Google hangouts

I have always found video chat and desktop sharing kinda clunky in the past.  But I just used Google hangouts for the first time today.  Oh my, this is the best video chant sharing tool I have ever used. 

If you have any need to talk to someone over video and share your computer screen use this.

Snoop

Found this indispensable tool for doing wpf development called snoop.   I don't know how I lived without it. Its like having the developer tools in chrome, ie or firefox only for WPF.   I must thank team snoop for developing this.

I have two tips for using snoop.
1. If you are running visual studio in admin mode, make sure you run snoop in admin mode also otherwise it will not work.
2. If you have WPF applications with more than one window it can be a bit confusing to figure out how to inspect any window other than the main window.
To inspect non main windows
a. drag your target cursor from snoop over to the window
b. press ctrl+shift and you you are inspecting the non-main window.  Control shift also works great for selected an element you want to inspect on the screen.

I hope you find this tool as useful as I did.

Pandora Windows Client

While I am coding late in the night I like to listen to pandora. But I get tired of logging into pandora every time. I thought would it be nice to have a windows client for pandora instead of using my browser. So I went in search of a windows client for pandora and found this great little app. So far it is working great. Try it out.

http://www.adamhaile.net/projects/elpis/

Linked In Password theft

The recent Linked In password theft inspired me to write this post about password management.

Passwords are everywhere. We have them at the office, and at home. There are so many that no one person can remember all of them. Most people probably have credentials for web sites they don't remember using.
One way to keep track of logins and passwords easily is to use the same one on multiple sites. That makes it easier to remember one password. However if anyone ever exposes that one password, now they can go to other common web sites and try that password. So that means you are trusting some guy running a web site from his garage with the password to your bank account. They have your email and your common password. They could go to many different common web sites and access your private information. You never really know how secure people are being with your passwords. In reality companies should really not keep your real password but a hash of your password so only you really know what your password is. But who really knows what they are doing with them.
To keep things simple and keep things secure I use a free opensource program keepass. Keepass This application is small. You can even run it from a thumb drive. It will generate passwords that are different for each web site and keep them encrypted and secured. I use this in conjunction with dropbox and I am able to access my passwords on any machine. I turn off all password remembering on my browsers, that way I know only keepass has my passwords and they are safely encrypted.

So get secure and get keepass.