Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Free screen capture tool: CamStudio

Yesterday I gave a 2 hour presentation to all our new developers about some of the tools we use. Unfortunately, I neglected to mention one of them. Rather than schedule another meeting for a 5 minute topic I decided to record a quick screen cast.

I thought it would be quick, anyway.

I've done this in the past using Snagit which has a video capture function. But for whatever reason the act of recording the screen caused my actions to suffer a terrible delay. For example, click a menu item and wait 45 seconds for the menu to react. Not good. I lost about an hour trying to get the system to work correctly while recording without success.

Over lunch a coworker suggested using a free tool called CamStudio. I installed it, changed a couple of settings to record audio and boom! Done. Free and easy. Two of my favorite four letter words.

Friday, April 9, 2010

Getting ready for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4

Monday is the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4! Are you as excited as I am? Yeah, I thought so.

One of the things I've been doing to get ready for this (in addition to playing with the RC) has been preparing for the April VT.NET user group meeting. Our meeting coincides with the release date so we're dedicating the meeting to have people share their favorite new feature. I'll be talking about:
  • snippets for web developers (e.g. HTML, ASP.NET and MVC)
  • web.config transformations
  • JavaScript intellisense
  • and the revised Add Resources dialog
Information about the VT.NET user group is available at http://www.vtdotnet.org/ and registration for the event is at http://vtdotnet.eventbrite.com/. One of the new things we're going to do at this meeting, by the way, is to conduct the raffle for people who have registered for the meeting. So go sign up before the meeting!