Note: Installer and source code were updated on September 1, 2025 to support the latest versions of .Net
Sometimes you might want to print a small section from an email that has 30-embedded replies or just a snippet of code from that big class file. The Clipboard Printer Windows app makes it easy to do by copying what you want to print into the clipboard (CTL-C or right-mouse “Copy”) and then print it to your printer.
Continuing on the previous post about using the drop-in Altairis.Web.Security membership provider, I ran into an issue where the database may not be recreated in a timely fashion on a change to the model classes. For example if you add the following property to the User class:
public string FullName { get; set; }And change the initializer in the ApplicationDB.cs class to drop and create the database on model change:
public class DBInitializer : DropCreateDatabaseIfModelChanges<ApplicationDB> The problem is if you then access the database by creating a new user in the “Account/Register” controller, the database will not drop and create because the Altairis membership provider uses non-EF (ADO.Net classic) methods of data access. Therefore, the Entity Framework access methods haven’t been touched yet and won’t drop/create the DB until that time.
I’ve always thought the default membership/role provider for ASP.Net is a bit heavy in that it is targeted by default to a different database than the main application database and takes several additional steps to set up and deploy. I found the Altairis Web Security Toolkit on CodePlex and it has a nice, simple schema that is easy to integrate that into your application database. It is also available from Nuget as Altairis.Web.Security.
I decided to learn more about VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting and set up an account with Linode, a leader in affordable Linux VPS hosting. Basically a VPS host gives you a “slice” of a computer to use for hosting where you’re guaranteed a certain amount of the computer’s resources. Also the virtual operating system is isolated from other user’s systems so you won’t be affected if somebody else on the server fouls up and pulls too much resources as can happen with shared hosting.
I just got Windows Live Writer set up and so far it seems to be a very nice way to edit a blog. It has a great preview function so you can see how the blog is going to look before you publish it, even before you save it as a draft locally to your computer, or publish it on the website.
You can download Windows Live Writer from this link: Download Windows Live Writer.
Extending on the theme of value from the web (Wikipedia post), I checked out the Project Gutenberg website, and found that they have a great quantity of classic books that you can download for free to your computer or Palm Pilot.
Most people don’t like to read books from the computer and it’s difficult to “curl up to your computer” in bed. However, the new Palm Pilots with the higher resolution screens have changed that. The eReader application makes it possible to read from the screen in a package smaller than a “pocket book”. Plus they come with their own backlight so you can “curl up to your Pilot” without turning the lights on. They’ve also come down in price and probably could be acquired at a great price used.
The open source movement has been a transforming phenomena in the area of computing. Mainly it’s about people working on free and open software in their spare time (and some full time and paid), with multiple people working on parts of the problem at the same time to solve big problems. It’s brought innovations such as entire free operating systems (Linux), great browsers (Mozilla FireFox), and the most popular web server (Apache). One of the pleasant surprises I’ve run into is one that probably hadn’t occurred to many people – a free and open source encyclopedia.