Productivity

Yeah, I know, it's been quite some time since my last post. The ideas keep coming though and I’ve just realized there is no better time for a QA to blog than ... the summer. Do you know why? Well, just because of the summer time! You know, devs are humans too and they also need to rest a bit. ;) I can at least stop bugging around for a while and post some nice, interesting content. I'm afraid the list of ideas for my future posts is already quite long. However, since I'd like to share the most fascinating ...

When you use a tool day-in and day-out you typically want it to be accessible as quickly as possible and to launch just the way you like it, with all your favorite bells and whistles ready to go. For those of us saving the world every day with our .NET applications, Visual Studio is no exception. So here are a couple of easy tips for fine-tuning Visual Studio to get you from the icon to the code just a little bit faster, as well as a few of my own preferred features and settings. Launch Tips 1. Get rid of the splash...

These days there are a lot of cool ways for .NET developers to be more productive. From code generation to refactoring, there is never a shortage of plug-ins out there to help us in this goal. But let's not forget about the great tools and features already built into Visual Studio that we can use. One feature I have started using recently is the item template. Whether you know what an item template is or not, you use them in your every day development. Item templates are those pre-written files you add to your project whenever you need a new ASP.NET...

Being a professional developer requires that you invest some time in learning your tools. Working with .NET my tool of choice (not that there is a whole lot of choice) is Visual Studio.  It’s an excellent IDE that’s very customizable and can be extremely productive if you learn how to use it well. The best way to increase your productivity is to learn some keyboard shortcuts. Yes, the toolbars are all nice and pretty, but you can do pretty much absolutely everything with the keyboard. I even know some people who don't use any toolbars at all! In my opinion that's...

Let me clarify first that the title is a bit misleading. You may think that the story will comment on these devices in general, but you are wrong :). I will comment NVidia’s* entry in the handheld and portable devices business in particular, and what it means for the whole industry. Will they shape the landscape the way they did in the GPU market? Why is this event important enough to compel a guy that develops software to blog about hardware? Why the Nvidia Tegra? Why not the IPhone 3G? Or the HTC Diamond? A lot of tough questions to answer...