Jason David Carr

The new version is here! As always, it is recommended to upgrade as soon as possible. Here are the major changes:

• Administrator permissions are no longer required to run the application from the Program Files folder; application settings and logs are now stored in the Windows program data folders.
• The application has been tested with and should now work fine with UAC under Windows Vista and Windows 7.
• Summary logs have been added to the end of the logging to report count totals for the various operations.
• Fixed a bug in the new syncing empty folders functionality that caused a neverending loop when the root of either folder was empty.
• Added a “File Filter” property to mapped folders to allow the use of wildcards (*.txt) to restrict which files to sync (as requested by Jason Saul).

Simply run the setup to upgrade to the latest version.

Download UpSync 0.7 Setup
Download UpSync 0.7 Source Code (Visual Studio 2008 required)

Remember to share your thoughts and suggestions!

Filed under: C#, Software, Technology, UpSync, Visual Studio 2008 on October 5th, 2009 | 15 Comments »

I have a new version of UpSync to put out today! If you are regularly using the application, it is strongly recommended that you upgrade because the stability of the sync process has been greatly improved. Here’s a brief list of some of the more interesting changes:

• Significantly improved error handling
• Delete prompts are now all displayed at once (instead of throughout the process)
• A new “stop prompting and do this for x remaining files” feature has been added
• Code is now StyleCop-compliant (as well as code analysis-compliant)
• Empty folders are now synced properly based on their creation date

You may simply run the new setup and it will automatically upgrade over whatever old version you have installed.

Download UpSync 0.6 Setup
Download UpSync 0.6 Source Code (Visual Studio 2008 required)

Please remember to comment and share your thoughts on the application! :)

Filed under: C#, Software, Technology, UpSync, Visual Studio 2008 on September 1st, 2009 | 2 Comments »

If you’re like me, you slave over your music collection on a regular basis making sure every song is properly tagged, free of any audible flaws, and overall as perfect as possible. Okay, well, you’re probably not like me. But still, having your music skip because you used a crappy ripping application or hiccup between songs because of a non-gapless codec is exceedingly annoying. Here we’ll go through five commonly-made mistakes by music enthusiasts when managing their music collection.

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Filed under: DRM, Music, Technology on August 14th, 2009 | 7 Comments »

One of the annoying caveats of using the built in .NET message box is that it provides no functionality to center a message box on the currently active window. Oddly, even when you specify the parent window using the proper overloaded version of the Show() method, the window still insists on centering itself on the desktop, instead of on the active window. This is annoying and confusing to the end user because it breaks the ability to set aside particular “screen real estate” for an application. Fortunately, there is a way to fix this, although it does involve the Win32 API.

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Filed under: C#, Technology, Visual Studio 2008 on August 7th, 2009 | 5 Comments »

My wife, baby boy, regretfully the dog, and I are on our way to Michigan for a wedding as I’m typing this post. I managed to download the latest beta version of WordPress for BlackBerry, and like I’ve been with everything else WordPress-related, I’m extremely pleased with the ease of use and functionality (and that it’s even possible to update the blog from my handheld without having to deal with trying to do it in a crappy browser).

WordPress for BlackBerry is currently at version 0.9.0.134 in beta, but it sure does seem to be working well enough for me. Of course, it only has a subset of the full WordPress admin features, but it has pretty much everything you need for what you’d want to do on the road (full page, post, and comment viewing, adding, editing, and deleting).

It seems there’s no end to what I can do on my BlackBerry these days. It sure beats my days with Windows Mobile…

Filed under: BlackBerry, Family, Technology, WordPress on July 24th, 2009 | No Comments »

Nothing irks me more than to have to dig through garbage code.  Working at a software consulting company, I’ve seen a whole slew of it.  And I’ve hurled on my computer monitor enough as a result to give it a pretty, brownish-green tint.  Bad code destroys hardware.  And souls.

The single biggest clue that a developer either has no idea what they are doing or simply doesn’t care about their code is inconsistency.  We all have different preferences and coding styles, but when a developer can’t pick a particular approach to take they come off as incredibly amateur, and for good reason.  Inconsistent code is difficult to read, and is thus difficult to modify in the future.

The majority (or even the entirety) of the list below revolves around writing consistently styled and consistently performing C# code.  Much of this list is admittedly anal retentive, but all of it is guaranteed to improve the quality and readability of your code.
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Filed under: C#, Technology, Visual Studio 2008 on July 17th, 2009 | 4 Comments »

Below are the downloads for the setup and the sources for the first official release of UpSync, version 0.5.  As I stated in my previous post, it works properly in Windows XP and Vista, as well as Windows 7.  For a description of the application, and some screenshots, see the previous post.

If you use it, let me know!  I’m interested in any kind of feedback.

Download UpSync 0.5 Setup
Download UpSync 0.5 Source Code (Visual Studio 2008 required)

Filed under: C#, Software, Technology, UpSync, Visual Studio 2008 on July 16th, 2009 | 4 Comments »

I recently started working on a new application called UpSync. From what you can probably already tell from the name, the application is meant to sync files between folders on different machines. It’s meant to be easy to use but also down and dirty enough to meet a typical system admin’s needs.

I’m open sourcing the project, and I’ll have the setup and the source code for version 0.5 up very shortly.  It works properly on Windows XP, Vista, and even Microsoft’s new, unreleased Windows 7 (the screenshots are from Windows 7).  It’s written in C#, my favorite of the .NET languages, using Visual Studio 2008.

Here are some of the key features that have already been implemented:

• Any number of folders can be synced with separate settings for each folder.
• Sync in one direction, the other direction, or both directions with no interaction necessary.
• Specific settings for handling deleted files allow for all possible situations.
• Syncing engine uses file dates and times to ensure the most recent version of files are replicated.
• New files in either folder are automatically handled correctly and copied over to the other folder.
• Sync process can be entirely automated or manually run.
• Syncing engine logs every operation in complete detail so there is never any confusion as to what files were changed.

Screenshots are after the break.
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Filed under: C#, Software, Technology, UpSync, Visual Studio 2008 on July 16th, 2009 | 4 Comments »

I vowed I’d never create a WordPress blog.  Too generic.  Such a waste of my “skills”.  Well, here it is, generic as ever, but immediately functional.  The problem with my home-grown blogs was I tended to focus on the website development for the blog, and never got around to the actual content.  What good is a blog without content?  Hopefully this one actually contains some material worth-reading/listening to…

I should say I’m quite impressed with the WordPress “experience”.  I was up in ten minutes, literally, and the amount of easy “tinkering” you can do is amazing.  I hope, though, that as I need to customize the blog (if I need to), WordPress doesn’t get in the way too much.  We’ll see.

For now, welcome to the blog.  I hope you never read this because of the vastly more interesting content about to be added. :)

Filed under: Technology, WordPress on July 14th, 2009 | No Comments »