Friday, July 11, 2014

130 free ebooks available from Microsoft

Microsoft has many many free ebooks available for download on their different websites.
Up to now it was difficult to find them, since they are scattered over the different sites and pages.

Thanks to Eric Ligman we now have a (complete?) list of all available free ebooks from microsoft.
The books are available in different formats, most are pdf, some are epub or mobi and even some word and zip documents are available.
Some of the ebooks are also available in multiple formats, just look at them.



The books cover MS related topics, from Windows 7, to Server 2012, Sharepoint, SQL Server and many other related topis.

You can also get a free info app, where new free ebooks will be announced.
Unfortunally this one is only available for Windows Phone...

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

What rectangular selection can be used for in Netbeans

Netbeans has very powerfull editing capabilities.
One of the less known features is the regular selection in text files.

This is very handy, when you for example need to remove the first two columns inside a text file.

Go to the first line, press CTRL+SHIFT+R and move the cursor down to then end and left two characters.
This selects the first two character in each line.


Now with a single DEL key you can remove them all.

But there is more to this rectangular stuff...
With the rectangular selection still active, start typing hello

Here what you get...


As you see, not only deletion of text can be made via rectangular selection, but also inserting new text on multiple lines at the same time.

This is handy, when you for example wish to add a css class to a lot of <div> tags at the idention level.

A improved version of this multi row editing capability is sheduled for a upcomming version of netbeans. The corresponding enhancement request can be found here.

Official Office 365 Roadmap available

Microsoft recently published a roadmap for the office 365 environment.
You can look at it here.

It shows what has already been rolled out, what is currently in the rolling out phase and what is intended to be implemented/changed in the next weeks/months.

New features are not released for all office 365 at the same time.
Rather the new functionality is rolled out in several phases, during a few days up to a few months, depending on the impact of the changes.