Alt-Tab in windows is really nice (especially in Vista), with little thumbnails etc. - why can't we have that in our favorite browser (meaning Firefox, of course!) .. well - Now we can! :-)

With a new add-on called Ctrl-Tab you get the a thumbnail view of your previous, current and next pages, and pressing F4 gives you a complete overview - It looks something like this...

The bits can be downloaded at: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5244

We all like our website to be as fast as possible (that's one of the reasons why we love .NET, right! :-)

A couple of minutes spend optimizing your IIS settings can also have a huge impact on the load time of your pages. Your website probably uses quite a few (semi) static files, like images, css and javascript - As these files does not change very often, there is really no need for your users to download these files every time they visit your site.

To cache these files, simply tell IIS to add cache headers. It's really simple to do:

1) Open IIS and locate your site.
2) Right click e.g. the "images" folder.
3) Select properties and choose the "HTTP Headers" tab. Check the "Enable content expiration" and set "Expire after 5 days".

The browser now compares the current date to the expiration date to determine whether to display a cached file, or to request an updated file from the server.

Our favorite web development tool for our favorite web browser has just been released - download away...

Umbraco v4.0 beta1 is available for download - looks like it's going to be a great release :)

Check it out / download the bits from: http://www.umbraco.org/v4

.. and by the way - aspnethotel.dk is of course capable of hosting both v3 and v4 umbraco sites! ('hidden' ad, beware! :-)

The Unified Software Development Process, Analysis and design is driven by use cases. Tons of books have been written about the subject (just do a quick search on Amazon), however many authors seems to "over complicate" the matter.

I've found two great articles about Use cases, which I think is worth reading if you're new to Use cases..

1) Use cases - An Introduction: usecases_intro.pdf (315.54 kb)

2) Driving Development with Use Cases: usecases.pdf (349.23 kb)

UML is, of course, also a big issue if you're beginning your quest into use case-driven software development projects. If you're new to UML take a look at What is UML?