For the last couple of weeks, I have been integrating Vim and a complementary set of tools into my development toolkit. I am firmly on board with what the pragmatic programmers say:

"Learn a good editor, and learn it well!!"

I am thoroughly impressed with Vim, Viemu etc. Last week I was recommended a registry hack that would allow my Caps Lock key to have the same behaviour as the ESC key. This results in a much smoother experience when using Vim.

So far, I am loving the reg hack and much prefer the need to not have to move my hand to hit the ESC key. Here is the text of the reg file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,01,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout\DosKeybCodes]
"00000804"="ch"
"00000408"="gk"
"00010408"="gk"
"00020408"="gk"
"00050408"="gk"
"0001041f"="tr"
"0000041f"="tr"
"00000423"="us"
"00000402"="bg"
"00000419"="ru"
"00010419"="ru"
"00000c1a"="us"
"00010c1a"="us"
"00000422"="us"
"00010402"="us"
"00020402"="bg"
"00030402"="bg"
"00020422"="us"
"00000412"="ko"
"00000425"="et"
"00000426"="us"
"00010426"="us"
"00000427"="us"
"00000411"="jp"
"00000404"="ch"
"0000041C"="us"
"0000041a"="yu"
"00000424"="yu"
"00000405"="cz"
"00010405"="cz"
"0000040e"="hu"
"0001040e"="hu"
"00000415"="pl"
"00010415"="pl"
"00000418"="ro"
"00010418"="ro"
"00020418"="ro"
"0000041b"="sl"
"0001041b"="sl"
"00000442"="tk"
"00000813"="be"
"0000080c"="be"
"00001009"="us"
"00000c0c"="cf"
"00010c0c"="cf"
"00000406"="dk"
"00000413"="nl"
"0000040b"="su"
"0000040c"="fr"
"00000407"="gr"
"00010407"="gr"
"0000040f"="is"
"00001809"="us"
"00000410"="it"
"00010410"="it"
"0000080a"="la"
"00000414"="no"
"00000816"="po"
"00000416"="br"
"0000040a"="sp"
"0001040a"="sp"
"0000041d"="sv"
"0000100c"="sf"
"00000807"="sg"
"00000809"="uk"
"00010409"="dv"
"00030409"="usl"
"00040409"="usr"
"00020409"="us"
"00000409"="us"
"00000452"="uk"
"0000046e"="sf"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout\DosKeybIDs]
"00010408"="220"
"00020408"="319"
"0001041f"="440"
"0000041f"="179"
"00010415"="214"
"00000442"="440"
"00000410"="141"
"00010410"="142"

Create a reg file and copy the contents into it, then merge the file into your registry. Make sure that you want to not have normal use of your caps lock key.

Develop With Passion!!

Well you can officially call me a Vim junkie now!! Having spent the last couple of weeks working with it I can definitely say that I would not work at a machine that did not have it. That's right, that is the same claim I made, and still make, about ReSharper. I still trip myself up in ReSharper with VIM a couple of times, but nothing worth writing home about. To ensure a complete immersion, I have purchased a copy of Vimemu that integrates with:

• Visual Studio 2008/2005
• Microsoft Word
• Microsoft Outlook

As well as now using gvim as my primary text editor (notepad++ is still in the picture) I just recently installed Vimperator which plugs into firefox to give me a whole world of Vim goodness.

There is only one problem with getting used to this tool - You will start wishing you had Vim integration into all of your applications!!!!!

For those of you who are curious, you might get a kick out of the following article:

Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?

As soon as I have time I am going to give a screencast on using all of these tools.

After watching the first screencast that Aaron presented on Vim, I thought I would check it out. The first day was a little uncomfortable, 2 weeks later I am happy to report that I concur with Aaron's statement, which is also what I say to people who were not using ReSharper:

"I could not use studio without it"

ReSharper + Viemu is the ultimate killer combo for increasing your keyboarding productivity. The fact that you can keep your hands on home row to do the majority of your navigation is a huge plus. The core command set does not take a lot of time to learn, you just have to stick with it so that it becomes second nature. Once it does you will be "yanking", "pasting", "changing" ..... up your code in ways that now make studio seem extremely cumbersome.

As with picking up any new tool/technique there is a period of ramp up that you have to go through. It was a 2 week road trip where I could not use my mouse, that forced me to learn all of the keyboard shortcuts that I needed to get around windows, studio etc with efficiency. After that 2 week period I realized that there were very few things that I actually needed to reach for the mouse for (game playing aside).

To dive in full force, I also purchased the Vim integration that works in Outlook and Word. That way I can completely immerse myself in the Vim experience.

I encourage you to check it out and give it an honest and open attempt. You might surprise yourself with the results.

Ever since the nightly builds for ReSharper 4.0 went live, being the REA (Resharper early adopter) that I am, I downloaded it and have been using it on my C# 3.5 projects. I am happy to report that even though it is in the pre EAP phase, it is extremely solid and a joy to work with.

The support for the new language features such as extension methods, automatic properties ... is great. So far I have had only one exception dialog pop up. For those of you who have braved prior EAP's for ReSharper (remember ReSharper 2.0 EAP!!!) you have probably already developed a thick skin for the exception dialogs that typically pop up during EAP. So far this is not the case.

In all honesty, those of us who love ReSharper would be more than willing to put up with multiple exception dialogs as, let's face it, studio without ReSharper == "I won't use it".

So what are you waiting for, head over and download the latest nightly build. Keep in mind that results may vary between use as well as different nightly builds!!

Develop with Passion!!

I might be a little late on this one, but I just learned a new shortcut that will definitely save me time when I am working in my VM on my mac. I love to use the keyboard. And when I use my natural keyboard it is fairly easy to access context menus (right click) by using the context menu key on the keyboard. My MacBook does not have such a key. This meant that up until yesterday (when I learned the shortcut) I had to have a mouse plugged in any time I wanted to access the context menu.

Shift-F10 is actually a keyboard shortcut that accomplishes the exact same thing as the context menu key / right click.

Thanks to Jay Smith for pointing this out for me.

I finally set up a googlecode project to host source code for the various things I have been doing over the last year. The first major significant contribution is of course the code drop that I promised a week ago now!!

The application is the start of what I hope will evolve to be a great learning resource for lots of things related to .Net development. The application does not currently cover any of the “extra” topics that I did not have time to get covered in the course. This is perfect because as request come in from people (including past students) asking how to tackle a certain problem, I will use this application as the demonstration area where I can tackle the problem, and update the code base, and you will be able to update your local copy and carry on.

I am currently in the midst of a large Smart Client application that I am hoping to be able to harvest pieces of code out and do the exact same thing except for the smart client realm. I have much more experience developing in the smart client realm and that is where I feel most comfortable, so I am looking forward to be able to do another code drop (for a different application) in a couple of months.

I am going to write up another post about the Web Application as it is built very differently from traditional .Net based web applications. In following with the theme for my courses, there are currently no 3^rd party frameworks (other than log4net) that have come into play. My goal with this web app is to demonstrate to people how far we can push raw .Net. The goal being that expanding their knowledge of how to creatively leverage .Net, they will be better prepared to jump into frameworks that they may currently feel daunted by. As time goes by, I will swap pieces of the application out with components that people are asking to see meaningful samples on:

• NHibernate
• Castle
• Prototype
• JQuery
• ..*

As the app stands right now I see it as the beginning of what will shape up to be a pretty mean machine!!

I am going to post a screencast that will show people how to get started working with the web application. For people who are eager to get going right now, here are the quick and simple steps without a lot of explanation (that will come in the next post):

• Anonymously checkout the trunk from the google code repository using the following svn command line:
  svn checkout http://jpboodhoo.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ jpboodhoo-read-only
  
• Navigate to the checkout folder
• Go into the build folder
• Copy local.properties.xml.template and paste it into the same directory, then rename the copied file to local.properties.xml
• Open up the local.properties.xml file with your favourite text editor.
• Modify any of the settings in the file that are different on your machine.
• Open up a command prompt and navigate to the build directory of the code.
• type: build load.data and hit enter.
• type: build test.all.woc
• type: build run
• The last task should fail (I haven’t automated everything yet)
• Create a virtual directory called nothinbutdotnetstore that points at the following location (this location is created after you attempt to run the build run task) : ${checkoutfolder)\build\deploy\web\app
• After successfully creating the virtual directory try the build run task again.
• If the web browser pops up pointed at a web page (for the app) you are in business. Feel free to click through the first set of pages that are implemented (only 3 pages are currently implemented).

As far as what I have planned to implement in the web app (that is currently not implemented):

• Build out a more extensive domain model that encompasses some more advanced scenarios of the application (especially around order processing).
• Unit Of Work for the service layer
• Implement a lightweight OR/M layer
• Integrate some UI frameworks like prototype
• Eliminate Master Pages completely and switch to a much more elegant template view pattern.
• Introduce a more robust container (as the current one is a simple dictionary wired up in a simple procedural fashion).
• Introduce the concepts of lifecycles for the items in the container. Right now, everything wired into the container is essentially a singleton.
• Introduce CSS based layout for the web pages (working with a designer on this one).
• Bring security concerns into play
• Demonstrate how to effectively manage sessions
• ……lots,lots,lots more!!!

Obviously I will be leaning on people checking out the code and playing around with it and submitting requests for things they would like to see.

There are a couple of things that you will immediately notice about the application:

• Clean front controller implementation with ASPX pages as the template views. There are no code behind pages in this web application. All web requests are handled by command objects that interact with the service layer, push the details into a “ViewBag” and then choose which view to render.
• Logical layers in the project are separated using simple folders and namespaces (not full blown projects)
• Build automation is its own project in the solution (props to Jay Flowers for this inspiration)
• The current container implements (CustomDependencyContainer) is very simple and is handled by a big procedural application startup task.
• Compile time support for the database layer. A couple of classes ago I introduced the concept of a generic TableColumn<T> type. In England after introducing this concept Scott Cowan leveraged his knowledge of MyGeneration to automatically generate strongly typed table definitions that we could leverage to do mapping (trust me when I say, this is nothing like datasets). Until moving into OR/M concepts deeper this gives a good place to start as the generation of the TableDefinitions is linked to whenever the SQL files change, so you will get compile errors if column types are now mismatched etc…

There are lots of other things I could talk about, but this code really is the start of what I see being a long running conversation between myself and other people wanting to learn. In all honesty for all of the emails I have not paid attention to this year, hosting code through google will allow me to answer peoples questions in a much more meaningful way as I can point them at this site to see the implementation of the code they had questions about.

I am going to be placing all of the code for presentations that I have done for the last year as well as continue to update it with the source code that comes out of new courses that will be coming out in the new year, and the DNRTv episodes.

Once again, the application is currently in its infancy, but as people start sending in the requests I now will have a venue and example to add upon to answer questions in a much more timely fashion!!!

Develop With Passion!!!

Thanks to everyone for all of the feedback. In the end, the first response that I tried was to install the latest copy of VisualSVN (I was running a slightly older version).

After installing the latest version of VisualSVN everthing is functioning as expected.

Well, today I installed VS2008 on my machine. Setup went great and completed with no errors.

This was a fresh install on a machine that had no prior beta bits installed whatsoever. So I did not anticipate anything weird happening.

Fired up VS2008 for the first time and  it went through its normal first time setup deal. So there I was, in a blank IDE with my C# RSS Feed showing from the help page.

I go to add a new project and I’m presented with this wonderful dialog:

Ok…. So I try a few (lot) more menu items and the same thing happens. So, I think to myself, just exercise the standard Windows remedy. Get out, get back in, and see if it is better!!

I would do that, if I could exit Studio!! Even hitting the big red x in the top right corner of VS2008 pops up this dialog. The only way to shut this down is to kill the devenv process.

I am currently running XP with SP2 and an existing installation of VS2005. Again, let me stress that I have not installed any beta bits of VS2008.

After un installing and reinstalling to no success (same result) I quickly googled. I happened to stumble into an MSDN forum where people are having the same issue and are also not sure how to go about resolving it.

Has anyone else ran into this issue? How did you fix it?

The title says it all. Looks like I will be prepping a new VMWare image in a couple of hours!!

Now the JetBrains people have a good target to aim at with getting a release out that supports the RTM of VS2008!!

Develop With Passion

Since I have been asked for these quite a few times, I thought I would oblige and give these out. You can find below the links for both my Resharper Live Templates and File templates.

Enjoy:

• Live Templates
• File Templates

As you can see from the title. I am currently not using the datahand to type right now. This is due in large part to the immediate needs of a client and my personal frustration with going from being able to type fairly fast on a natural keyboard to not very fast at all on a DataHand.

During the 2 weeks that I used the DataHand, I personally found the learning curve to be fairly low. In fact, the need to not have to reposition your fingers around the home row keys was a big plus. If you are a fairly proficient touch typer, you would probably have no problems making the transition to the datahand. I think it would be even more beneficial if you are not already a fast typer, as I think that in the long run, the speed improvements to be gleaned from the datahand far outweigh what you could gain from regular keyboards on the market.

I was hoping that the DataHand would be able to become a mouse replacement for me also. Alas, the mouse on the datahand is pretty weak, and I think I would still resort to reaching for my mouse at the times that I absolutely had to.

An interesting experience using the DataHand came into play when I had to switch to using studio combined with ReSharper. The keyboard shortcuts definitely took less effort to pull off. It did require me to remember to “mode switch” in order to be able to pull off certain refactorings and navigation. I think it will take a bit of time to make this “mode switching” automatic.

It was ultimately the slowdown inside of studio that caused me to switch temporarily back to a natural keyboard, as I am unfortunately in a heavy delivery mode right now.

The effort involved to operate the keyboard is definitely much less than any keyboard I have ever worked on. Your wrists and hands will feel the difference almost immediately.

One other big negative that I had not even counted on was the actual size of the unit. It is fairly beefy. I currently tote my natural keyboard with me wherever I have to type. Granted, it is not the smallest of keyboards, but it is slim and can fit nicely into a suitcase or backpack with no problem. On the other hand, the DataHand is a fairly bulky unit. Just a little wider than a natural keyboard, but considerably thicker. Unhooking this, and transporting it between work and home is a little annoying (which is why I have 3 natural keyboards, one at work, home, and one for presentations). Obviously, having more than one DataHand is a little ridiculous from a price perspective.

There is one last final negative that I have to mention, one that I did not even think about. There are lots of times in the morning, when I am working from home, when our youngest son runs into my office and wants me to hold him on my shoulder. This leaves me with one hand available to type. On any regular keyboard, you can get away with pecking away at the keyboard to get some stuff written down, this is not really the case with the datahand. To use it, you really need to have both hands available. I know this is of little concern to most people, but it is one of those little details that I did not even think about.

I am going to take some time off from work near the end of the year, to truly immerse myself in the datahand unit. Where I can devote a full 2 weeks to learn the device well without the pressures of deadlines looming. If you are thinking about buying this device, you need to be sure you have the time to allow yourself to get comfortable with it. Because I spent 2 weeks completely isolated to the DataHand, I got an opportunity to learn it without confusing myself. This allows me to go home, and do the practice exercises on the unit without getting confused between my natural keyboard and the unit.

I would strongly recommend the DataHand as an alternative to the regular keyboards that are on the market. You just have to keep in mind the caveats that I listed in conjunction with the rampup time required to get proficient with the device.

I’ve been using ReSharper 3.0 EAP for quite some time now, and I’m loving it. The beta just released (yesterday I think), so what are you waiting for:

• Solution Wide Error Analysis
• C# Code Analysis
• Unit Test Explorer
• XAML Support
• More…

Download it right now and start developing with pleasure!!

Looks like TW Studios just released a new offering to the general consumer public.

CruiseContol Enterprise is an interesting offering from TW that looks to add interesting support and consulting features as well as some interesting additions to the actual tool itself.

I could duplicate information and screenshots, but you are better off just taking a look at it!!

Using ReSharper 3.0 for the last week and a bit has been an awesome experience. It is currently in the EAP phase, but so far it is proving to be the most solid eap of the product they have released to date (in my opinion).

Of all of the features that have been brought into the mix, I am particularly pleased with:

• Solution wide error analysis
• TODO Explorer
• Member reordering

I asked for solution wide error analysis as a feature several months ago, I am pleased that other people must have also asked to ensure that it got brought into the mix.

The title of the post has to deal with the fact that coupled with the solution wide error analysis, I can now truly not need to do my compiles using studio at all. During this last week, I held another iteration of my Nothin But .Net coding bootcamp (1 10 hour day, 4 14 hour days!!). Aside from 2 times that I accidentally built in studio, the app evolved over the course of the week, and there was no need for me to use studio once to do a build.

The nice thing about the solution wide error analysis, is that I can deal with my error quicker than doing a NAnt compile, looking for the error, fixing, and repeating. I can just hit ATL-F12 to take me to the next error in the solution, fix the code, ensure that I am good to go solution wide, then I can do my build in NAant.

Cheers to the Jetbrains team for continuing to evolve a stellar product for .Net developers.

David Stennett over at JetBrains is soliciting existing users of ReSharper to pipe up and tell them about things they could do to improve the killer product we all know and love (all of us who use it that is!!).

Take a couple of minutes out of your busy day and fill out this survey which should arm them with more information with which they can continue to improve the single biggest productivity booster to grace Visual Studio.

For those of you getting started with powershell here is a simple example for you to cut your teeth on, file copying.

I had to quickly copy some assemblies out of the gac to another location, specifically I had to copy all of the Assemblies for ActiveReports into a single directory. If you take a look at the GAC from the command line, you will notice there is a bit of a tree there. To make it simple I wrote this quick powershell script to do the heavy lifting for me :

get-childitem C:\windows\assembly\gac * -Recurse -Include act*.dll | foreach-object -process{copy-item $_FullName - destination O:\efc}

Notice how I am piping the results of the get-childitem cmdlet into the foreach-object cmdlet, the most powerful thing is that I am piping around objects, not simple strings, I love it!!

I know there are ways to do this using the plain old command promtp, but it gives me another reason to sharpen my Powershell skills. If you have not started playing with Powershell, I encourage you to give it a try.

I am not sure where he finds the time, what with home schooling 2 kids, consulting and speaking, but James Kovacs has managed to write a plugin to allow running VSTS unit tests from within ReSharper. If you happen to be one of those people who has to use the VSTS unit test, and you also have the joy of using ReSharper, head over and download it and give him some feedback!

Yesterday Jeremy Miller asks the question : Do you use OSS tools for .Net development. My answer is an obvious and resounding Yes!!

Here are some of the tools I currently use:

• Castle Windsor - Leveraging IOC implementation
• NHibernate - Data Access
• IBatis .Net - Data Access
• log4Net - logging
• MbUnit - Unit Testing
• NUnit - Unit Testing
• Prototype - Javascript
• Script.aculo.us - Web 2.0 framework built on top of prototype
• Watir - Automated web ui testing
• NCover
• NCoverExplorer
• Boo - so many uses!!
• NAnt - Automated Build Tool
• CruiseControl .Net - Continuous Integration Server
• Rhino Mocks - mocking while practicing BDD
• NMock2 - was using this in conjunction with RhinoMocks as until recently, only NMock2 supported mocking generic method calls.
• FireFox - wicked internet browser
• Notepad++ - awesome notepad replacement
• NHQG - Strongly typed querying with NHibernate
• FileHelpers - data import/export
• iBox - overlays in HTML
• Subversion - source code repository
• TortoiseSVN - windows subversion explorer client
• MonoRail - Great MVC framework

I am sure I am missing a few, but the above list definitely covers the brunt of them!!

What OSS tools do you want to use today!!

If, like me, you are a keyboard junkie wanting to sharpen you keyboarding skills in VS 2005 you might appreciate this PDF that contains the default keybinding for Visual C# 2005. Thanks to Lucio Assis for providing me with the link!!

This is a great place to start getting more proficient navigating around studio without the mouse. If you really want to take your keyboarding skills in studio to the next level do yourself a favour and pick up a copy of JetBrains ReSharper, then you can really start to fly.

Looks like the Vista installer for Powershell got finished up, which is good news for those of us waiting for a fully supported Powershell for Vista. Head over to this link to download a copy. Powershell is da bomb.

My good friend Terry Thibodeau just posted about a new version of Launchy that allows me to finally remove SlickRun from my machine so I don't need to run them both. I won't go into the details, check out his post.

As an aside, keep an eye on his blog as this guy is a storehouse of tech/dev knowledge, and he has only just started blogging.

Thanks to Igloo Coder for reminding me that today (Jan 19th) is the unofficial "Windows Developer Tools Day".

I have a lot of tools in my utils folder, the ones that I use almost everyday are:

• ReSharper
• DotTrace
• mbUnit / nunit
• VMWare
• SlickRun
• Launchy
• SysInternals (if you're still using Task Manager instead of Process Explorer, make the switch please!!)
• NotePad++
• nAnt
• Reflector
• Snippet Compiler
• Powershell
• Foxit Reader
• WinRar
• TimeSnapper