my learning curve...

Stardock Fences – you gonna love it!

prasoonpankaj — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:26:02 +0000

I’m sorry if you find this post a misfit, but you gotta try Fences. You gonna love it!

Fences is a one-of-a-kind program, allowing you to draw labeled shaded areas on your desktop, which become movable & resizable containers for your desktop icons. These groups can help bring organization and consistency to your computer’s desktop, solving the “constant mess” problem that has plagued the desktop since its inception.

Fences in Action

You can download this cool must-have tool from the Fences homepage.

Prasoon.

GhostDoc and Collapsing all the Auto Generated XML Comments

prasoonpankaj — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 19:05:15 +0000

XML commenting is an invaluable feature that all C# or VB.Net programmers must use. XML comments can be made on various code blocks like classes, methods or properties stating their purpose, use and other information like possible exceptions thrown etc. These can later be used to generate documentation for your assemblies using tools like NDoc. The only problem with XML documentation is the time taken to write a precise and well formed comment, and not to mention adhere to various notations as well. We often end up writing similar statements over and over again. So here comes GhostDoc to the rescue. Here’s a description of the tool picked directly from GhostDoc homepage.

GhostDoc is a free Visual Studio extension that automatically generates XML documentation comments for methods and properties based on their type, parameters, name, and other contextual information.

When generating documentation for class derived from a base class or for interface implementation (e.g. .NET Framework or your custom framework), GhostDoc will use the documentation that Microsoft or the framework vendor has already written for the base class or interface.

Statutory Warning: This is not a replacement for writing thorough documentation, but a tool to automate the mindless part of documentation generation.

Now here’s ironic situation. With all that XML commenting, I found it hard to go through my code. It was especially annoying that even I ignored the above mentioned statutory warning and most of the XML comments were worthless. So here’s another trick I learned. We can actually setup a Macro in Visual Studio which could collapse all the XML comments in the current document.

The macro is available at Peter Macej’s blog at helixoft.com

The macro is also available as Visual Studio macro file, and can be downloaded from here. After extracting the file load the macro project in Visual Studio by selecting Tools > Macros > Load Macro Project…

One can even assign the macro a shortcut from Tools > Options…, and under Environment node look for Keyboard options.

Assign shortcut keys to toggle xml comments macro

If you really find it useful, then perhaps you can add it to a toolbar or menu bar in Visual Studio. Go to View > Toolbars > Customize… and drag and drop the macros to the desired position.

Assign toggle xml comments to toolbar or menu bar

Prasoon.

WPF Designer Hotfix

prasoonpankaj — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 12:47:28 +0000

I recently encountered a bug in Visual Studio which gave some error related to VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups but it actually didn’t stop the compilation of the project and also Visual State Manager (VSM) was available when the application was run. So nobody bothered. Well, I did. As a curious trainee, I took it on myself to find a solution. And here it is – WPF designer hotfix released on 10/31/2008. Check out the links below to find out more.

WPF SDK Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/wpfsdk/archive/2008/11/10/wpf-designer-hotfix-is-posted.aspx

Silverlight SDK Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/silverlight_sdk/archive/2008/11/10/wpf-designer-hotfix-posted.aspx

Microsoft Connect: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=14834&wa=wsignin1.0

You can download the hot fix at the Connect. And for some reason the post at WPF and Silverlight SDK blogs are the same!

Also please do note: If you already have the latest version of the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1, you DO NOT need and should NOT install this hotfix. All of the fixes in the Hotfix package are already included in Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

Consolas Font Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or 2008

prasoonpankaj — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:07:40 +0000

Well, first things first. Visual Studio is a great IDE. I have been using it for just 6 months or so and I just love it. It feels like first love, may be cause its the only full blown IDE that I have ever used.

Recently, I found this great fixed-size font specifically designed for Visual Studio by Microsoft. At my first attempt to install it, I found the font rendering to be awful. With no clue whatsoever, I immediately discarded it. Then later one day when I was looking for a solution to WPF’s blurred out font rendering I got to know about ClearType technology. I downloaded ClearType Tuning Control Panel Applet, it just helps to set various registry values used by ClearType. And that my friends was the day when I first saw the real beauty of my XAML and C# code in Consolas font.

Believe me, you gotta give the Consolas font a try, and do make sure you download and run the ClearType Tuner.

Other fonts which I found many blogs have talked about are the Pro and Proggy fonts. Do take a look at them too if you are seeking more alternatives. What I really like about Consolas font is that although it is a fixed font, but it gives a feeling of being a “normal” font which is quite pleasing to eyes.

sample code in consolas font

Prasoon.