.ps1
# This script recursively fixes the ownership on the files in the 
# current and subdirectories.

$acct1 = New-Object System.Security.Principal.NTAccount('Administrators')
$profilefolder = Get-Item .
$acl1 = $profilefolder.GetAccessControl()
$acl1.SetOwner($acct1)
dir -r . | set-acl -aclobject $acl1
pause