If you are a graphic designer, web designer, or any kind of artist or designer that gets paid for your designs, you must read Matthew Inman’s blog post, “How  to Ruin a Web Design.”  After you get done laughing, I would suggest printing the article and hanging it somewhere that your boss and co-workers can see it!

I’ve been having problems with a SanDisk Ultra II compact flash card and thought I lost a handful of images that I took over the weekend.  Thanks to some help from the DPReview forums, I was pointed to the ArtPlus Digital Photo Recovery application.  It’s a nifty little free application that can recover photos from a corrupt memory card and did a pretty good job for me, even after I had reformatted my compact flash card!

How cool is this?  Red-Gate Software has a free plug-in for Query Analyzer that gives you Intellisense® support!  Click here to get it.

Should you ever find yourself needing to write CAML queries (XML queries) against a SharePoint list, the U2U CAML tool is quite helpful. U2U member Patrick Tisseghem has a nice blog post on how to use the tool which can be downloaded form their web site.

One thing to note is that the tool wraps the query XML nodes within a <Query></Query> node.  You’ll want to delete that node in your .NET code.  As a result, your CAML query might look something like this: 

Dim strQueryDate as String = Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPUtility.CreateISO8601DateTimeFromSystemDateTime(CDate(“05/05/2006”))

Dim strQuery as String = “<Where><Geq><FieldRef Name=””Created”” /><Value Type=””DateTime””>{0}</Value></Geq></Where>”, strQueryDate)

Note the goofy CreateISO8601DateTimeFromSystemDateTime method that is used for the date… CAML uses an ISO8601 date format so you must use this method if you want to do date comparisons.