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. I built this small app for this purpose a couple of years ago and thought I’d share it here in case someone else needed to use it.

In a previous post I showed how Entity Framework Code First ORM could be integrated with the Altairis Web Security simple membership provider to create a simple way to add a membership provider with an application using the EF 4.1 framework. One of the issues is that when the database is regenerated during development the users would have to be manually re-registered. This is a hassle if you want to create an initial admin account or user account for testing.

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:

Problem with Current Membership/Role Provider 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.

I bought a magic gadget from Best Buy called the LiveScribe smart pen and paper after watching a colleague using it for making notes during a meeting. Technology The smart pen is really a small computer with an infrared camera analyzing a series of micro-dots in a matrix pattern on paper (originally invented by Anoto in Sweden). You write as with an ordinary pen on special notebook paper and the pen also optionally records audio.

We were visited by the “dirty” (west) side of Tropical Storm Hermine on September 7 which dumped some significant rainfall on us. The main density of rainfall walked right up I-35 in what the weathermen call a “train” effect. Then again on September 8 a second load of rain was pulled up from the gulf by the tail of the storm. Unfortunately the ground was still drenched from the previous rain and it resulted in some flooding in our area.

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.

Our temperature dropped down into the low 20′s last night so I thought our area would be ripe for frost flowers (first freeze of the season, after having had some rain this week. Sure enough there were a bunch of them – a few right in our back yard! They are very rare and short-lived and a real cool phenomenon of nature. Frost Flowers on Wikipedia The last time we saw frost flowers around here was in December 2004: Christmas Eve 2004 Frost Flowers.

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.

The F1 Help key can be frustrating because it is very slow to invoke on Visual Studio. I figured out a way to make it faster by having it bring up a browser rather than the MS help. This technique will also work with the currently highlighted word. Use the following steps to make this happen: Use the Tools > External Tools menu. Add a new tool as shown in the top image below.