DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by jason

Managing SVN via SlickEdit

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 01:26:50 GMT

A short how-to on how to setup SlickEdit to manage your SVN Repository.

SlickEdit Versioning Toolbox Screencast : Visual Studio Hacks

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 04:46:03 GMT

A quick screencast showing off the cooler features in the SlickEdit Versioning Toolbox

Let's Do a Code Review With SlickEdit Tools (Part 2) » "Hello World" -

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:53:09 GMT

Part 2 of how you can use the SlickEdit tools to do a code review. I think the idea of having code comments that are not a part of the code is particularly useful in this scenario.

Let's Do a Code Review With SlickEdit Tools (Part 1) » "Hello World" -

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:46:06 GMT

An interesting approach to code reviews using the SlickEdit Tools, the Version Control visualizations are particularly cool.

SlickEdit's Tools Editing Toolbox 2.0 Review

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:28:45 GMT

SlickEdit's Tools Editing Toolbox v2.0 brings to Visual Studio some of the features that "power programmers" love about the SlickEdit editor. If you hate to take your hands off the keyboard and believe that real programmers don't use menus -- in other words, if pressing Ctrl+Shift+0 to navigate to the next method in your code makes sense to you -- then you're the audience that the Editing Toolbox is aimed

SlickEdit Tools

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 22:36:50 GMT

I love tools that'll help me be more productive, so I jumped at the chance. SlickEdit Tools is actually two products - Editing and Versioning. Both integrate with with Visual Studio, and since that's where I spend much of my time, that works for me.

Playing with SlickEdit Tools

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 23:50:46 GMT

Being a tool geek I couldn't resist installing it and fooling around a bit. I've not spent a whole lot of time with the tools, but have already found some cool bits. The window below shows a cool documentation preview in MSDN style, a nice compliment to what I get from ReSharper's Ctrl-Q. There's also a nice regex evaluator which can generate code for you to paste in as needed.

"Management" is a Dirty Word

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 23:49:28 GMT

Though it won't be flagged as profane in most dictionaries, one word that is often viewed as a dirty word in programming is "management". Managers are so maligned in engineering that Scott Adams created the "pointy-haired boss" as their representative (http://www.dilbert.com/). It may be true that managers are equally loathed in other fields, but having spent my adult years working in software engineering, this is the only field I feel competent to address. I also have a somewhat unique perspective having been both a developer and a development manager.

Highlight Current Line in Visual Studio 2008

Tue, 20 May 2008 22:46:14 GMT

How to highlight the current line within Visual Studio using Resharper or SlickEdit Gadgets. Also shows the messed up highlighting that Resharper does on a dark themed visual studio.

What Would I Do Without Programming?

Wed, 07 May 2008 22:49:02 GMT

One of my friends lost his job this week. He worked in the chem department of a pharmaceutical company, doing something that went completely over my head while he was explaining it to me. it's not uncommon for companies to just run out of funding or to have massive sweeping layoffs.

SlickEdit Editing Toolbox : Visual Studio Hacks

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:27:22 GMT

Review of the SlickEdit Editing Toolbox

Finding Misery in Another Programmer's Success

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 23:13:45 GMT

I was introduced to the word schadenfreude by an episode of the Simpsons, "When Flanders Failed". It's a german word that means "pleasure from misfortune". In this episode, Homer finds happiness in watching Flanders' Leftorium shop go out of business. The Wikipedia reference to it says that the opposite meaning of schadenfreude would be "happiness in another's good fortune," but I think that the opposite should really mean "misery in another's success". This sentiment has a long, unfortunate place in software development.

SlickEdit Inc. Announces the Release and New Lineup of SlickEdit Tools

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 22:39:05 GMT

The SlickEdit Tools productivity suite is a powerful collection of utilities optimized for use within the Microsoft Visual Studio environment. SlickEdit Tools is organized into two products: the Editing Toolbox and the Versioning Toolbox. The SlickEdit Tools Editing Toolbox is comprised of features that help you write and edit code. The SlickEdit Tools Versioning Toolbox contains features that help you manage and control your source code.

Help With MSDN Help

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:22:29 GMT

F1. it's possibly the most feared key on my keyboard when writing code in Visual Studio. At best, it's going to bring up MSDN help, aka dexplore.exe. That means that I'm in for a very, very long wait. Startup time is 3 minutes on average, and I'm an Athlon 64 dual core @ 2 GHz with 1 GB RAM.

QA Deathmatch - Make Testing Fun

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 01:14:31 GMT

I've worked previously at several companies that didn't have a QA department available. When the code freeze happened, all of the developers would go into QA mode. We'd then spend the next few weeks testing the features, and typically each developer would test their own. It was possibly the most feared and hated time of the year. If you're familiar with Quake, or pretty much any other FPS, then you know about the deathmatch. It's my single favorite type of game and, in it's own way, is really therapeutic when the stress of development, or testing, gets you down. A lot of the other developers I worked with at one point also loved to deathmatch and we used to play during lunch. When testing time came around, we found a way to make it fun. QA Deathmatch.

Creating a PHP 5 Extension with Visual C++ 2005

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 13:20:40 GMT

This article describes the steps to create a custom PHP extension DLL for the Windows platform. The Zend API documentation that comes with PHP 5 on Windows (see php_manual_en.chm) does a good job explaining how to write extension methods, parse method parameters, and return values. But there is not currently a good step-by-step tutorial on how to get your first extension project up and running on Windows. The aim of this article is to fill that gap.

The Code Project Browser Add-in for VS 2005

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 16:46:02 GMT

The people from SlickEdit have created a great add-in to let you integrate the very very large collection of projects directly from Code Project just inside your VS IDE.

The Code Project Browser Add-in for VS 2005

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 15:07:40 GMT

The Code Project Browser Add-in for VS 2005 is a free add-in that lets you browse Code Project directly in Visual Studio 2005. When you click on a link that would normally download a zip file, it asks you instead if you'd like to open the sample up using the Code Project Browser. If you say yes, the add-in will download the file, unzip it to a base "My documents\My Code Project Samples" directory, then load it directly. It also provides a sidebar where you can view, reload and delete all of the projects you've downloaded. Finally, it allows you to keep Code Project favorites, just like any respectable web browser would.

It takes a community of programmers.

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 19:46:50 GMT

I'm the type of developer who learns best by example. Show me a working piece of code that solves a problem I'm having, then let me take it and reshape it to my needs. For me, this is an extremely powerful way of learning and achieving code reuse.

VSIP: Detecting code window switches in VS 2005

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 14:48:58 GMT

I recently tackled the problem of reliably detecting code window lifecycle changes in Visual Studio 2005 using the VSIP SDK. For something that seems like it should be very straightforward, it wasn't at all. There's even a page in the SDK help that tries to describe how to do this [link] but misses several of the possible scenarios.

VSIP: Detecting code window switches in VS 2005

Thu, 17 May 2007 21:50:09 GMT

Slick Edit Gadgets - Free VS2005 Utilities

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 20:43:39 GMT

"SlickEdit has released SlickEdit® Gadgets, a collection of free utilities or the Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 development environment. It is completely free. SlickEdit Gadgets is an assortment of useful utilities to help programmers monitor, explore, and inspect the contents of their code.