At work, we are using ceTe’s PDF libraries for .NET . They have a pretty easy to use, versatile set of tools for building PDFs. However, after building a few of them, it became painfully obvious that assembling all but the most anemic PDF layouts was painful. The Tweak-Compile-Generate-View-Repeat method takes quite some time. Too much time. The Tweak-Refresh-Repeat model for HTML+CSS seemed to me to be a much better method of building a layout, but the Dynamic PDF API doesn’t support anything like that.

I spent most of my day at work today setting up a new development server. SQL Server 2008, IIS, msbuild server and finally, Subversion. Our dev box died a few months ago and we had cobbled together some things on a bunch of different existing boxes and basically hobbled along. So today I got a chance to consolidate everything onto a nice new box. And originally I wasn’t planning on moving our source control onto it.

Apparently I’ve been asleep at the command-line wheel. I was told today about a tool that Vista includes free, and I cannot figure out how I lived without it: robocopy . I’ve been using SyncToy with mixed results. No more. See this great article for some robust copying goodness. PS: yes, I do know about Cygwin + rsync.