Of Ones and Zeros » Software Development

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 Installed on Windows 7 RC

bryan — Wed, 27 May 2009 18:37:39 +0000

Today I installed Visual Studio 2010 Professional Beta 1 on the Windows 7 RC running in VMWare Workstation 6.5. Special thanks to Miha Markič for this tip regarding disabling 3D graphics acceleration in VMWare. This is what the top bar of Visual Studio looked like before that change:

And this is what it looks like after:

Much better! In any event, if you haven’t seen it yet, here is the new VS2010 start screen:

Pretty clean looking. One of the very first things I looked for in this version is to make sure it can target the 2.0 Framework, and sure enough, support for 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0. Very cool. Stay tuned for more updates as I get a chance to play around with this some more.

Subversion "Shelving"

bryan — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 15:04:36 +0000

I had one of those moments yesterday where you get 60% of the way through fixing a problem a certain way, and then discover that there was a simpler, more elegant solution that would require 10% of the effort. Problem being, I had just written a lot of code that I didn’t necessarily want to lose forever, incase it may be useful somewhere down the road.

From my days working with Team Foundation Server I remembered the "Shelving" concept. Unfortunately, I was using Subversion, not Team Foundation Server. But isn’t a shelf really just a branch? So I figured I could do a poor-mans shelf with Subversion, and I was right. Worked great.

I was going to write up my steps to do so but decided I would do a quick Google sanity check before expending the effort. Glad I did, cause Mark Phippard did a much better job then I would have done. Kudos Mark, thanks for the excellent amount of detail.

Maintaining Other People’s Code

bryan — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:43:12 +0000

I have taken over maintenance of other people’s code in the past, and its generally a mixed-bag. Sometimes you inherit a plate of spaghetti, sometimes you luck-out and actually get a well architected and implemented codebase. The real payoff when inheriting maintenance though, is to read the fantastic comments left behind, such as this gem I unearthed today:

// if it's a number we should sort it descending because it is probably a date
// bad? no, this is AWESOME!!!! Regular expressions are for assholes.
int.Parse(f.SubFolders[0].Name);
dv2 = this.GetFolderViewSorted(f, "DESC");

Great new Visual Studio color theme

bryan — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:50:22 +0000

The other day Tomas Restrepo released a new Visual Studio Color Theme called Distant Shores. It is a low-contrast theme with a dark background, and I must admit I am a BIG FAN! Have a look at the following screen shot. BTW – The font I am using is Damien Guard’s Envy CodeR font that Tomas Restrepo recommends in his blog posting.

Give it a shot! Your eyes will thank you!

A.D.D. Be Gone!

bryan — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 14:18:31 +0000

Working with SharePoint, particularly within VPN environments, can be a focus-challenging task. Write new master page, compile new web part, wait for SharePoint to recompile (okay, more specifically ASP.NET), lose focus, fire up FireFox, browse net for 15 minutes, forget what you were working on, remember, and continue work. Now I am a BIG fan of multi-monitor setups, I feel it generally improves productivity. However, when I find myself staring at IE while waiting on SharePoint, I will often glance at my other monitor and see all those pretty desktop icons, or a tempting FireFox browser session, and I’ll fill time while waiting on SharePoint.

The thought occurred to me earlier this week — what if I could black out the rest of my screen and see ONLY the window that am currently working on? Sure, in full-screen scenarios that may be simple, but when you regularly work within VPC’s and have a multi-monitor setup with different screen resolutions, the solution is not as simple. So I did a google search for this very creation and alas, I am not alone! Over at www.lifehack.org I was able to find a fantastic utility application to achieve exactly what I want, and it is called Dropcloth written by Adam Pash.

Once you launch Dropcloth it will take up residence in your systray. The “Settings” menu provides the ability to change the screen overlay, whether Dropcloth appears in the taskbar, whether Dropcloth should keep the active application above the Dropcloth, the transparency level of the overlay, and a hotkey.

When you want to stay focused on a given task and see only that window, simply press the hotkey combination, in my case Ctrl-Shift-C. The rest of your screen will black out (or whatever color you have chosen). In order to remove the dropcloth you can press the hotkey combination again and your screen will be restored.

As an added bonus, this utility is great for taking screenshots. In that instance it may be best to set the background color to #ffffff (white).