Google Wave – a game changer that will change the very fundamentals of communications and collaboration over Internet as we know it today. If this technology takes off, as I believe it will, tools like e-mail and IM that we have grown to love and depend upon will gradually cease to exist. Other collaboration tools such as discussion forums, social networking, and blogging tools will change dramatically.

If you have not done so yet, checkout the Google Wave preview video here.

Web analytics is the science of collecting and analyzing your web site usage data so that you can optimize your site for best results. For example, if you analyze the click behavior of your web site users, you can learn how to best place links on your site to encourage most sales. Similarly if you learn about the demographics of your users, you can target marketing campaigns to those demographics that yield most results.

There are several tools that can be used for web analytics. Some of these are paid, while others are free. Below I will discuss some of the most useful tools available.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most widely used free web analytics platform. Integration with any web site is as easy as copying and pasting a few lines of JavaScript code into your web pages, and Google takes care of the rest.

There are tons of available features including, automatic integration with Google AdWords for analyzing advertising ROI, benchmarking with industry standards, advanced segmentation, goal-driven reporting, custom reporting, and motion charts.

2. Piwik

Piwik is an open-source web analytics platform created using PHP and MySQL. It closely mimics Google Analytics with pretty much all the major functionality provided by Google.

The big difference is that Piwik is hosted on your own servers, which is great if you do not want to share your data with Google for any reason. Also this allows you to have real-time access to your data, which is a feature that Google still lacks.

Moreover, Piwik is a plug-in based platform, which means that you can easily extend the out-of-the-box functionality by creating new plug-ins. Piwik also provides complete API access, which means that you can consume data collected by Piwik in a non-PHP based application. For example, if I want to create a SharePoint web part that displays the top 3 keywords used to land on my web site, I can easily do that.

3. ClickTale

ClickTale is a unique web analytics tool that records the actual browsing sessions of your visitors in real-time, which you can then view as a video at a later time. Every single mouse movement, click, and keystroke is recorded to recreate the user experience for you to analyze.

ClickTale pricing plans range from free to about $800/month depending upon the amount of activity recorded on your web site.

4. Clicky

Clicky is also similar to Google Analytics in that it provides simple integration with any web site and hosts data on it’s own servers. It provides a clean and modern web interface to access and analyze your data.

Clicky is tailored for small- to medium- size web sites, and provides plans that range from free to $49/month. It has some nice features, such as Google Maps integration, real time statistics, and plug-ins for easy integration with WordPress and other popular applications.

5. Snoop

Snoop is an interesting application that sits in your Windows system tray (system status bar for Mac) and alerts you of events on your web site in real-time. For example, it can notify you when someone makes a comment on your blog or creates a sales order.

At the time of this writing Snoop is still in beta and registration is via invites only. You can register your e-mail address at the Reinvigorate web site to be notified when an invite is available.

There are several other free and paid web analytics solutions out there that help you analyze your visitor behavior and usage patterns so that you can tweak your site or advertising strategy for better conversion rates.  There are also companies that provide more comprehensive solutions, such as Omniture and Unica, that are tailored for large web sites and high-dollar marketing budgets.  For most small to medium sites, however, a combination of free and cheap solutions does pretty well.

Finally a new version of SubSonic was released today with a lot of new features.  SubSonic is one of my favorite Data Access Layer (DAL) generators, that makes it super easy to create data access code.

As a developer you have a lot of control over what the generated code looks like, which is great because I do not like code generators to dictate the essence of my code.  But the beauty of SubSonic is that you never really have to interact with the generated code itself.  It’s automatically generated and compiled for you — you just need to learn how to use it, which is pretty simple.  What’s more, it’s free, and works with not only SQL Server, but also with MySQL, SQLite, and Oracle databases. 

SubSonic was originally started by Rob Conery as an open source project.  Later, Microsoft hired Rob and asked him to continue working on this project.  The latest 3.0 version took about a year to be completed.  According to Rob’s blog following are some of the new features:

A nice Linq engine which parses IQueryable “stuff” into SQL (thanks to Matt Warren’s excellent work with the IQToolkit, which we stole mercilessly).

A templating system which allows you to use ActiveRecord, good old Linq in Linq to SQL style, or whatever floats your boat.

A SimpleRepository which is just about zero-drag and even builds your database for you

A brand-new project site that will hopefully answer the question “is SubSonic dead”? Or probably not

A new docs site that has permanently crushed my ability to type. It’s a wiki so if you feel like being helpful and like SubSonic and want to help… nudge… nudge

Sign-up to be notified when this free service is made available to public

Developer Express and Microsoft provide a new version of CodeRush licensed exclusively for C# developers working in Visual Studio. The new product is called CodeRush Xpress, and it includes a slew of useful features to boost your productivity under Visual Studio.

You can download CodeRush Xpress here.

I wonder why any version of Windows has never had an undelete utility to recover files that you accidentally deleted.  We all do that, or have done it at least once in our lifetimes (if you have not, you will!).  It’s a more essential utility than some that Windows installs by default.

But no sweat as long as we have the freeware recovery software called Recuva!  Here’s some information about this great utility straight from it’s developer’s web site:

Recuva (pronounced “recover”) is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer.  This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players.  It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses!

I have used Recuva on Vista x64 where some other file recovery utilities fail (even though they say they are Vista compatible), and had great results.  I had accidentally deleted some of my family pictures, and Recuva recovered them for me in a snap.

The latest beta version of FxCop 1.36 was recently made available for download. This new version includes various features and fixes that include:

• 200+ bug fixes that reduce noise, missing analysis and rule crashes
• Support for analyzing anonymous methods and lambda expressions
• New option for skipping analysis over tool generated code
• Better support for C++/CLI and the Compact Framework
• Language ‘friendly’ API names in the UI and resolutions
• New globalization, design and usage rules
• Performance improvements that cut analysis by 2x and use half as much memory
• Documentation that is now available on MSDN

FxCop is an excellent free static code analysis tool from Microsoft that checks .NET managed code assemblies for conformance to Microsoft’s .NET Framework Design Guidelines.

SubSonic is an excellent open source DAL generation tool developed by Rob Conery that has been around for almost a year. In most cases SubSonic can just be added to your project, pointed to a databse, and you magically and immediately gain access to a rich and strongly typed object model that can be used to query and persist data to and from your relational data source.

SubSonic also has a cool feature called the REST handler that essentially allows one to use HTTP protocol as an interface to data stored in a back-end relational database. It is URI based and returns data back in XML format. This data can then be used by decoupled client applications as they see fit. If you have never looked at SubSonic, you owe it to yourself to checkout this very cool tool.

Recently Microsoft unveiled their plans to release similar features codenamed Astoria and Jasper with .NET framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. The CTP of Astoria and Jasper are available for download from Microsoft.

Jasper is described by Microsoft as:

Project Jasper is geared towards iterative and agile development. You can
start interacting with the data in your database without having to create
mapping files or define classes. You can build user interfaces by naming
controls according to your model without worrying about binding code. Project
Jasper is also extensible, allowing you to provide your own business logic and
class model. Since Project Jasper is built on top of the ADO.NET Entity
Framework, it supports rich queries and complex mapping.

Pablo Castro, the mastermind behind Astoria describes it as:

The goal of Microsoft Codename Astoria is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within a corporate network and across the internet. The data service is reachable over HTTP, and URIs are used to identify the various pieces of information available through the service. Interactions with the data service happens in terms of HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, and the data exchanged in those interactions is represented in simple formats such as XML and JSON.

The Astoria web site also includes sample online services that showcases how this new technology can be used. It also allows anyone with a Passport account to design and host their own experimental data services .

To alleviate some of the pain, Microsoft finally came up with a Windows Installer Cleanup Utility, that can be used to remove all references to a given application from your system. This utility just saved me a few hours worth of work when Installer refused to uninstall a given application from my system so that I could install a newer version. Without this utility I would have had to go through and search my registry for all references to the application and remove them by manually hand. Then, if I was lucky, I would be allowed to install the newer version of the application. With this utility I removed the application from my system in seconds and painlessly installed the newer version after that.

After the popularity of Logo (Turtle Graphics) in the 80′s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has once again come up with a new programming language for kids called Scratch. Scratch teaches kids skills necessary to become future technology professionals, such as creative thinking, clear communication, systematic analysis, iterative design, and continuous learning, while they create fun and interesting projects such as interactive stories, graphic animations, games, music, and art. Projects created with Scratch can be shared on the web with others.

In addition to home, Scratch can be used by schools, museums, community centers, or other group settings. While the tool is intended for 8 to 16-year olds, with some adult help it can definitely be used by younger children.

Scratch is available for both Windows and Mac platforms, and is available as a free download.