Scott Hanselman

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Microsoft Fingerprint Reader - a Mini Review

February 08, 2005 Comment on this post [17] Posted in Reviews
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Fingerprint2I picked up a Microsoft Fingerprint Reader, which is a Digital Persona straight re-brand.

I'm seriously digging it. The registration process (shown at left) is fantastic. It's smooth, it's accurate and best of all it's simple.

Once you've clicked a few fingers and registered it, you can use any finger you want to indicate that it's you.

If you're on a web page with a name/password dialog when you touch the reader, you're prompted to enter your combo. After that, the software will automatically enter your password when you touch the reader. You can also touch the reader first, then pick what page you'd like to visit.

Either way, I've stopped entering passwords since I got this little gem. I've plugged it into the USB Hub on my DELL LCD Monitor, so it's always at hand (no pun intended) and it doesn't take up a USB Root Port on the main system.

Good Things:

  • It integrates with the Windows XP Ctrl-Alt-Del Login or Welcome Screen without changing it.
  • Non-intrusive and stays our of your way. No modal dialogs.
  • It's shiny

Bad Things:

  • You could cut off my finger, go to my house and log into my machine. Ah, but which finger!? I gotcha, evil doers. Unless, you take the whole hand. Er. Ick.
  • I can't figure out from the super-simple interface where to EDIT or DELETE an existing password. It must be there, and it's mentioned in the help, but I swear, I can't find it.
  • Rare: If you already have a Ctrl-Alt-Del replacement, perhaps for VPN software like Cisco, you can't use the reader for your primary login.
  • Can be spoofed if you use a gummy bear with ridges cut to register your fingers initially.

It's definitely worth the money and I use it every day.

Now playing: Eve - Gotta Man

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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A JavaScript implementation of innerText (not innerHtml) for FireFox and non-IE browsers.

February 08, 2005 Comment on this post [10] Posted in ASP.NET | Javascript
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In the sick, twisted word of cross-browser DOM-based JavaScript, sometimes you need to get the contents of an element. You usually use element.innerHTML, but often you don't want any existing sub-tags that might be in there. You want .innerText! But, innerText is only available on IE. Poop.

So, I needed this today, and my buddy Stuart found a solution here. Sick, yes. Twisted, yes. Works, yes. Moving on.

    <script type="text/javascript">
      var regExp = /<\/?[^>]+>/gi;
      function ReplaceTags(xStr){
        xStr = xStr.replace(regExp,"");
        return xStr;
      }
    </script>

All you need to do is pass it a string and it returns the string stripped of the tags. An example is shown below to grab the text from a div without the tags.

<html>
  <head>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      var regExp = /<\/?[^>]+>/gi;
      function ReplaceTags(xStr){
        xStr = xStr.replace(regExp,"");
        return xStr;
      }
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="test">
      <span id="span1">Test <u><b>Test</b></u> Test <br/><a href="#">Wow</a>!</span>
    </div>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      var xContent = document.getElementById("test").innerHTML;
      var fixedContent = ReplaceTags(xContent);
      alert(fixedContent);
    </script>
  </body>
</html>
[Eric's Weblog]

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Adding Tabs to Internet Explorer (IE) and the Rise, no, uh, er, fall of the Integrated Application

February 04, 2005 Comment on this post [6] Posted in Speaking | Tools
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I was asked today how to add Tabs and Tabbed Browsing to IE. Since "Use FireFox" wasn't appreciated as an answer, I pointed them to:

  • MyIE2/Maxthon - Renamed Maxthon recently, this has a load of toolbars, Skins, Gestures and
  • AvantBrowser - Feels from MDI and is free. Includes Skins, cleans up your tracks and filters Flash.

Which got me thinking. Is there room for IE-based browsers? Or are they just potential spyware-carriers? Do we need another browser? So many people were lamenting the lack of an IE7 on the Horizon and have been moving away from the "one browser/webapp for them all" view as RSS Readers are being favored by many over the integrated experience. Are there too many apps out there? We seem to oscillate between lots of 'applets' and lots of do-it-all apps.

Visual Studio seems to be taking lots of the best Add-In (applet) ideas and merging them into the mainline making Visual Studio the "Outlook" of development. I'm the guy with lists of utils, but in an average day, I may only touch:

  • iTunes
  • VS.NET (with a crapload of addins)
  • Virtual PC
  • Dragon NaturallySpeaking
  • Word
  • Outlook (with NewsGator)
  • BlogJet
  • VS.NET Command Prompt
  • Messenger

This is a pretty small list. Does this show some kind of pattern? Are apps becoming more laser focused? or more shotgun approach? Is there room for a dozen different RSS Readers? or just a few?

I also wonder if we're "red vs. blue-ing" the desktop application space:

  • Thunderbird vs. Outlook/Entourage
  • Newsgator vs. FeedDemon
  • Word vs. OpenOffice
  • Messenger vs. Trillian
  • VS.NET vs. Eclipse
  • Virtual PC vs. VMWare

I know it's not that really that polarized, but sometimes it feels as such. I guess that's just the magic of evolution/opensource/freemarket ecomony.

Hm.

Now playing: Mos Def - Next Universe..

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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The DebuggerDisplayAttribute in Visual Studio 2005 and IFormattable

February 04, 2005 Comment on this post [5] Posted in ASP.NET | Ruby | Bugs
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I didn't realize this when I did my generic IFormattableObject implementation last week, but this week finds me writing a chapter on Debugging for an ASP.NET 2.0 book.

I was checking out the DebuggerDisplayAttribute and realized that it uses a similar format string style as my stuff. (Of course, my stuff isn't new, languages like Ruby and others have done it for years).

Anyway, the point was that I had been wondering if my idea "fit" into the world of .NET, but the syntax of this DebuggerDisplay attribute left me feeling more justified for my work. It's interesting though, that they are offering this attribute, when I always used ToString to do the same basic thing in the debugger. So, in a Whidbey world of DebuggerDisplayAttribute, what's ToString() for? I guess just Console.WriteLine(myObject)?

UPDATE: The "TracePoint" syntax in the VS 2005 Debugger is the same.
For example: {i.FirstName} Function: $FUNCTION, Thread: $TID $TNAME
prints out the variable i's property FirstName as well as some psuedo-variables like the current function, the Thread ID and Thread Name

Syntax Description
 
[DebuggerDisplay(
  "{_forename} {_surname}")]
Uses the private _forename and _surname members 
[DebuggerDisplay(
  "Employee- {ToString()}")]
The ToString method is called to provide the textual representation to be displayed as the value of the object
[DebuggerDisplay("Employee
  ( {Forename} {(_wizard) ?
  \"Is a Wizard\" : \"Is 
  \"Is not a Wizard\" } )")]
An expression is evaluated in order to provide a differing representation to the user based on the value of a flag

Now playing: Kevin Lyttle - Turn Me On

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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TestDriven.NET Keyboard Bindings for Visual Studio.NET

February 02, 2005 Comment on this post [4] Posted in Bugs | Tools
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I've been meaning to do this for months, and Gordon reminds me to. If you are a TDD person and you use Test Driven.NET, nothing has changed your development life in the last year than right-click "Run Tests."  I was always irritated by the mouse action, and never got around to assigning keys. Now I've assigned Ctrl-Alt-F5 to "TestDriven.NET.Debugger." That along will save me at least 10 minutes of mousing in a development day.  I've also added Shift-Ctrl-T (Test) to compliment Shift-Ctrl-B (Build).

TestDriven.NET Keyboard Bindings -I did a little exploring today and discovered that you can assign keystrokes to these commands. Under Tools | Options, Keyboard, the commands you're looking for are:

TestDriven.NET.Client - The equivalent of the run test cases menu option, this will run test cases on whatever the active window is.
TestDriven.NET.Debugger - This is the same as the run in debbuger option, it will run the code in the active window in the debugger.
TestDriven.NET.Solution - This will run all the test cases in the current solution
The 80/20 Solution - TestDriven.NET Keyboard Bindings

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.