Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools

“Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools” has been released and provides you with a number of extensions to improve productivity. You can download it here.

TeamViewer – easier than setting up a VPN

I have read an article (sorry, but the article is in Dutch…) about a tool called TeamViewer. It allows you to create a “Remote Desktop Connection” to another computer with TeamViewer installed (or at least the client module). Both computers need to be connected to the internet, but the great thing is that all communication is sent using http, which means that firewalls probably won’t stop you! (Of course all communication is well encrypted using RSA Public-/Private Key Exchange and AES (256 Bit) Session Encoding.) Moreover this tool is compatible with Windows 7 and free for non-commercial use!! Last but not least, you can up- or down-load files to/from your remote computer. Just download the “TeamViewer Full Version – Windows” from the TeamViewer website.

TeamViewer can be used for “Remote Support”. In this scenario, someone at the remote computer should manually accept when you create a connection.

If you want to use TeamViewer as a “Remote Desktop Connection” tool, you don’t want manual interventions like this. Therefore you should configure TeamViewer on your client computer like this (I’m translating the settings to English, so hopefully you can recognize them…):

• Go to the menu “Extras -> Options” and go to the tab “Security”
• Type in a strong password (I’d recommence at least 10 characters, including combinations of minor case/major case, numbers and special characters…)
• If you want to be able to connect when the Windows logon screen is displayed on the remote computer, you also have to set “Windows logon” to “Allowed for all users”
• Also set the password strength for spontaneous connections to “Very safe (10 characters)” or “Off (no session password)”
• Make sure that “Access management” is set to “Full access”
• You could still add a black- or white list, but I think these settings are quiet secure yet…

I also found a nice demo of this tool on youtube. Easy isn’t it?