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 newstuff@microsoft.com |
| Theresa W. Carey
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With any luck, by the time you read this you'll be finished with all your holiday preparations and can get back to the real fun: designing and implementing interactive applications. I've found several project design tools, as well as polling software, performance monitors, and metatag managers. Unwrap one of these goodies and enjoy! See you again after the year-ometer flips over to 2000. Check out Your Competition
Once Max has been let loose, a SiteProfile is generated based on the site owner's specifications. The standard SiteProfile report compares a Web site against two of its primary competitors and a selected industry benchmark. There are three expanded levels of service that generate additional detail, trend analysis, and recommendations for fixing problem areas. WebCriteria Inc. Still Worried about Y2K? Sutton Designs Inc. recently released NETSAVERS NetY2K Y2K Scanner, a program that automatically fixes the hardware-related Y2K problems found on many Windows-based systems. The hardware-related Y2K problems involve the real-time clock (RTC) and the BIOS. The Scanner contains a real-time Clock Scanner module and a TSR program that corrects the BIOS date management problems for dates before, during, and after the Year 2000 rollover—including a leap year correction. The Scanner is available from Sutton Design's Web site. Sutton Designs Inc.
While DD2K doesn't attempt to fix the equipment and software products of other manufacturers, it includes remediation tools that offer specific options for fixing the problems that it identifies. The program then brings up the most current Internet hyperlink library so that identified Y2K solutions can be readily acquired. DD2K is capable of testing virtually all PCs as well as networks. It runs on Windows 3.x, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, and even MS-DOS. Due Diligence 2000 Spell it Right!
VSSPELL can now be autolinked to RichTextEdit controls to correct spelling mistakes without disturbing the text format. VSSPELL 6.0 has no limitation on text length and can quickly spell check entire documents at once. Built-in dialog boxes make it easy to customize functionality like automatic or manual correction, generation of suggestions for misspelled words, and underlining of suspect words. The program also features an extensive standard American English dictionary that has been expanded by more than 400 percent to more than 250,000 entries. Since VSSPELL 6.0 includes a utility for building and maintaining dictionaries, developers may also incorporate their own dictionaries for other languages or for specialized industries such as the medical or legal fields. No additional files need to be distributed with applications. VideoSoft 5900-T Hollis Street Can Your App Handle the Load?
e-LOAD lets you test the scalability of e-business applications by emulating thousands of virtual users accessing a Web site simultaneously, and measures the effect of the load on application performance. RSW's TrueLoad technology ensures that the testing correlates with real user loads so that e-LOAD's results can be relied upon to help make key decisions about a system's architecture, tuning, and hosting alternatives. e-LOAD is part of RSW Software's e-TEST suite, an integrated solution for testing the quality, scalability, and availability of business-critical Web applications. The e-TEST suite includes e-LOAD for load/scalability testing, e-TESTER for functional and regression testing, and e-MONITOR for testing the continuous availability of live Web applications. RSW Software Inc. XML-based Developing is a Breeze
Breeze Commerce Studio enables developers to create, import, and modify XML schema (DTDs). Additionally, Breeze can import schema from JDBC and ODBC-connectable databases and generate Java code in the form of objects that can be integrated into applications. The objects will validate XML documents based on the parameters and constraints set in the schema. Breeze includes a toolkit that can route XML data via HTTP, TCP, email, file, and XML-enabled fax servers. The code generated by Breeze presents an object view of XML documents and databases to the developer. This approach allows the developer to treat XML documents and databases like any other object in the application. Breeze organizes the work by project, allowing you to create, import, and combine schema, and generate code under a single project. Breeze Commerce Studio is available from the V-Systems Inc. Web site. V-Systems Inc. Integrated Modeling and Code Generation
The ZIP archive capability in WinA&D 3.0.5 has the flexibility to add, remove, or extract single files, filtered files, or exclude files from a ZIP archive. A ZIP archive can automatically back up project files after a work session. Self-extracting archives can also be generated. There is now stricter enforcement of code access defined for namespaces during code generation or editing. Performance enhancements include faster text export of large dictionaries and faster generation of large HTML reports, with reduced memory requirements. The WinTranslator 2.0.2 update adds additional customization options to the reengineering wizard, which steps the user through the process of generating a design from code. It also adds optimizations for Java reengineering. Excel Software Building Help Files with a Developer Focus
A variety of wizards simplify common tasks like creating new topics, which helps generate default information automatically. Once added, topics can be edited using plain text for fast typing, or edited in full visual HTML view. Topics are available for preview either in an external Microsoft® Internet Explorer window (in real time) or by using the built-in HTML viewer. Each help topic contains a variety of fields for providing main topic text, related links, and keywords, providing a structured approach to help building. For component developers, a special Class tab allows you to provide specific information about class methods, properties, and events. Help Builder includes numerous tools for building help files, ranging from drag and drop topic moving to support for Cascading Style Sheets for consistent layouts and live previews to automatic related link creation. Additional features include auto-creation of context IDs, auto-complete topic selection, exporting and importing of subtopics to XML or Help Builder project files, and a utility to find and fix bad internal links. West Wind HTML Help Builder is available from the West Wind Technologies Web site. West Wind Technologies Manage those Metatags
In addition to standard HTML documents, Metabot Pro now supports Microsoft Office documents and common graphic images associated with HTML. New integration with Microsoft FrontPage® allows customers to take advantage of Metabot Pro's editing capabilities by launching Metabot Pro from the FrontPage menu. An upcoming free patch release is planned to include integration with Allaire Homesite and Macromedia Dreamweaver. In addition, Metabot Pro supports editing of HTML documents via FTP and allows directory filtering to ensure that only those documents under development are being scanned for editing. Watchfire Get Bugs Before they Get You
The newest version of CodeWizard features RuleWizard, which allows users to quickly create custom coding standards. Using patented Source Code Analysis technology, CodeWizard looks for coding standard violations. It automatically enforces over 70 coding standards that come from industry experts such as Scott Meyers and Stanley Lippman. RuleWizard allows users to compose and modify coding standards (or rules) by graphically expressing the pattern that they want CodeWizard to look for when it parses code. Rules are created by selecting a main node, then adding additional elements to a flowchart-like representation until it fully expresses the pattern that constitutes a violation of the rule. Rules can be specified by option, command line, or named rules. CodeWizard is available on Windows NT®, Windows® 95, Windows 98, Linux, DEC Alpha, Sun/Solaris, SGI (IRIX 5.x and 6.x), HP (10 and 11) IBM RS/6000 (AIX 3.4 and 4.x). ParaSoft What do Your Web Visitors Think?
Key features include browser-based authoring and management tools and an open API, which allows ViewsFlash polls and result pages to integrate easily with existing Web publishing systems. In addition, ViewFlash has extensible, reusable HTML templates, providing control over the UI. Polls and surveys can be published as whole Web pages or as page fragments, and can include radio buttons, checkboxes, dropdown menus, and full-text fields. Real-time results are displayed instantly after voting, to entertain and inform site visitors, and are automatically archived. In addition, a true random sampling option ensures statistically valid survey results with minimal disruption in the visitor experience. Cogix Corporation Tracking Customers and Incidents
TechExcel Inc. recently announced the availability of ServiceWISE 1.0, a customer and incident-tracking application for technical support groups. ServiceWISE provides customer incident tracking and management, customer and contact management, knowledge base creation and searching, customer submission and review of incidents via the Web, customer access to the knowledge base via the Web, automatic email notification, and sales force integration. TechExcel Inc. Dress up Your Buttons Castlemount Soft recently released Active Multimedia Button 4.0, a 3D ActiveX® button control for user interface developers. Active Multimedia Button's new 3D button ActiveX control lets visual programmers add a new look to their windows, dialog boxes, and forms using a variety of shapes, 3D effects, surfaces, bitmaps, cursors, animations, sounds, colors, and fonts. Active Multimedia Button can simulate the Picture, Animation, Hyperlink, Frame, and Led controls. Active Multimedia Button 4.0 runs under Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4.0. A high-resolution video card and a sound card are recommended for best performance. Castlemount Soft 
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From the December 1999 issue of Microsoft Internet Developer.
