Monday, January 31, 2011

Humour link - What if Visual Studio had achievements?

A proposal to have Steam/XBox style “achievements” in Visual Studio – and apparently it’s being made into an extension!  I’ve come dangerously close to getting some of these I think.   Some examples from the site:

  • The Enterprise – Build Solution took more than 10 minutes
  • Highway to Hell – Successfully created a WCF service
  • Job Security – Written a LINQ query with over 30 lines of code
  • I’d love one for architectural anti-patterns – a bunch of them were given unofficial names at work, but a bit too rude to put in print.

    Tuesday, January 11, 2011

    .NET Reflector 7 Beta is out!

    Haven’t actually played with it, but it has got to be good.  Apparently a popular community plugin is now built in.

    Get it here, use the link on the right side, the one that asks for you email is version 6.5.

    A list of new features available here (which was where I heard the news).  There’s apparently a “Write LINQ against loaded assemblies” feature that sounds… intriguing.

    Sunday, January 9, 2011

    Launchy vs Windows 7 Start Menu Search

    For the last few years I’ve been using Launchy for rapid keyboard based application launching.  It’s a distant, weaker cousin of QuickSilver on the Mac, with a tiny subset of its functionality, but still fantastic.  Some people, when seeing Launchy in action comment that in Windows 7 this functionality is built in via the Start menu search box.

    Not quite.

    For example typing “vis 10” in Launchy will match “Visual Studio 2010”, however in the Windows Start search thingie, it will not.  You would need “vis 2010”. 

    In the below screenshot, you can see that Launchy matched anything that has a “vis” followed by “08” anywhere in the application name.

    image

    In short, the Windows 7 search matches from the start of a word, whereas Launchy is happy for the match to be anywhere within the word.  I think that’s a lot more useful, especially in situations where a program name is a concatenation of some words.  E.g. I might have a bunch of XML related applications, all with “XML” somewhere in the name… is it “XMLSpy” or “SpyXML” ? The point is, I should be able to look for it by just typing “XML”.

    Anyhow, even if you’re on Windows 7, get Launchy.  Or if you’ve been spoiled on a Mac, get QuickSilver.  You won’t regret it.