Personally, I believe that XMLSpy from Altova Software is one of the best tools available if you are going to be dealing with a lot of XML documents. However, this tool does come at a price. A few years ago, they used to offer a free community edition of their software – this has since been discontinued.

I’ve recently needed to create and modify some XML and was searching for some tools that fit the criteria:

• Windows Based
• Non-Trial Editions of Software
• Free

I have come up with a list of three tools that perform a majority of the tasks in commercial products like XMLSpy and are a good alternative.

1. XML Notepad

XML notepad makes it easy to edit XML nodes without the need to edit the XML syntax directly. By attaching an XML Schema, your XML document is checked for validation as you input values.

Although this tool has not seen an update since 2007, it is still one of the better free XML editors with a simple, yet powerful interface.

2. XPath Visualizer

If you’ve ever had the need to query XML to find specific nodes, XPath Visualizer provides a way to test XPath queries against an XML document. With the ability to include XML namespaces, the XPath expressions can easily be imported into code environments like Visual Studio.

3. XML Sample Generator

You have an XML Schema, but now you need to create an XML document based off this schema. If you don’t have a tool that helps you visualize a schema graphically, it can be a daunting task to traverse an XML Schema and create an XML document manually. Thanks to the XML Sample Generator, you can import your XML Schema and export a well-formed, validated, XML document.

XML Sample Generator provides a good starting point if you need to start from square one.

Do you have a free tool that you use? Please share in the comments.

These books are programming-language neutral and are an effective tool to writing succinct code.

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

Robert C. Martin

This book covers the best practices, case studies and first hand experiences with creating “clean” code.

Recommended by: Squirrel Hacker, Noroctal Labs and kodeninja

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, and Don Roberts

This book covers the best practices in modifying existing code.

Recommended by: kodeninja

How To Design Programs: An Introduction to Programming and Computing

Matthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt, and Shriram Krishnamurthi

This book is geared to the beginning programmer and focuses on the design and creation of programs.

Recommended by: Dave

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman

Picking up where How To Design Programs left off, this book explores ways to look at code from an object-oriented point of view.

Recommended by: Dave

If you were the original commenter, please contact me and I will provide a backlink to your website or blog.

The books I have chosen are those that are meant to inspire, increase productivity and improve your programming design skills.

Note: This list has no particular order.

Code Complete 2

Steve McConnell

The main focus of this book to help you improve your programming design skills.

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

Andrew Hunt and David Thomas

This book focuses on the best practices of programming (i.e. what you should and should not do).

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware

Andy Hunt

From the author of The Pragmatic Programmer, this book takes one-step back from programming and focuses on your everyday thinking and problem solving skills.

The Productive Programmer

Neal Ford and David Bock

This book will teach you different tools that you can use to make your programming life more productive.

Algorithms in a Nutshell

George T Heineman, Gary Pollice and Stanley Selkow

Unless you’ve memorized the implementation of every algorithm, this book is a handy desktop reference with pseudocode examples.

Alternate: Introduction to Algorithms

Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein

This book has become a staple in many undergraduate computer science programs. Containing much more information and details on algorithms.

Head First Design Patterns

Lisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman, Bert Bates, and Kathy Sierra

The people at Head First have a way of explaining things in a straight-forward, non-technical approach – a good tutorial and desktop reference.

Alternate: Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John M. Vlissides

Also a common computer science textbook by the Gang of Four (GOF), this book has much more information and more detail on design patterns.

If you are interested in exploring other programming books and reading reviews, check out ProgrammingBooks.org.

What book inspires you to be a better programmer?

The program would work correctly when run directly from the Terminal.

The only solutions that I could find online were to install a previous version of Xcode.

Solution

When entering standard input, you need to terminate your string with the forward slash ‘/’.

Example:

The Rules

When it came to choosing my domain name for this website, there were a few things I was looking for -

1. The name had to be short enough to memorize.
2. The name didn’t contain any non-dictionary words.
3. The name had to be descriptive of the web site content.
4. The name didn’t contain any hyphens.
5. The .com needed to be available.

The Discovery Process

I know I wanted the word geek in my domain, since it was my intention to gear my blog towards computer geeks as my readers, as well as, categorize my blog with others in my niche.

Other blogs catering to geeks:

• Geek Girl Blogs – http://www.geekgirlblogs.com/
• How-To Geek – http://www.howtogeek.com/
• Geeks With Blogs – http://geekswithblogs.net/

The Missing Link

Now that I’ve decided on part of my domain name, I needed the right word to append to my chosen word: geek, but would also fit within my subscribed set of rules.

There are a few sites that will generate a domain name for you based upon user-specified keywords or categories.

Domain Generator Websites

• Dot-o-mator
• Make Words
• Nameboy

I started to compile a list of keywords that would best represent the content of this site: ideas, improvement, success, planning, achievement and learning.

Using these keywords along with geek, I looked at the availability of possible domain names. Although the domain generation sites are great resources for checking the availability of a domain name and discovering preliminary results – the results generated didn’t always adhere to my list of rules.

Discovering Visual Thesaurus

Dictionary.com will provide a list of synonyms (for most keyword searches) at the bottom the keyword entry page. I noticed a new visual representation during my keyword searches – which proved to be a valuable tool: The Visual Thesaurus.

The Visual Thesaurus recursively connects your keyword to all related synonyms and allows you to interactively rebuild the synonym tree by choosing different words.

Manipulating the tree is both fun and useful, you can quickly drill-down on relevant keywords without the need to perform additional searches.

Note: Visual Thesaurus only allows you to use the interactivity functionality on a trial basis; however, you are able to drill-down to six levels using the free trial. If you find the tool useful you can subscribe for as low as $2.95/month. Most keyword searches will allow you to view a static representation of the Visual Thesaurus tree at no cost.

Overall, the Visual Thesaurus is a great resource for quickly identifying keywords for your domain name.

After a few passes looking at related words with the Visual Thesaurus, I decided upon repeat as the word to append to geek.

Compile Your Short-List

By using a combination of site content keywords, domain name generators and the Visual Thesaurus, you should have a comprehensive list of possible domain names choices.

Compare each against your list of rules and decide which one will become your next domain.

Setting up a local instance of WordPress and a development environment will help you tweaking theme source files, test upgraded WordPress installations and test plugins – without making changes on your live site. You won’t be using the local instance for posting, but you might want to post a few dummy posts.

Step One: Installing WordPress locally

WordPress has some tutorials on how you can setup a local version of WordPress using tools such as MAMP, XAMPP, etc. depending on your operating system.

• Windows XP with XAMPP
• Windows XP and Vista with WEMP
• WIndows XP and Vista with WLMP
• Gentoo Linux
• Debian Etch Linux
• Debian Linux
• Fedora Linux
• Ubuntu Linux with LAMP
• Mac OSX with MAMP

Step Two: Install a (source/version/revision) control system

It’s unlikely that you will like everything about a WordPress theme, so before you start editing the theme source files, establish a source control repository to keep track of your revision history.

You can use the SCM of your choosing – Smashing Magazine has a review of the 7 most popular revision control systems in use today:

• CVS
• Subversion (SVN)
• Git
• Mercurial
• Bazaar
• LibreSource
• Monotone

Step 3: Test all your plugins locally

Before you activate any plugins on your live site, install and test any plugins locally. Some plugins may make modifications to your database and potentially corrupt your WordPress installation. Other plugins may not be compatible with your version of WordPress or behave well with your selected theme.

Step 4: Install an IDE (and a FTP client)

The Appearance Editor within the WordPress Admin site is not the most user-friendly for editing and formatting source code. It is better to use a Text Editor or an IDE that supports syntax highlighting. Some of the better IDE include a built-in FTP/SFTP so you don’t need to switch applications when deploying your files.

Editors with Built-In SFTP/FTP

• ActiveState Komodo Edit
• Eclipse
• jEdit

Even if your IDE supports SFTP/FTP, I would still recommend installing a FTP client such as Filezilla.

Edit your files that are under version control and when you are ready to deploy, FTP them to your local WordPress directory.

Step 5: Install WordPress on your web-host

Most web-host will have some sort of one-click WordPress installation through cpanel or GoDaddy’s Hosting Control Center. These make it relatively easy to setup on your web-host without the need of transferring and configuring WordPress files.

Once, WordPress is installed on your web-host, add the FTP server information for your web-host to your FTP client and IDE.

Note: Once you have WordPress deployed on your webhost, I recommend that you backup your WordPress database regularly – this will preserve your posts. See this post from ProBlogger: How to Backup Your WordPress Blog In Three Easy Steps.

* WordPress Icon provided by BlogPerfume.com

Note: This code assumes that you already have the PDF binary data stored in a byte() array called data.

To add an Open / Save dialog window:

If you encounter errors in Adobe Reader, make sure that your aspx page contains only the page directive:

My first impressions were that it looked a lot like the command window (cmd.exe), until I did a “dir” command; the output was Unix/Linux-like. I then tried a couple of Unix commands such as “ls” and “ps” and surprisingly they worked! Other commands such as “grep” and “who” did not work. It looks like Microsoft had developed a shell comparable to those found on Unix/Linux and they also borrowed a lot.

PowerShell Resources

I was determined to test-drive PowerShell to see what it was capable of, and surprisingly found out that PowerShell had already been out since late 2006 and there was a lot of documentation and tutorials available. Frank Koch (Infrastructure Architect at Microsoft) developed some workshops and documentation for learning PowerShell that are available for download in both English and German. I walked through the first of his tutorials and discovered most of what you can accomplish in the shells of Unix (e.g. ksh, bash), can be accomplished with PowerShell and the syntax is very similar. Most of the commands (called cmdlets) will utilize pipes ‘|’ to redirect the output of a command to another or to a file. PowerShell also supports looping, and formatted output (i.e. csv, xml, html).

Another great site for PowerShell tutorials and resources is PowerShell Pro! One of the more useful features of the site is the Script Library, a forum where users can find/post shell scripts.

When starting to learn PowerShell commands, you will find that there is a lot more typing involved. Many of the commands will use a “verb-noun” context, for example, the equivalent of the “kill” command is “Stop-Process”. Fortunately, like in Unix, PowerShell supports the use of aliases and by default will map most of the known Unix Shell commands to their respective cmdlet. Here is a list of the built-in aliases:

If you use PowerShell regularly, what tasks do you find it is best suited for?

Xcode SCM Attributes

If you have your project successfully configured for use with Subversion, once you check-out your files and make any changes Xcode will identify these changes with attributes. Once you start editing a file, an ‘M‘ will show up next to the file in the Groups & Files window. Also, if you add any files to your project these will be identified with a ‘?‘. These attributes will remain until your changes are committed or if you discard your changes.

Committing & Discarding Changes

If you are familiar with other version control systems, you might know committing as ‘check-in’ and discard as ‘undo check-out’. You can commit or discard changes at the file level by right-clicking each file or folder and making the selection or by selecting ‘SCM‘ from the menu and selecting commit or discard changes. The ‘SCM‘ menu also allows you to commit all the changes in your project by selecting ‘Commit Entire Project‘.

Other SCM Tools

The Xcode SCM Menu provides a couple of ways to easily compare the contents of any file that you have checked-out with any revisions committed in Subversion, using FileMerge and the Unix diff tool.

Compare

By selecting ‘Compare With’ from the ‘SCM‘ menu, Xcode will open the FileMerge application that will show each file side-by-side and indicate the differences between each file. In File Merge, you can choose to add or remove any lines in your checked-out file.

Diff

If you have had exposure to the diff tool in Unix/Linux, it is available as an option to use within Xcode. By selecting ‘Diff With‘ from the ‘SCM‘ menu, Xcode will execute the diff command with your currently checked-out file and the revision file that you specify as arguments. The results of this command will be displayed in the current code window.

Subversion Tagging

In Part I, I mentioned that Subversion also has the following folders: tags and branches. The tag folder is used for storing releases or stable builds of your code and allows you recall the correct version of the project files if you need to fix any bugs. Here is a script that will allow you to tag your project, it assumes that whatever the is currently committed in the trunk folder is what you want to tag:

Subversion Branching

The branches folder is used for storing code that you want to develop new functionality with or experiment on without making revisions to the code in the trunk. Here is a script that will allow you to branch your code, also it assumes that whatever the is currently committed in the trunk folder is what you want to branch.

I hope you enjoyed reading this 3 part tutorial on setting up Subversion within Xcode. Please share your thoughts on how you use Subversion or any other SCM system with your development environment.

SSH

Before you can use Xcode’s SCM client to connect to your Subversion server, you need to enable the SSH server on your Mac. SSH server is installed by default on OS X 10.5, to enable it open System Preferences.

From the Internet & Network section, select the Sharing icon, within the Sharing preferences check the box labeled Remote Login.

That’s it, at this point your SSH server is running.

Configuring SCM Repositories

After you launch Xcode, you can configure your SCM repositories by selecting SCM > Configure SCM Repositories… from the menu bar, this will open the Xcode SCM Preferences window.

Click the the plus sign ‘+’ to create your repository, it will prompt you for a name and ask you to select which SCM System you are using (Subversion in our case).

Now you need to build the URL to connect to the repository on your computer. Here you enter the Scheme, Host, Path, User and Password and have Xcode build the URL for you.

Scheme: svn+ssh

Host: either <computer name>.local or localhost

Path: the absolute path to your repository

Port: N/A

User: your login username

Password: your login password

If you entered everything correctly, you should see a green light indicator with the word Authenticated beneath the password box, click OK. If you are encountering errors, double-check that all information is entered correctly above. You can also try connecting to yourself through SSH via the Terminal: ssh username@localhost.

Configuring Projects

Before you import your projects in to Subversion, you may want to configure your project so that your build files are not located in the same directory as your project. It is normally not necessary to place these files under version control, as they can easy be regenerated by rebuilding your project.

Viewing SCM Repositories

Whenever you are ready to import into Subversion, you can add it through the Xcode SCM client by selecting SCM > Repositories from the menu bar, this will open the SCM client. If you ran my scripts from the previous post, you should see the following in each column:

Column 1: All of your configured Repositories.

Column 2: The Projects folder you specified when setting up your repository

Column 3: The Project you created

Column 4: The Subversion folders that were automatically created with the script

The horizontal window at the bottom will display the Subversion commands that are being run when you select an item from each column. This can be helpful troubleshooting tool if you are having access or permission problems.

Importing Projects

To add your project to Subversion, click the Trunk folder and then click the Import icon. This will display the directory import dialog, here you will want to select the folder of your local project and enter a meaningful comment.

Configuring Projects for SCM

Now that you’ve added your project to Subversion, you will want to configure it so you can start versioning any changes to your code. You may want to create a separate directory on your computer to store projects that are under version control. I recommend choosing a location that is separate from the directory where you initially imported from. Once you establish a location, select the Project folder under the Trunk folder and click the Checkout icon, here is where you will select the folder you created. After you click Checkout, you should receive a Checkout Complete dialog window where you are given the option to open the project. Congratulations! At this point your code should be under version control.

Part III will show you how to commit any changes that you make and will explore some of the SCM tools.