I’ve been so busy lately I didn’t have time to blog so I’m writing this post to summarize everything I’m working on and my plans for the future.

The most important thing for 2010 is the decision to retire StartMenuSearch and focus on time tracking and time management related products, this will let me expand the Nbd-Tech product line in a way that makes sense from a marketing perspective.

I’ve released the second time tracking product - Squirrel Clock – and I have 4 (yes four) other time management products in various stages of planning and development.

I want all my product to be the best in their category, this means every product have to be finished, polished and marketed – so only one of those four is currently planned to be released this year.

Below is a detailed breakdown of my development plans for 2010, all those plans are just plans and can change at any time without notice – don’t say I didn’t warn you.

yaTimer – The easiest way to track your time

yaTimer 2.5.1 will be released this month, this will be a service release and will only contain bug fixes, no new features.

The next version is yaTimer 2.6, this version is planned for the second quarter of 2010, this version will contain new features, especially in the area of project management.

The version after that will be yaTimer 3.0, as the name suggests this will be a major upgrade, this version is planned for December.

Squirrel Clock – The easiest way to track your employees time

Squirrel Clock is still in private beta, you can register to participate in the beta on the Squirrel Clock home page, everyone who registered for the beta will get a 50% discount for the first year after the beta is over, so register now.

The private beta, together with the 50% discount, will end this month (or the beginning of march at the latest) when all the functionality planned for the first version will be ready.

As a web application Squirrel Clock will have small frequent updates instead of a large update every few months, the schedule and content of updates after coming out of beta isn’t set yet and will depend on customer feedback.

Productivity Tips

There hasn’t been any new productivity tip on the blog for some time now, this is because the productivity tip series is expanding, it will leave the blog, get a brand new format and it’s own section on the web site.

The new and improved productivity tips will make their first public appearance later this month or early march.

This Blog

The blog will continue as it is today (just without the productivity tips category) with a mix of in depth technical content, business topics and product related announcements.

Undisclosed Future Product

The third time management product is planned to be released in the third quarter of 2010, I will publish more details closer to the release date.

I am very happy to announce my second time tracking product: Squirrel Clock.

yaTimer is a wonderful time tracking tool, it is designed for people who need to track their own time - freelancers, consultant and anyone who wants to improve personal productivity – it does not fit very well with the need of employers who have to know how much time employees spend in the office.

For tracking how much time employees spend at work I’ve built Squirrel Clock – an on-line employee attendance tracking time clock.

Squirrel Clock is now entering a very short beta period, anyone who registers for the beta will receive a 50% discount for the first year after the beta is over – so if you, or anyone you know is looking for an employee attendance tracking solution register now.

I tend to have a lot of software installed on my computer this obviously means I have a lot of items in my start menu, on my old XP computer the start menu was so big it didn’t fit on my screen.

The Vista version of the start menu solved my problem, the menu layout was changed to accommodate more programs and the search feature made finding the program you want to run easy.

But I was still working on some XP computers – and so StartMenuSearch for Windows XP was born (I was actually using it before Vista was released but I didn’t release it until some time after).

StartMenuSearch for Windows XP does exactly what the name suggests, it let’s you search the Windows XP start menu – it’s very good in searching the start menu, it uses your Windows theme so it looks exactly like your start menu and it very fast – but it’s limited to searching the start menu, a feature that is built into Vista and Windows 7.

so, now that Windows 7 is out and looks like it’s going strong (unlike Vista who suffered from some really bad PR) I don’t see much of a future for StartMenuSearch.

So, in a few days I’ll update the web site, the StartMenuSearch pages will remain on the site, you will still be able to buy it and it is still supported – but it will be removed from the site’s navigation menus.

2009 is coming to as end and it’s time to look back on what we did this year.

Here is the list of 10 most popular posts of 2009 on this blog:

1. WPF XAML Data Binding Cheat Sheet
2. Getting a WPF application to pick up the correct regional settings
3. WPF Printing Part 2 – The Fixed Document
4. WPF Printing Part 1 – Printing Visuals
5. WPF Data Binding Cheat Sheet Update - The Internationalization Fix
6. WPF Printing Part 3 – Sizes
7. WPF Printing Part 4 – Print Preview
8. What Percentage of Users have the .net Framework Installed (and what versions)
9. Destroy the Web!
10. Free Mouse Pointer Image

From this list it’s obvious the most popular topic on this blog is WPF, with the 8 top posts – none of my productivity related posts made it into the top 10.

So, what should I post about on 2010? I have some posts about WPF and software development already lined up, I’m going to  announce a new product I’m working on and there will probably be some posts about system administration soon after I finish moving to the new server.

I’m always looking for topic to blog about, so if there’s anything you want me to write about just send me a message or leave a comment on the blog.

I’ve upgraded the software running this blog, everything should continue to work exactly as before but if you see anything wrong please send me a message or leave a comment.

Earlier today someone managed to insert some unsafe HTML into a comment on this blog, the actual comment didn’t do anything (it printed the word “test”) but the same technique can be used to insert malicious code into a comment.

This was possible due to a bug in my blogging software, the bug was fixed for the latest version so I dropped everything and upgraded the blog.

I’d like to thank the person who did this (after all, this brought to issue to my attention and I fixed it before any damage was done) and hope this “attack” was an act of curiosity and not a test before a real attack on my blog.

I’m moving this blog, the Nbd-Tech web site, e-mail and everything else to a brand new web server.

I’m trying to complete this move with no interruptions – buts its likely there will be some intermediate problems while services switch over.

I apologize in advance for any problems that ay happen – and if you can’t use this site or send me e-mail just wait a little and try again.

I’ve just released version 2.5 of yaTimer – my time tracking application (3 days ahead of schedule).

yaTimer 2.5 is a free upgrade for all customers, you can get the latest version from the upgrade page.

I’m writing this here because this information is hard to find, searching for related keywords will get you a lot of incorrect answers, I hope this post will save someone (maybe even me) time in the future.

Windows Firewall and non-secure FTP traffic

Windows firewall can be configured from command line using netsh command. 2 simple steps are required to setup Windows Firewall to allow non-secure FTP traffic

1) Open port 21 on the firewall:

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="FTP (no SSL)" action=allow protocol=TCP dir=in localport=21

2) Activate firewall application filter for FTP (aka Stateful FTP) that will dynamically open ports for data connections:

netsh advfirewall set global StatefulFtp enable

Source: This forum thread on MSDN (you have to scroll down a lot to get to the correct answer).

Disclaimer: This post talks about unreleased software, there will be some small changes before the yaTimer 2.5 is released, yaTimer 2.5 will be a free upgrade to all existing customers.

yaTimer had the option to run in the system tray almost from the beginning, the icon change color if you have active timers and a balloon popup can show you the list of running tasks.

In this version the tooltip and balloon popup tests are a bit nicer, there are two new option in the right click menu (Pause all and Restart Paused Tasks) and everything you can do from the tray icon you can also do using global hotkeys.

So you can pause and resume all your tasks without even switching to yaTimer.

All those features are disabled by default and can be enabled from the options window.

By the way, the tooltip still doesn’t show the running task list because of technical limitations of windows – I may write about that in a future blog post.

Unless there’s some huge showstopper bug yaTimer 2.5 will be released on or before December 20th 2009 and will be a free upgrade to all existing customers.

I’m currently working hard on testing yaTimer and fixing bugs, when I’m happy with the quality of the software I’ll release it.

As always, I have a very long list of features that didn’t make it into this version, and if you asked for one of those features I’m truly sorry – but in any project you have to make painful decisions about cutting features or the software will never be released.