August 2007 Entries
Customize your code snippets. Someone mentioned a couple of months ago that my IDE tweaks are minor and insignificant in the larger view of things. I disagree vehemently. A combination of a lot of small tweaks can achieve very large productivity gains in the same way an ant colony can accomplish miracles. So on to my "minor" tweak. It is not a prescription, but rather an example of and a path to productivity. If you don't use Visual Studio code snippets, that's a problem to begin with. Let's assume that you do use them and improve from there. Let's take a specific example of your...
How to comment / uncomment code faster. This one applies to VS2002, VS2003, VS2005, VS2008, Visual Basic 4/5/6. People are always surprised when I show it to them. What if you could just highlight code and press Alt+C to comment it out or Alt+X to uncomment it. In Visual Studio, right click on the toolbar and select Customize... menu Ignoring the Customize dialog, right click on the Comment Selection button on the toolbar. An interesting menu will popup. Under Name, change the entry to &Comment. So now instead of Comment Selection it should read &Comment. Press Enter to record the...
How to create a DVD less entertainment center Between the two of our children, my wife and I have probably purchased 200 DVDs over the last several years. Needless to say, the DVDs were all over the place. Sometimes, they'd get lost. Other times, they'd get scratched. I've stopped counting how many times I had to make a copy of the Teletubbies because the DVD player would choke on it. This is an instruction manual on how to stop the madness. Wife Acceptance Factor (W.A.F.) So the idea is to buy a Media Center PC, then rip/backup all your DVDs to a hard...
For whatever reason, setting up SubText on GoDaddy is more difficult than elsewhere. Or at least it's been an issue at some point, so much so, that there is a FAQ entry to specifically address this issue. To setup the blog, I followed blog setup instructions outlined here. For email setup, I looked here. Unfortunately, the blog still came up with the yellow screen of ASP.NET death (not the one in the photo), which stated that since I am not on the actual server, I can't see what the actual error is. So, if you run into the same...
In college, a mind numbing number of moons ago, I both loved and hated English classes. Hated, because my conversational style of writing kept garnering C grades at best, but typically Ds. On the other hand, I loved writing, so I kept attending these classes even after I was done with the required ones. So here comes blogging and pretty everyone is doing it conversation style.
My passion is programming. Particularly, I am fascinated by the area of programmer productivity and performance. Being productive is a theme not only at work, but also in other areas...