An Avanade Blogging Community

Avanade issues Toshiba laptops to our consultants – well equipped M3’s.  My initial beef with these machines when I first got my hands on one was the absence of a Right-Ctrl key… immediately followed by fear that my desk would catch fire from the heat this thing spits out.  There’s not much I can do about the heat as far as I know, but you can create a Right-Ctrl key pretty easily.

I’m a Right-Ctrl freak.  A common keystroke sequence for me is to move my right hand’s index and middle fingers to the Right-Ctrl and Right-Shift key respectively, press both and hold, and use my thumb and ring fingers to whack at the arrow keys.  This method is my primary means for navigating a text document of any kind.  All modern Window’s based text editors supports moving the cursor from word to word (as opposed to by-character) using the Ctrl+<arrow> combination.  Similarly, batches of words can be selected via the cursor using the Shift+Ctrl+<arrow>.

I’m a keyboard guy – I minimize my trips to the mouse as much as possible.  Without the Right-Ctrl key, my text editing world is hosed. I simply could not train myself to move and select words with two hands – obviously I can’t use the Left-Ctrl and Left-Shift keys AND the arrow keys with my left hand… not quickly anyway.

Enter…. KeyTweak.

I must admit, this utility feels junky, but I’ve been using it’s keyboard remapping of my Right-Alt key for ~6 months with no problems.  Any Toshiba laptop owning keyboard freaks out there might want to check this out.  I’m sure there are dozen out there that can do key remapping for you, but this one is free and seems to work nicely.

Simply click key 62, set the Choose New Remapping drop down to “Right Control”, click Remap Key, click the Apply button, and of course reboot.  62 truly is your Right-Alt key enough though the visual keyboard does not show it as such according to Toshiba’s scheme.

Scott Hanselman, the tools and utilities freek has a new Hanselminutes audio stream up and mentions a handy Windows tweak for .NET developers.  A common need for .NET developers is to SEE the GAC – which Windows hides from you.  Perhaps you need to see the physical file version living there, or you’d like to copy some stuff there such as PDB files for debugging.  In the past I’ve used the command prompt to manually navigate to the C:\Windows\assembly:

Scott’s approach is much nicer using the subst command to map a path to a drive.  This is a simple Windows Shell extension available from Windows natively.  Scott recommend mapping the G drive to C:\Windows\assembly, which then gives you the raw GAC available to you at G:\.  Pretty slick.

This…

SUBST G: “C:\Windows\assembly”

Gives you this…

I live my life through Outlook and instant messenger… In truth, I can’t remember using any of the features available in any of the MSN Messenger other than messaging (I count file transfer as messaging).  I don’t care about webcams, VoIP, desktop sharing, alerts, etc. etc.

I was really unhappy with the first Windows Live Messenger user interface when the first beta was released.  I found it really hard to nagivate – way too much stuff going on.  An update just came down from the Messenger heavens and the new UI (at first glance) rocks.  i.e. it looks like the 7.5 version!

I was reading travisp’s post on Learning MSBuild and I remembered an interesting gem I stumbled across a while back when I had no time to blog.  The MSBuild Community Tasks Project looks very interesting.  They already have a lengthy list of tasks that look useful.  The open source model is perfect in this arena.

One of my favorite features of Visual Studio 2005 is the work they’ve done in the Custom Tools develop area.  Custom Tools are those handy little VS extensions that let you generate code in the IDE.  The most infamous is the DataSet generator.

MSDataSetGenerator is wired up in the IDE via the following registry setting…

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Generators\{fae04ec1-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}\MSDataSetGenerator

In short, what this does is wires up a COM registered assembly that implements a certain number of interfaces expected by VS and that assembly does that actual code generation.  Like most things in VS extensibility, you’re free to create your own.  Doing this VS.NET 2003, was not nearly as friendly as it could have been.  In VS2005, the process is much more streamlined.  There are tons of sites and blog posts out there explaining how to do this, but what’s new in VS2005 is the IDE automatically detects that you’re developing a Custom Tool when you implement the aforementioned interfaces and automatically COM registers the assemblies, and creates the necessary registry entries.

So… this

automatically gets the following register key created by the IDE – notice the CLSID in that key matches the GUID that decorated on my custom-custom tool class!

That earns huge props in my book.  I plan to post a How-To guide on custom tool development.  If you’re reading this and that sounds of interest to you, leave a comment - that will help bost my motivation.

Something I’ve been meaning to blog about since August is VS2005’s support for web projects.  The new version of VS now has “Web Sites”, not “Web Applications”.  This confused alot of people intially and will continue to confuse newcomers, but the gist of it is this…. VS projects (regardless of type) are project-file based.  Meaning, VS loads the project file (.csproj, vbproj, etc.) and that file contains all the information about that project that VS needs (references, files contained, default namespace, build events, etc.).

That changed in VS2005 when “Web Sites” are introduced.  “Web Sites” are the same ASP.NET application, but they are project-file-less.  They are entirely file system based.  There are a lot of opnions out there about this, and mine is this – I personally don’t care fo the project-file-less project, but what I really loathe is I don’t have a choice.  The old project-file based Web Application available in VS.NET 2003 is not present at all in VS2005 – even if I want it… until now.  The ASP.NET team at Microsoft has listened to the outcries and have released a custom project type for VS2005 that in effect gives us the old project file based Web Application.  You can download it here.  Fred has been listening to me compain about this for months and I have finally listened to his advice and I’m checking this new project type out.  Fred, throw me your blog URL and I’ll give you a link here

Project-File-Less Web Application Thoughts

• No namespaces by default – I like namespaces and I don’t see any value in removing them.  I view a web application as a piece of the solution (there are usually several other projects in the solution), so I like assemblies and namespaces for each.
• No true compilation step – compilation is performed up first execution.  This means you don’t have to compile explicitly, but you do have to deploy your application code so that upon-first-hit ASP.NET can compile it for you.  Personally, I don’t like this, I’d rather compilation and the units I deploy to be be explicit
• Life without project files makes references very painful.  If you think about it, when you create a reference in your web application (web site), without a project file, how does it know there is a reference?  Well, in project-file-less world the presense of an assembly in the Bin\ directory constitutes a reference.  This is true in the VS.NET2003 world as well, but at least in that project-file world, the next time I load up that project and it find an assembly there the IDE knows if it’s supposed to care about it or not.  This really isn’t a big problem until integrated source control enters the equation.  With integrated soruce control, any file on the file system directory is added to source control.  They made some hacks in this area – namely .refresh files – to help the IDE know when not to add certain types of references to source control.  Again, without a project file, the IDE has no way of knowing.

I’m not exactly sure what problem they were trying to solve when removing project files (though I have some theories I’ll keep to myself).  Anyway… glad to see project files back…

A common problem faced by developers – especially consultants is understanding/justifying/managing your time.  Do you ever catch yourself at the end of the week needed to fill out your status report or time card and having no idea what is it you did all week?  You’re exhausted and feeling pretty good about what you accomplished, but you’re stumped when trying to document your accomplishments?

Introducing TimeStapper….

TimeStapper was one of the winners of Mike Gunderloy’s The Larkware 2005 Developer Tool Programming Contest.  It’s a tiny system try application that takes screenshots of your desktop at a time interval you specify.  Those screenshots are saved off to your hard drive and can be played back in a timeline fashion so that you can review what it is you did on your desktop for a given day.  Go to TimeStapper.com and checkout the screenshots… you’ll get the gist immediately. 

This officially replaces that journal I told myself I was going to start in 2006 (and have forgot to do every day for 11 days now).