Marrying Windows Live Writer with Ommwriter

I use Windows Live Writer to manage my blog posts in blogger.com. If you are a regular blogger, occasional or a lazy one, this writer is clearly a winner on Windows. It seamlessly integrates with most blogging sites like blogger.com, wordpress.com etc.
Being a follower of The Rands, I was introduced to an elegant text editor called Ommwriter. It is exclusively available for Mac. I must say that the experience with this editor was just wonderful. The creators of Ommwriter have clearly nailed down the requirements of a serious writer. The soothing appearance, mild tones running in the background just brings out the creative in you. It just emphasizes the fact that the environment in which we work in very much affects the quality of our work. My posts suck regardless of the editor, which is a different story all together.
So I am like, we have a great tool in one hand, the Windows Live Writer and a brilliant idea like Ommwriter. Wouldn't it be great to have the same experience of Ommwriter while I am writing my posts in Live Writer? I will be digging deep into the Live Writer SDK to overhaul any such possibilities. I do not think anyone has tried this until now but it would be very very useful to me.
Until I am able to get something like this, I will continue to use Ommwriter to write all the text and then paste it into the Live Writer to add pictures and other items in it. Its painful to switch between OS to do this, but its worth it for me.

Abhang Rane


Ruby like command line access to an ASP.NET project

I have been playing with Ruby on Rails in my house for some time alongside my experience with ASP.NET in my office. It is a framework worth spending some time with regardless of the technology you are working on currently for your bread and butter. In particular, I liked the idea of command line access to a web application. I guess love for command line comes with love for coding. So I thought of pulling out this feature and create a nifty utility to talk with a ASP.NET web application project via commands.
For now the tool works only for those web projects which have a Linq to SQL designer file generated by Visual Studio when you add a LinqToSql dataset to your project. The tool basically uses reflection to pick out the tables in your Linq Context and dynamically create instances to query the database.

To use this tool,

Create a WebApplication project in Visual Studio, add a Linq To Sql dbml file and let the editor create the designer file for you. For now, you would have to build the project at least once to generate the dll. I will add the project compilation code later so that you do not even have to do this build. Thats it.

The tool just provides a read access to the underlying database for now, the code is pretty straight forward to add features like insert, update, delete etc.


Here are some screenshots –:

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Abhang Rane