Firefox 3.5

Today is “Upgrade to Firefox 3.5” day :-)

My upgrade went very smoothly, and one nice feature was it warned me beforehand which extensions wouldn’t work with the new version.

Post-upgrade, it found a compatible version of Firebug, but I’m still waiting for updates of

• Bookmark Duplicate Detector
• Google Notebook
• Live Writerfox
• Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant 1.0

The following extensions work ok:

• DownThemAll
• English (Australian) Dictionary
• IE Tab
• Xmarks

They reckon 3.5 is about twice as fast as 3.0. It certainly does seem snappier.

As a side note, I just noticed that Google Notebook is no longer being developed. Might be time to finally make the transition to Evernote.

Saasu

(or two things I remember from this month’s SQL Server user group meeting)

This month, Rob presented on “SQL in the cloud”. It was an interesting talk, if nothing else for the interesting direction(s) that Microsoft have taken trying to get this whole “cloud database” concept up and running.

Rob’s joke turned out to be quite good (considering the context of a SQL Server User Group - “A man walks into a bar, sees two TABLEs and says ‘Can I JOIN you?”

The other thing which he mentioned as part of a discussion on cloud computing was Saasu – an online accounting site. Think MYOB or Quicken but entirely online. This attracted my interest as I’ve been using MYOB Business Basics to track Narelle’s scrapbooking business for a few years, and I’ve come to discover that particular product isn’t really suited to a reseller type business.

Saasu is free to join and if you keep below 15 transactions a month it is free to use. Following the familiar service model, once you start using it more often than that you need to pay a small amount each month. That cost would probably be less than having to buy an upgrade for MYOB each year, so it is quite competitive. Even though it’s a global site, they have facilities for handling Australian accounting and tax requirements (eg. GST and BAS).

So far, I’m quite impressed, especially considering they support handling inventory (something Business Basics couldn’t even do).

Tracing and logging WPF

Whilst researching unit testing WPF applications I came across Bob King’s answer to this question on StackOverflow.

WPF DataBinding can appear to be a bit of a mysterious black box, but I now know that you can enable diagnostic trace sources to see what’s happening under the covers. Mike Hillberg shows some examples in this post.