Following the trend for the “gamification of everything”, Microsoft launched the Visual Studio Achievements Extension. The extension adds achievements and badges based on the developer’s work within VS, which are then added to a leaderboard.
Maybe this will motivate developers to adhere to Code Analysis and other best practices? That remains to be seen. I just hope they add a “Build Breaker Award” soon 
The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method that I’ve been interested in recently. It is more about focus on the task at hand, rather than prioritizing or planning a huge set of tasks.
I’m still not entirely convinced of its virtues, but it seems to work well with development or design tasks. It sets an immediate goal to achieve, and all of the focus is directed towards each short-term objective.
The kitchen timer may not be the best thing to use in the office, so get a tool such as Pomodairo and give it a try!
Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
http://code.google.com/p/pomodairo/
Using the keyboard for repetitive tasks is far more efficient than using the mouse. Especially when navigating complicated context menus, with the option you really need buried beneath countless sub-menus.
We all know the quick and easy shortcuts such as Ctrl+Shift+B or Ctrl+N, but these may not suit you or you may find that a certain option does not have a shortcut key assigned.
Fortunately, VS allows you to redefine or assign shortcut keys to its commands. Just follow these simple steps:
Try to use a key combination that is not in use, or is only used in a specific editor you usually do not need.
Have fun!
This time, I’m posting two short & sweet productivity tips.
Copy as Path: so many times you just need to grab the full path of the file you are looking at to paste somewhere else. And what better way than to do it directly from the Explorer?
Regedit Favorites: another time waster, looking for that specific registry key. No more looking around when saving the most used keys in the favorites.
Both tips work in Windows Vista as well
The daily job of a developer or a tester often involves repeating text inputs over and over. And I’m not talking about writing lines of code… Sometimes you have to add a reference path, input the same password while testing your application or provide values in a wizard. There are better ways to keep those frequently used folders at hand, but for those things typed over and over during your work day, there is a very useful tool: Ditto.
Ditto constantly monitors the clipboard and allows quick access to items placed in it. Get the installer here:
http://ditto-cp.sourceforge.net/
For me, the most important feature is Groups. With it you can save your “favorite” text snippets and insert them quickly in any text box:
The next time you need to input one of the snippets in the Utils group, select the target text box and press Ctrl-` (Ctrl+ç for Portuguese keyboard, but the shortcut is customizable). The Ditto window pops up just below the text box, and then you can navigate to the snippet with the arrow keys and confirm the input with Enter.
It’s that simple. Besides saving a lot of time typing the same things over and over, it also helps avoid mistakes (which cost even more time).
As promised, I’ll post a short sample on how to manage windows using AutoHotkey.
One of the major annoyances in the latest versions of Skype was that the Skype Home window kept popping up when in compact mode, and there was no way to disable this behavior.
With AutoHotkey, a small “monitoring” script can be created that closes Skype Home and minimizes the main window back to the system tray. Just right-click the AutoHotkey tray icon, and select “Edit This Script”. Paste the following code before any hotkey definition, save and select “Reload This Script”.
; #########################################################################
; # Close Skype Home #
; #########################################################################
SetTitleMatchMode, 1
while, true
{
if WinExist("Skype Home")
{
WinClose, Skype Home
PostMessage, 0x112, 0xF060,,, Skype ; 0x112 = WM_SYSCOMMAND, 0xF060 = SC_CLOSE
}
Sleep, 30000
};
The script will check whether the Skype Home window exists every 30 seconds, then closes it. The tricky bit was finding how to minimize the main window, because WinClose didn’t work. The answer was in the manual: this PostMessage line is the same as clicking the ‘X’ button, which effectively minimizes the main window back to the system tray.
As you can see, after learning the syntax it’s not hard to manage windows and interact with them using AutoHotkey. The only limit is your creativity!
One of the best UI automation/script tools I’ve found in the past years is AutoHotkey. It is a very powerful tool, which enables automating almost anything with mouse clicks or keystrokes, and also writing small scripts to automate repetitive tasks.
It takes a while getting used to the script syntax, but it has one major advantage: it’s free! You can download it here.
To get started, follow these steps:
This script is continuously running while AutoHotkey is active, and it contains a few sample hotkeys. You can try writing new ones by looking at the detailed AutoHotkey help file.
It is also possible to create other scripts that can be executed either by double-clicking the .ahk file, or by compiling a .exe that can be used on computers that do not have AutoHotkey installed.
On a next post I will explain how to use window interaction by showing how to automatically close the “dreaded” Skype Home window .
It’s funny how some things become obvious after you try them for the first time. It is the case with this small tip. I found myself constantly browsing to the same set of folders when opening projects, adding references, etc. And as you should know by now, I really dislike repetitive tasks.
I was looking at the Open File Dialog and thinking “there must be a better way”. There is, and it is quite obvious: add your most commonly used folders as Links in the Favorites area within Windows Explorer.
Works very well in Windows 7 as well as Vista. Try it!
If you have upgraded to Visual Studio 2010, but still using TFS2008 as a build server, there is an annoying bug when opening the build details page. Visual Studio 2010 SP1 simply crashes.
The bug is reported here, and the hotfix has already been released here.
Happy building!
Most of the people see WinMerge as a file comparison tool. However, it can be used to compare folders. This feature is very useful, for example, to verify why a local application debug instance works, and an installed one doesn’t. Files may be missing, in the wrong place or in the wrong version.
To compare two folders in WinMerge:
The results window is easy to understand. There is information about which files are different, the comparison result and the file extension. In the View menu you can further tweak which types of differences are shown. You can also sort the list by extension and hide items that are not relevant to your analysis by right clicking and choosing “Hide Items”. You can double click files that exist in both folders to view differences and merge them if necessary. It is also possible to copy/move/delete/rename files from any of the compared folders.
Explore the context menu, it has all the necessary features that allow exploring the differences between two folders and merge them step by step. This way it is very easy to understand what may be causing a deployment error in your application, instead of just solving it by trial and error.
