I remembered a couple of other Mac programs I use pretty regularly. Add these to my other list of Mac software: XBench. This is the standard Mac benchmarking program. It’s freeware and it rocks. It will benchmark your Mac’s CPU, memory, graphics card, and disks. Remote Desktop. The only Microsoft offering I use on the Mac, RD is essential if you need to remote into a Windows machine somewhere. This is great if you are a Window developer (at least some of the time) and need to get into your servers and don’t want to boot up the Windows VM or reboot into Boot Camp.

Ever since I started writing .NET code, I’ve been irritated that there seemed to be no way to programmatically set the TITLE tag of a web page from the code-behind. Certainly you can do things like <title><% = msTitle %></title> but I never found a way to set it in the code-behind. Always seemed to me that there should be something like Page.Title = "My Title"; Today, thanks to someone’s posting on GeeksWithBlogs.

I recently had a strange experience with IIS 5 and some phantom virtual directories. When I write “phantom virtual directories” I mean that IIS is handling requests for virtual directories that no longer exist. This is a description of the events leading up to this: One of the websites I was working with required two virtual directories, named genericdir and securedir. Both of these directories had their own web.config files. The both used an HttpFilter to handle requests for certain types of files.

I recently worked on a web application where the general philosophy behind exception handling was that every method would catch any exceptions that occurred in the method. The reasoning behind this is that when an exception occurs, its effects would be contained and the executing page would continue to render successfully. When exceptions occurred in this application, certain parts of a page might show up blank while other parts of the page would render normally.

This class, PrimeFinder, has two methods. The Find method takes the piMax parameter and finds all prime numbers between 0 and piMax. The Print method dumps the list of prime numbers from piStart to piMax, for example, between 1,000 and 100,000. With the int type, this class works well for primes up to approximately 14,000,000. The Find method uses the algorithm known as the Sieve of Eratosthenes to identify prime numbers.

In the event that one or more CDS or OMS machines are installed and the CMS has been removed, going into Add / Remove Programs and uninstalling Vignette will fail with a message that Vignette must be “unconfigured” first. Unfortunately, without the CMS running, nothing can be removed in the Platform Manager and so the whole installation must be removed manually. Stop all services and then set them to Disabled.