Sandip's Programming Zen

If you are looking for Outlook Express alternative then Foxmail is a good choice.

I have installed and used it and found it working nicely. It is lot faster than OE. Takes about 4MB ram in minimized mode compared to OE which takes about 25MB

It is basically comes in Chinese UI but English version an be downloaded from here. By the way it’s FREEWARE.

If you know any other good alternatives then I would like to know in comments.

I just found a post which describes best Free IE Add-Ins, some of them are really cool, I wonder why I didn’t know some of them yet. anyways here is the list:

IE7Pro
Website: http://www.ie7pro.com/

Quero
Website: http://www.quero.at/

Feeds Plus
Website: http://www.enhanceie.com/ie/feedsplus.asp

Inline Search
Website: http://www.ieforge.com/InlineSearch/HomePage

IE7 Open Last Closed Tab
Website: http://www.muvextoe.com/download.php#ieolct

GooglePreviewIE
Website: http://ackroyd.de/googlepreview-ie/

ieSpell
Website: http://www.iespell.com/

StumbleUpon
Website: http://www.stumbleupon.com/

del.icio.us
Website: http://del.icio.us/help/ie/extension

SiteAdvisor for Internet Explorer
Website: http://us.mcafee.com/root/product.asp?productid=sa&brw=ie&affid=0

I just downloaded Bug Shooting. It’s free and exactly what I wanted. Download size is just around 1 MB (.Net framework 2.0 required).

It is mostly targeted for developers and testers but anyone can use it as a normal screen capture utility.

It is light weight and has most of the features you normally require in such tools like different screen capture modes, text and shape annotations, merging multiple screen captures together etc.

Recently I had a need to merge two DataTables with same structure, DataSet has built-in function called Merge but not in DataTable.
So I wrote my own, this is my function to merge two DataTables…

public static DataTable mergeDTs(DataTable dt1, DataTable dt2)
{
DataTable dtResult = dt1.Clone();

foreach (DataRow dr in dt1.Rows)
{
dtResult.Rows.Add(dr.ItemArray);
}
foreach (DataRow dr in dt2.Rows)
{
dtResult.Rows.Add(dr.ItemArray);
}

return dtResult;
}

Hope this helps.

Today I switched back to MS Outlook from Gmail, I used to access all my office emails on a Gmail account but something drove me back to Outlook again, well here are my reasons…

1. Sending email in gmail is time consuming especially when you have a slow or unstable connection, In outlook you can compose email and just click on Send button (outlook don’t “complain” even if you are offline, it will send email in background process).

2. With Gmail you can’t access your email offline.

3. Can’t take backup of your emails on Gmail (yes, I need to as per our policy rule).

4. It’s simply easier to work with keyboard on Outlook than Gmail.

5. I just love the Outlook 2007 interface, it rocks.

Of course noone beats Gmail in email search and spam protection, I will continue to use it for my personal emails.