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

It happens every once and a while.  You see it and to the untrained eye you just glance over it, but if you are in the know it should stop you in your tracks.

GC.Collect();

Once upon a time when the garbage collector was new to java and .net there were a group of people who thought that they were smarter than the people who implemented these system.  They thought that they could find the best place to force garbage collection.  At the time they may have been right. But advance the clock, because as we know code is never complete only abandoned, ten years into the future and I see that there is this section of code that is being called as part of a loop.  It stopped me in my tracks,  to realized that there was once a hack put in place to clear up an issue, and now since we have moved ten years into the future it is more than likely the code that is causing the massive slowdown and the reason that I am looking at the code.

I think there is a lesson to be learned here.

We are faced with another year, and looking back on it I realize that there is a lot that has happened over this last year. Accomplishments that I have managed to complete over the last 365 days.

1.) I am a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer for Enterprise Applications.

2.) I have managed to complete the writing of my first novel ( I still have to do the editing)

3.) I have donated clothing.  For me this is huge,  I am now getting to the point where I have to get rid of clothing that no longer fits.  I didn’t lose a lot of weight this year (-6 lbs for the year),  but feel that I have proven to myself that I am capable of keeping off the weight and maintaining.

4.) I have adopted a dog.  This has been one of the most challenging things that I have been through.  Kiddo is a hand full.

All in all I was able to mark eleven of the items off my list that I had set out to accomplish over the next couple of years.  That means that I have about ninety to go in the next two years.  Looks like I have my hands full.

Everyonce and a while I need a good rant. This is one that has been brewing for a long long time.

When I run into a problem that I generally can’t solve immediatly I often search for a solution online. Thats the beauty of the internet, it’s a collection of really great people work to solve problems. But there is nothing more frustrating than searching sites and coming time and time again to the same site. Normally this would be good becuase it allows you to find out who is the leader in this area. But there are a hand full of sites that when I mistakenly click on the link to their site from google that send fire into my veins.

Expert Exchange is a bullitin board that is a pay site for people to exchange infromation. If I remember the speil, the idea is that if people pay for the right to be a member of the board that they will care more about the people and everts that are going on there. The major problem is that I have no interest in being a member of their board. I remember back to a time before they were a paysite and all of the Aweful content that they had there. Most of the questions were genuine questions and the majority of the answers were pure drivel. But they have for a while managed to (i’m sure) sucker people into paying for membership to their boards, the way that they do it is what infurates me. When I search for the content they post the question and say ‘if you want the answer become a member”.

The final note out there is that there are alot og groups out there that really help to make programming easier find one that meets your needs and rock out with it. But if you aren’t going to offer anything real, please for the love of god don’t advertise junk to me.

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Side note, thanks to Rick Stahl for all of his posts about using jQuery with WCF. While I desipise the use of javascript ( another rant for another time ) it was made sightly less painful by the fact there were so many good resources out there. So if you get a chance please check out his site.

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As of late I have been working late and one the parts that goes with that is having to ride public transit late at night. The part that has started to fascinate me is a little game called ‘crazy or Bluetooth’. The purpose of the game is simple, look at a person who is talking to themselves and try to guess if the person has a mental deficiancy or if the are talking on the Bluetooth headset. There should be nothing shocking about the game itself. The interesting part is how often you cant tell the differance.

You see you would think that it’s easy the guy who smells like a crustie is more than likely crazy, but about even the guy is talking on a phone. Works for the suits too. And it’s more fun than ‘count the chucks’.

I managed to pull a bone headed move today.  I heard this morning that Rancid, Billy Talent, and Rise Against were playing a music festival together in Winnipeg.  Both Robbyn and I are fans of the three bands and the chance to do a summer music festival in a very mild climate seemed really apealing.  The biggest issue would be getting across the border, which we would have covered. The whole plan leave out Friday night find a hotel and drive the 13 hours to Winnipeg, camp in a space just outside the city then go into the city for the festival. Camp the next day and leave with enough time to make a leisurely trip home.  Seems perfect right.

Small snag,  because I can’t read a calendar I managed to get tickets on the exact weekend that we already had a trip planned.  So now I am left trying to figure out what I can to with two tickets purchased from Ticketmaster to a concert that is being held in another country.  I figure the worst case senario is that I eat the cost. But I would rather try to get at least a portion of my money back so I am trying to get in contact with the box office.

All of this leads me to a point that was something that I really don’t concider in this world that is getting increasingly small.  The internet has enabled me to purchase a ticket in a country where I would feel comfortable about going to a show but I realize now how little I know about how to get rid of the tickets now that I can’t go.

So a while back some of the people I work with were talking about the old days.  One of the things that we were reminiscing about were the days of the old modem sounds.  The only respectable thing to do from this point was to create a ring tone, so here is the iPhone ring tone for the 56k Modem Handshake.

56k Modem Handshake