Then you need to visit Another Random Developer Blog.  This is a Java development blog with some great tutorials and practical code tips, tricks, and snippets that you can actually use.  Even though I am not a Java developer I’ve been following the tutorials on this blog keenly,  and I know anyone who’s even remotely interested in Java will enjoy them too.   So there’s another useful resource for all developers (and aspiring developers) out there.

As an aside, the fourth part of the Drupal tutorial series will be posted soon, but be sure to check out Another Random Developer Blog.

Microsoft is offering free developer and design software for students all around the world. Students can download professional-level Microsoft developer and design tools.

The downloads currently (as of this posting) listed are:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
• Microsoft Expression Studio
• xna Game Studio 2.0
• xna Creators Club Online
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition

Other free products include:

• Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition
• Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition
• Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
• Microsoft Visual Web 2005 Express Edition
• Microsoft Visual J# 2005 Express Edition
• Microsoft Virtual PC

In order to get this software from Microsoft at no charge, you first have to log into the website using your Windows live account, and if you don’t have one it’s easy and free to create one. You are then asked to establish or verify your student status and you have to do this verification once every 12 months. This process is built into this DreamSpark site itself. You need to be at least 18 years old or have otherwise reached the age of majority in the place (province, state or country) where you live, or if not, your parent or legal guardian must accept the Microsoft DreamSpark software license terms on your behalf, in order for you to download and use the software.

As of this posting, the countries listed were:

• Belgium
• Canada
• China
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• Spain
• Sweden
• United Kingdom
• United States.

If your school is on the list then the verification process is easy. If not, you have to go a step further and provide more information to attempt online verification. If that doesn’t work then you need to mail in your information such as current school ID to them for verification.The other thing to keep in mind is that the software being offered is only accessible via a download, and as you know these are not small programs, so you’re in luck if you have a fast internet connection. Considering that these are full editions, and not limited student editions, I think that if you’re a student or a parent of a student who is into computers and coding, it’s definitely worth the process to get the free downloads.

To access the download area, select your product and start the verification process: https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/

In response to my post on importing large files into Excel by first splitting them, one of my readers, JP pointed out to me that you can bypass the splitting step by using a VBA macro to do the import.

As you may know, Excel has a cut off of 65,536 rows, and so if you want to import a csv or text file that has more rows than that, you’ll run into trouble. This is where the csv splitter I mentioned before, or this macro that JP pointed out to me will come in handy.

You can find the knowledge base article with the macro code, for a VBA solution to importing large files into Excel at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/120596.

And be sure to visit JP’s excellent website and blog VBA Code for Excel and Outlook where you’ll find a lot of useful macros and articles.

BloggertoBlogger is a new community that’s coming up for bloggers. There is a forum where bloggers can share ideas and talk about blogging in general and specific blogging topics too. The forum is still young but if definitely active and interesting, and the posts are filled with useful material.  There is also a blog, and you can get your blog reviewed by using credits that you earn by posting on the forum.

I found BloggertoBlogger when looking for a way to transfer a Wordpress blog from one server to another, and there was a useful tutorial on how to accomplish this.

While not necessarily focused on coding and programming topics, I think that BloggertoBlogger has great potential to become a very useful resource for programmers who mostly work on blogging platforms to share ideas and to exchange information on the latest plugins, enhancements, and on customizing different aspects of the blogging software.

So visit BloggertoBlogger today and share what you know.

We’ve talked before about using content management systems, whether database-based or flat-file. As you may know, some of the CMS’s out there are very powerful and can be used to create some amazing websites and communities. In a previous post I talked about the simplicity and ease of using a flat-file CMS.

Another option for creating a website, apart from hand coding it yourself, is to use templates and build on them. To this end, I want to share with you two wonderful resources I discovered the other day. I am going to be exploring and using these resources myself and you may see me mention them again, but in this post I just want to introduce them.

The first is the Open Source Web Design project. Open Source Web Design is a site where you can download free web design templates and share yours with others. The goal is to help make the internet a prettier place, and the templates you find there are really nice to look at, and can inspire you with a slew of ideas. As of this post, there are currently 2080 free designs for you to download and play with. If you download and use one of the templates, make sure you read and adhere to the Usage Agreement and the copyright information of each template.

The second resource that I want to share with you today is the Dynamic Drive DHTML and Javascript Code Library. This is one of my favorite places to find and download free, original DHTML (Dynamic HTML) and Javascript scripts to enhance your web site. Some of the scripts you will find on this website include:

* Calendars
* Date & Time
* Document Effects
* Dynamic Content
Iframe & Ajax,
* Form Effects
* Games
* Image Effects
Galleries, Mouseover, Slideshows
* Links & Tooltips
* Menus & Navigation
CSS Based, Multi-levels
* Mouse and Cursor
* Scrollers
* Text Animations
* User/System Preference
* Window and Frames
* XML and RSS

and others.

Between these two resources, you may be able to come up with some ideas for projects in the new year.

I love Akismet because it has saved me a lot of time and ibuprofen (that I would be taking for the headaches I would get trying to ward off spammers. Here’s why:

Now this blog hasn’t been around for that long, considering that I made my first post on June 13 of this year, and I haven’t been posting as regularly as I would like, so to have been hit with that amount of spam in such a short time is something to think about!

Let’s think about this for a few minutes: This blog has been online for about 6 months now, that’s approximately 180 days, give or take. If you do the math, you find that this comes to about 8 spam messages a day!! Wow!!

Since I have comment moderation turned on, without Akismet I would be getting on average 8 emails a day to moderate comments on this blog alone!

Do you see now why I love Akismet?

If you have a Wordpress blog, make sure that you enable Akismet, it will save you lots and lots of time!