In early June, I signed up for a business class shared web host account package with a good provider that offers support for several main sites and cPanel for administrative requirements. Part of this package was a separate view of AWStats for each of my main domains and sub-domains available from cPanel, with fully parsed data for each site. Coming from a hosting provider that didn't have the first clue on how to configure their servers, this was a great feature and worked well for my requirements.

Now, the only problem was that cPanel on my shared hosting account can only have one login, and my associate (okay, by brother) is the owner of another site on my account, www.fealabs.com. I wanted to give him access to his statistics data on the account, and I don't mind sharing my credentials with him, but I wanted to make it easier for him to get the data he wanted to see about his site. So I went searching for a package that can supplement AWStats with good statistical and analytical views, without the need to log into the cPanel account. After a short research session on Google, I came across JAWStats…

According to a short article on the front page of the MSDN Subscriptions Home page, the full Microsoft Expression Studio 3 is now available to premium MSDN subscribers. This is great news as the first 2 releases of this design tool only had certain portions of the product available to MSDN subscribers (Blend and Web if I recall correctly) and now we get the full complement of functionality via our subscription. While I didn't use the version 1.x at all, I have had the opportunity to use Expression Web 2 for a couple of projects, and I've found the design elements of the tool very useful. It's compliance to HTML, XHTML, and CSS standards made my work of creating simple web interfaces rather easy and I recommend any developer who has an opportunity to check out the new release to do so.

Here's what the full package of the new release offers:

What is NAntBuilder? (Excerpt from NAntBuilder Website)

NAntBuilder is a full-featured Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for NAnt, the popular process-automating tool. It is designed to be a powerful NAnt script creator, editor, and debugger. 

NAntBuilder enables you to manage your build process easily, allowing you to focus on more interesting and important works. Its full-featured code completion will save you thousands of keystrokes while authoring NAnt script. And the integrated NAnt script debugger will help you execute NAnt script task by task. With all these features, NAntBuilder provides a flexible, easy-to-use platform to author, debug and execute NAnt script.

I've recently been involved in a project to automate windows software builds at my organization and take the first steps toward continuous integration. This is a project that actually started back in mid 2006 with an evaluation of available build tools, but was shelved after the initial research due to resources and lack of infrastructure to support the new process. When we picked up the project again this year, we decided to use NAnt as our build tool of choice based on the research we did in the initial project and the fact that the continuous integration server had native support. However, a few weeks into the project I was doing some research and found that most of the articles I found regarding NAnt were… Well… Old.

So I started to wonder, "Is the NAnt project dead?"