praveensg.com

I’m not sure any of you guys have faced this problem but this has been a major issue for me on many of my projects. The problem I’m talking about is when you have that one file that you excluded from your project but forgot to delete from your hard drive and it somehow makes it to production without your knowledge! Or if you have an application that loads user controls at run-time or does http calls to other parts of the application at run-time. You made sure that you ‘excluded’ the file from your project but somehow it shows up. This could be applied to various kinds of files (think about overriding stylesheets).

The problem gets exacerbated when you’re working with a team and you merge your projects every now and then. Different team members work on multiple releases of the app (usually at the same time!) and team members include/exclude files over time. Then you have that big ‘merge party’ where you decide to merge all your branches. The problem arises when you try to merge project files. Many popular source control providers (hint: ahem, starts with a V) do not let you merge your project files. So what do you do? You just decide to use one of the several project files your team has been working on. So now you have a project with multiple files excluded (your team member didn’t like the way you implemented that class and excluded it;)) which were previously part of the project. The project compiles fine, however you have those old files lying on your disk. You use xcopy or some other utility to copy your files while creating your build package and boom, you have a file that’s not supposed to be there in your build.

You might argue why not just use the show/hide toggle on solution explorer. Well that would work well if you had a project with say 10-15 files but imagine enterprise level apps with 1000s of classes/files.

This add-in is a simple utility that lets you see what files are not part of your project. The program is still in Beta meaning it does not actually let you ‘clean’ your files but I promise to update it this weekend. Please feel free to provide feedback.
Download here

Now this is some great news for iPhone and Touch lovers. The Flytunes service promises to deliver FM stations right onto your mobile device. I tried the service over the weekend and I must say I’m really impressed. To begin with, the interface is pretty simple and stands up to the iPhone standards set by Apple. Navigation is pretty straightforward and quick too. There is a lot of choice available when it comes to stations, in fact, they had a Hindi station too! Streaming is pretty fast when you’re connected to a Wi-fi network and surprisingly, even on EDGE. There is a set of toggle buttons that let you select the network you’re connected on and accordingly presents you with high/low bandwidth stations. Setup is quite simple, all you need to do is sign up on the website and wait for your registration email. Make sure that you provide an email ID that is already configured on your iPhone/Touch. There is a link in the email that you need to navigate to from your mobile device in order to complete the registration process. Overall, this is a great addition to the host of other sites available for the iPhone at least until the SDK opens up. Till then, go ahead, give it a try. www.flytunes.fm