One of the oldest and most basic programs is certainly the command prompt (cmd.exe). One thing is certain, you still can't do without the command prompt, and certainly being a developer.  I came across a nice tool, called Console, which enhances the command prompt. I have been using it for a couple of months now, and I really like it.

One of the things you should really customize is your PROMPT. More information about changing the PROMPT can be found here. Having, for example, your current directory path on a separate line is really useful. You can customize it through the environment variable called PROMPT, like Scott is doing, but I prefer passing it as a parameter to the cmd.exe. This way I can easily copy the application and no reboot is required. This can be done by the /k argument of the cmd.exe.

Here is a snippet of my XML configuration file for Console.

<tab title="Console">
    <console shell="cmd /k PROMPT $p$_$+$g" init_dir=""/>
    <cursor style="11" r="255" g="255" b="255"/>
    <background type="2" r="0" g="0" b="0">
        <image file="" relative="0" extend="0" position="0">
            <tint opacity="190" r="0" g="0" b="0"/>
        </image>
    </background>
</tab>
<tab title="cmd">
    <console shell="cmd.exe /k PROMPT $p$_$+$g" init_dir=""/>
    <cursor style="11" r="255" g="255" b="255"/>
    <background type="0" r="0" g="0" b="0">
        <image file="" relative="0" extend="0" position="0">
            <tint opacity="0" r="0" g="0" b="0"/>
        </image>
    </background>
</tab>
<tab title="VS.NET 2005">
    <console shell="cmd /k PROMPT $p$_$+$g &amp;&amp; C:\PROGRA~1\MID05A~1\VC\vcvarsall.bat" init_dir=""/>
    <cursor style="0" r="255" g="255" b="255"/>
    <background type="2" r="0" g="0" b="0">
        <image file="" relative="0" extend="0" position="0">
            <tint opacity="188" r="0" g="0" b="0"/>
        </image>
    </background>
</tab>
<tab title="PowerShell">
    <console shell="C:\WINDOWS\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0\powershell.exe" init_dir=""/>
    <cursor style="0" r="255" g="255" b="255"/>
    <background type="2" r="0" g="0" b="0">
        <image file="" relative="0" extend="0" position="0">
            <tint opacity="189" r="0" g="0" b="0"/>
        </image>
    </background>
</tab>

This is the result in Console

Recently I switched from RSSBandit to GreatNews as RSS reader (noticed by a post from Bert Jansen).

The speed for aggregating feeds using GreatNews is really fast! I think it was better called SpeedNews ;). Besides that, it has a nice user-interface and all config & feed data is kept in the installation folder. This means that no installation (MSI) is required, and that it can easily be deployed to other computers.

I am planning to install MediaWiki for my site www.istaysharp.net. This way I can easily add/update content, because currently the site is static, and that's thre reason why it's not updated frequently.

It was planned for this evening to update www.istaysharp.net, but a new version has been released of MediaWiki, version 1.6.1. I hope the upgrade will go smooth and that my code will still work :)

One other interesting point, is that apparently there is an experimental support for connecting to an Oracle database (read release notes). Are there any plans for supporting MS SQL Server 2000? If so, please let me know!!!