I’ve long thought that Caps Lock was quite dumb. Yes, I’m sure there is some archaic reason it exists, but the truth is I don’t care. I don’t find it useful and am annoyed that it’s taking up valuable room on my Home Row. The more I use Vim the more angry I get at the Caps Lock key. Making Caps Lock Useful, on The Mac I long ago remapped Caps Lock to Esc on my Mac – which worked great for TextMate. However, these days I spend the majority of my time in Vim or Zsh...

I’ve noticed Rake has been gaining some traction within the .net community as of late, or at least within a certain segment of that community. We’re currently using Rake to automate the great bulk of an entire deployment pipeline here at VersionOne, and I know of a few teams at Quick Solutions that are doing similar things. I believe Rake is a great tool for automating intensive processes and/or tasks and also find it to be great for handling some of the more mundane tasks we do on a daily basis. I spend a fair amount of...

Tired of typing all those underscores_while_writing_your_BDD_specifications? Yeah, I wasn’t really either. However I’ve heard read complaints from some folks that typing the underscore so many times was getting annoying, so they had opted for PascalCasing instead. Just deal with it Maybe its because of my exposure to Ruby and the joy that is RSpec, but I don’t think such minor annoyance is enough of a reason to top using a more readable style. Repetitive Stress Injury, be damned! Or maybe not! The other day while cleaning out my RSS reader I came across AutoHotKey (thanks JP), a...

This may seem like a completely obvious tip to some, and like a complete waste of time to others. But you know what? Its something that I've found extremely useful so I'm going to share it anyhow. Hey, this is my blog and I can do what I want! :) Update: I forgot to explain how to enable Highlight Current Line in the original post. I've now added instructions. Highlight Current Line This feature is not available in vanilla Visual Studio - its part of my favorite zero-friction productivity enhancer, ReSharper....

At the day job I spend the majority of my time in Visual Studio, writing, refactoring, debugging, and banging my face against code. C# code specifically. And what is my #1 complaint about C#? The Compilation Tax. I get over taxed! I have a little problem that causes me to pay that tax more often that I think I ought to. I have some kind of weird internal clock that causes my fingers to issue the Ctrl + S, Ctrl + Shift + B keystrokes every five minutes, causing the IDE to freeze up while it...

The tech support for a certain large computer manufacturer, who shall remain nameless... but their initials start with an H and end with a P, recently stole more than eight hours of my life. Yep, that’s a whole work day’s worth of my life that I’ll never get back. Sound familiar? It should. Anyone who has ever owned or been responsible for any significantly complex piece of technology and/or equipment (read: magic) has at some point called tech support or customer service. Calling tech support/customer service is never fun. No one likes to spend their already limited...

Who here loves ReSharper? I do, I do! Now that I’ve got that out of the way, let me tell you yet one more reason that I <3 ReSharper. While doing a little Subtexting tonight I was looking through a new class and noticed a couple those little yellow ReSharper (R# from now on) warning lights. You know, the ones it so kindly puts next to the vertical scroll bar to let you know there are some things that need your attention. The first one was safe to ignore - a warning about an unused...

Brennan recently posted a great tip for changing the RSS Feeds that Visual Studio displays on the Startup page. Finally I can get rid of those horrible Microsoft articles and get some good content in that window! I quickly realized that many VS users probably already knew about this, but to many others, self included, this was totally new. And what's more, it's useful! So with that in mind, I decided I would start sharing some simple tips, tricks, and shortcuts that I use within the VS IDE and Windows environment to reduce the friction of many day-to-day development tasks. Open Containing Folder...

Remote debugging can be a huge time-saver when dealing with a hard to reproduce bug, or trying to track down a Works on My Machine issue. I mean, what's better than stepping through the code on the remote machine that's having the problem? However, the hardest thing about remote debugging isn't actually using it - it's getting it correctly configured between your local (debugging) machine and the remote host. Luckily the MSDN site has a pretty solid How to: Set Up Remote Debugging guide that can get you most of the way there. Remote debugging monitor The key set in getting remote...

I'm a huge fan of using multiple monitors and the productivity gains they bring. I'm also a big proponent of using Virtual Machines to isolate client projects... once you get over the initial work it takes to get your VM Image library going, the productivity gains are gi-normous! However, the lack of real multi-monitor support in Virtual PC (both 2004 and 2007) tends to limit the productivity gains you can squeeze out of your VMs. This is especially evident when using VMs as a development environment on a daily basis. I was hoping that Microsoft would address the issue and...