MSDN Live will end as useal in Oslo, the 30 sep ... and holding the Keynote: Steve Ballmer :)
Im really looking forward to this, and hope to see you all there.
MSDN Live will end as useal in Oslo, the 30 sep ... and holding the Keynote: Steve Ballmer :)
Im really looking forward to this, and hope to see you all there.
One of the things I missed most, when moving from PHP to C#, was the way PHP let you pass along default parameters for any function. Now it look like C# 4.0 gets the same feature. Now I often find myself writing lots of overloaded methods, just because I want it to be easier to use the methods later on in the project
So this is how it is done today:
However, with the new feature in C#4.0, you can now put default values directly into
the method:
That little line of code, covers all of the methods I wrote with C#3.5. The only thing
to note, is that when you use similar input types for the parameters, it always used
the first default values it finds. In the next example, using “foo(“s string”, false,10)”
will set b = false, since it’s the first of 2 boolean default values.
I spend a lot of time in Visual Studio, and most of the default settings are usually
ok. But I there is always something you can do to improve your experience with the
IDE. This is more of a follow up to the blogpost of Gøran Hansen <a href="http://blog.goeran.no/PermaLink,guid,ab922a6a-702e-4ec8-8437-c643b5e6939c.aspx">”Pimp
my Visual Studio 2008 and developer tool belt!“</a> . But this will cover some
basic tweaking for people new to Visual Studio.
In this article I’ll cover some basic “tweaks” to Visual Studio:
When you spend a lot of time looking at the screen, your eyes have to work more when your screen is filled with a lot of light and contrasts. Therefore it’s a good idea to make a few changes to your codeview. So the most relaxing view your eyes could have, is a dark background with a non-contrast colors on your code/comments. There are several predefined colorsets out there, I just got a new favorite today, the one from Gørans blogpost. (Direct link to the colortheme)
If you want to change your colors yourself, open Visual Studio and open “Tools->Options”, then navigate to “Environment->Font and Colors”
if(you == me) then you’ll probably have a lot of small projects, which you created just to test out some new things, a library or just showing “how it works” to a colleague. In that case you end of with a bunch of “unimportant” projects in your recent projects list. I think it’s annoying, so here is the fix:
Even though I just show you how to remove all the unnecessary projects from the list,
I still like to see more than just a few projects.
In Visual Studio: Open “Tools -> Options”, navigate to “Environment -> General”.
Here you can control how many projects that will show up on your startpage. On My
screen, 20 projects fits well.
Default location for your projects is “My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects”.
To change this open Visual Studio, go to “Tools->Options”, navigate down to “Projects
and Solutions”. Here you can browse to your favorite project/code location and make
it default. I prefer to have it outside of the “My Documents” folder, since sometimes
the code/folder hierarchy gets a bit long. And if you use roaming user profile (like
at school or work), you might get some problems. I have all my code on a different
disk with automatic backup. 
The text editor has a few useful settings you can do. Yet again, in Visual Studio,
open “Tools->Options”, navigate to “Text Editor”. The options are mostly self explaining.
The only thing you should notice that you have an option “All Languages”, which basically
alters all the editors, regardless of what programming language you use. I always
enable line numbering here.
Often it is very useful to have a console besides
the winform/wpf application. And its really easy to :)
Create an available class:
using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
public
static
class
ConsoleEx
{
/// <summary>
/// Shows the Console
/// </summary>
[DllImport("kernel32.dll")]
publicstaticexternBoolean AllocConsole();/// <summary>
/// Hides the Console
/// </summary>
[DllImport("kernel32.dll")]
publicstaticexternBoolean FreeConsole();
}
I then use it like this in my Code (WPF App):
publicpartialclassApp : Application
{
public App(){
#if DEBUG
ConsoleEx.AllocConsole();
#endif}
}
You could use this with a Linq DataContext:
MyDataContext.Log = Console.Out;
While we were down in Paris on Imagine Cup, we encountered a big problem. Our server was running live in Oslo (Norway), and the internet connection was too slow to actually load the pages we needed. But it did however; work well in remote desktop as it takes lower bandwidth than a whole website with all the images. Imagine Cup had a firewall blocking just about everything about standard web ports (80,433), so we had to change the default port for Remote Desktop.
In
order to change the Remote Desktops default listening port, you actually need to do
a little registry hack.
Open regedit, and navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\TerminalServer\WinStations\RDP-Tcp\PortNumber
On the Edit menu, click Modify, and select Decimal (unless you prefer the hex values)
Now, restart “Terminal Services”, and it should be up and running on the new port.
We switched the port to 443, and everything worked like a charm. A special thanks to Rune Zakariassen for lending us the 3G connection to fix it all.