Productivity

It is no urban legend that having more monitors results in greater productivity, and most of all tremendous increase in developer’s comfort. Even the Myth Busters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters) dudes know that. So imagine that your group’s budget allows installing a brand new (say 22 inches) TFT display as your second, or even better you already have the setup. What are your options with VS 2005/2008 for efficient management of the screen estate to bust productivity? Better code access You can vertically split the Visual Studio screen estate in two, and position the divider down the center of the two monitors. This can be done...

There are two ways of doing this: The first approach is to assign directly the text to be displayed to every ComboBoxItem. This is done through the API or through the design time. You must assign the required text to every item’s ToolTipText.     The second approach is to handle the ToolTipTextNeeded event where custom logic can be applied: private voidTestComboBox1_Load(objectsender, EventArgs e) {     ComboPopupForm parent = this.radComboBox1.ComboBoxElement.ListBoxElement.ElementTree.Control asComboPopupForm;     if(parent != null)     {         parent.ToolTipTextNeeded += newTelerik.WinControls.ToolTipTextNeededEventHandler(radComboBox1_ToolTipTextNeeded);     } } Add...

I bet you never thought about this feature! Me either… It’s good that there is a marvelous blog about all goodies in VS maintained by a nice lady. I will be monitoring and making comments on the topics there that have excited me most. So what is on today’s menu? As you’ve probably figured it out already, I will comment on a fine (but unknown to me) feature of dragging and pasting code artifacts straight to the VS toolbox. At first I was a little bit skeptic, but it really worked out, let me show you how: 1. Mark a code segment...

I recently blogged about using code snippets as a shortcut to writing more code in less time. In this post, I'm going to walk you through the steps to create custom snippets that you can install into Visual Studio for use in your own projects To get started, let's take a look at the anatomy of a snippet. A snippet is nothing more than an XML file, with a .snippet extension, containing configuration settings. If you open up the file foreach.snippet (located in "<Visual Studio installation directory>\VC#\Snippets\1033\Visual C#") you'll find the following XML, which defines the foreach snippet: As you can see, the XML used to...

Over the past few days I worked on an image caching mechanism in the PDF Rendering Extension and I am happy to announce that the achieved output size reduction was more than significant. The Problem When a report contains the same binary image many times, the PDF Rendering Extension has no way of knowing that it is actually one and the same and renders it many times thus wasting disc space. For an illustration of this case imagine that you have your company's logo in the page header and your report is 200 pages long. The Solution: Enter Cyclic Redundancy Check I've implemented a central...