Punk-coder Blog

I love Visual Studio, which is kind of convenient since its where I spend most of my time, and one of the features that I like the most about it is the amount of customizing and plug ins that are available.  So I thought that I would go through and cover a few of the items to help others learn from the productivity hacks that I have found.

Customizing

The first thing that I change with any install of visual studio is the color scheme.  I’ve found that personally staring at a white background for long amounts of time leads to me having a burn in effect. After a couple of hours I find that it’s hard to focus because my eyes are tired and kind of burn.  It use to be that to change the color scheme in visual studio you had to go through and change all of them manually then export your settings.  Now there is a nice web site that keeps a good collection of them and allows you to export them for a particular version of visual studio. I personally prefer the ‘Desert Nights’ theme.

Website: http://studiostyl.es/

Plug-ins

CodeRush and Refactor!Pro

These two plugins are responsible for a productivity leap that would be difficult to explain without demonstrating what they do.  There is a version of called xpress for trying it out, but you won’t understand how fast you can be without downloading the trial.  I don’t get extended benefits any more since my transfer to ATS, I buy this one out of pocket.  I consider it an investment in my free time.

Website: http://devexpress.com/Products/Visual_Studio_Add-in/Coding_Assistance/

VisualHG

Source control is a must. Even if I am writing only a few lines of code, when I don’t have access to TFS, mercurial is my choice of source controls.

Website: http://visualhg.codeplex.com/

NuGet

Package management made painfully simple. Makes adding 3^rd party libraries as simple as adding references,  also includes the ability to integrate project specific repositories.

Website: http://nuget.org/

GhostDoc

Helps you quickly build out documentation if you use human readable code.

Website: http://submain.com/products/ghostdoc.aspx

So let me start by saying that I love my mac.  I own two of them and there are a great many things that mac does so well that others really can’t touch.  But, before you tune me out let me state very clearly that I am not a fan boy. Here’s why…

So for the last couple of years I have been working as a .net developer.  It wasn’t where I originally saw my self, I loved linux and I loved the power of the console.  To this day I still install cygwin and force the prompt to green on black, but something happened in the last couple of years.  That’s part of what I want to dig into in this post be warned I don’t have a particular direction for this so it could go everywhere.

The first thing that I wanted to use my mac for was development.  After all thats what I do for a living, this is where I hit my first snag.  I tried using xcode, I have studied many programming languages and to this day write code in c++ and dabble in ruby.  I found objective c so terse that I couldn’t continue.  So I looked for alternatives to programming in x code… there really weren’t any that I found. Directly following this I went looking for cross platform solutions for developing on mac. This lead to more heartbreak.

In the end I was able to figure out what my problem was, and I honestly believe this.  Mac’s are designed for users, not developers.  The IDEs seem to be very primitive and the languages for developing native code seem backwards, part of this I know is bias because I know C# and because I know C# I am inclined to use it as a bar to hold other applications to.  But after getting accoustomed to working with visual studio, which covers 90% of the functionality that a developer would need and the plug in support for it is astounding.  I couldn’t live without CodeRush…

The final part of this quasi rant is that I would like to have my eyes opened, are there any really good tutorials for developing applications on the mac using xcode or any other IDE… If so I would love to hear about them.  Do CodeRush type applications exist to make coding objective c more palatable?

For the meantime it looks like I will be going back to working with mono.

James