Building Wars of Earth

About 3 months ago I met a new friend (Alex Le) at work. He is also very young and we both have the same age. Alex is very talented. Two days later we meet he introduced me to Ruby on Rails. He is building an RPG game "Wars of Earth". You can check out the official game web site at www.warsofearth.com. Occasionally Alex brings it off line.

Ruby sounded very interesting and I said why not give it a shot. I have spend a few night helping Alex to develop his game. So far a build the guild and user messaging pages for the game. It's very exiting. Learning Ruby on rails is no brainier, but there are some bridges you need to cross. I look forward on the release of Wars of Earth.

Subversion integration with Visual Studio .NET 2005 (AnkhSvn)

AnkhSVN is an awesome add-in for Visual Studio .NET when working with subversion source depository.

You can download AnkhSVN from Scott Hanselman's blog (Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - AnkhSVN: Using Subversion within Visual Studio).

Once install you may want to edit the default configuration by going to Tools --> AnkhSVN --> Edit AnkhSVN Configuration in Visual Studio .NET IDE.

I turn off "AutoAddNewFiles" since I don't really want to add to the depository new files that I add to my project. Having this property turn on to "true" made my life annoying.

Here are my setting found in the ankhsvn.xml under my application data folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\AnkhSVN\ankhsvn.xml


You can download the xml file here:
http://www.box.net/shared/iz7jefzos4

SQL Server 2005 Management Studio Intellisense

In the quest for sql intellisense for the SQL Server 2005 Management Studio I came across SQL Assist for SSMS 2005 from company Round Polygons. SQLAssist can be download it here.

SQL assist works great. Its lighter weight compare to the RedGate tools.
I think its definitely worth the $50 bucks. I initially downloaded the beta version 2.0.210.0, however, this did not work for Windows Vista Business. After installing version 1.5.185.0 I was in business.

Make sure you have SQL Server 2005 Management Studio (Standard or Enterprise) version since this tool will not work with SQL Server 2005 Management Studio Express.

Replacing old notepad in Windows Vista

I am have been trying to find a good tool to replace the old windows notepad in Windows vista.
For a developer notepad.exe just doesn't cut it.
So far I have using notepad 2, notepad ++ and programmer's notepad 2.
These are all great tools, but I have not been able to replace notepad.exe from the c:\windows and c:\window\system32 directory. I have follow the instructions from Matt Berther's blog but the instructions do not seem to work for vista.

If any one has accomplish this task, please share it.

Thanks.