Coding Day

After reading interesting posts about the fonts and colors in Visual Studio, I gave a try to some of them. Because I work quite a lot with Visual Studio, I realized that it is actually very important for the eyes and for productivity. Unfortunately none of the themes have pleased my IDE concept, low contrast, dark background, pale colours, clear type fonts, and follow metaphors.

I also put some time to design and experiment with some fonts and colours. The themes that I found were to dark for me with very high contrast, and the fonts were glowing. 

This theme is still dark but with pale colours. More importantly it follows the metaphors we used to, so it will be OK when discussing with developers. What I mean? You know greenish parts of your code are always comments, or red parts of SQL code is bad (strings for dynamic SQL), as we all used to from visual studio, SQL or any popular IDEs.

One more thing is that when working with F# some of the color features are not the same as C#. So this theme is prepared with the F# projects in mind as well. Also HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and  XAML are formatted following my colour preference.

For fonts I have used DejaVu font with size 10. If Consolas is your favourite font than, it would be better to put on size 9.

Moreover if you use, ReSharper code refactoring tool it has also some colour highlights for it as well. But it is not a problem if you don’t.

Dark Color Scheme for Visual Studio 2010

Downloads: 138 File Name: Dark_IDE_2010.zip

Friendly IDE for Visual Studio 2008

Downloads: 1650 File Name: Friendly_IDE_2008.zip

Friendly IDE for Visual Studio 2005

Downloads: 596 File Name: Friendly_IDE_2005.zip

C# – F# Scheme

ASPX – HTML – XML Scheme

It is explained on Windows SDK blog how to integrate the updated Windows SDK with Visual Studio. However, how about the documentation and help integration with Visual Studio or even the search for API references ? I was using the online SDK until I figured out a work around.

Here are the steps to enable the updated help collections system for Windows SDK with Visual Studio. So at the end, the internal help function will will work with the updated help if necessary.

1. In Visual Studio , use the menu to navigate to Help -> Index
2. This will run up Microsoft Document Explorer (and yes it is different than MSDN)
3. Make sure that the results are unfiltered, in the “Look for” field search for “Collection Manager”,
4. On the results tree click to collection manager -> Help
5. Than select the Microsoft Windows SDK Collection checkbox. You can also have additional help integrated with the document explorer.
6. Update VSCC.

That’s it. Instead of the chm file it is useful to use from Visual Studio with the search capabilities.

It has been a long time since I haven’t blogged. Lots of things have happened on my side and on the development world. After finishing the internship at Microsoft Research Cambridge and submitting my thesis, I started to work at European Product Development Center in Dublin. I am very excited to work at Microsoft again.

I started a new project and used Visual Studio 2008 for that. I say used because the project is prematurely ended. That’s why I find time to write actually. Anyway that’s another story. From now on, I will try to blog more often about F#, C# 3.0, Parallel FX Library and Silverlight.

Here are the developer news . There were so many exciting things happened.

First F# is getting productized. I want to congratulate for the achievement and looking forward for the next updates. It is great news for the developer  and research world. I am really happy for F# being a “product”. What does that mean as a developer point of view is that, the language will not die and it will be more stable and developped more quickly. A functional language getting to the main stream will involve lots of new development and research ideas. The team is now focusing on stability and feature fixing and I am really looking for the future releases.   

Moreover, Visual Studio 2008 is out there. At first it looks very similar in terms of user interface. But I have to admit that it’s lot better and faster. Here are the quick impressions. I like the window list when navigating between the tabs with Ctrl Tab with a small preview window. I liked the transparency of the code complete display. when you press Ctrl it becomes transparent so that it is possible to read the code underneath, you don’t have to navigate away. Of course beside the visual enhancements, the language extensions such as LINQ, DLINQ, XLINQ, collection initialisers and functional constructs in C# and VB (lambda expressions, anonymous types), new designers and  new classes (pipes..) in the framework are really welcome. More classes are now supporting the generic types and most of nongeneric types became abbreviated.I hope the same goes for all of the typed collection types as well. Such as XMLNodeList etc . Typed is something good..

Finally the project management system of Visual Studio 2008 allows us to target to lower frameworks as well. So there is no need to hack visual studio to compile on other frameworks. This is also possible because there is no update on the CLR, on the other hand it is not possible to target 1.1 because of the CLR change but who wants to do that anymore ?

Happy coding…

What a nice morning after everything… It has been more than a week since I finished my coursework which means that I unofficially finished my masters. Things are started to change now, I really didn’t understand how this month has passed and couldn’t believe it’s just finished. Well the truth is I enjoyed every single moment of and very happy about it. Something is going to happen soon, I’ll tell you later but fingers crossed for the moment…

Back to business, the source code of the .NET Framework will be released under MS-RL license. Moreover debugging from Visual Studio, looking to the source locally will be possible. What an announcement! I just couldn’t believe it. Since the BCL Team insisted on the comments, I really wonder about the comments, as well as the code.

Have you ever wanted to look inside some of the BCL methods? Have you ever wondered about some exception thrown by our code? Are you curious to see what comments BCL developers write in their code?

Well yes to all those questions. This is a big step for the developer community. Previously Rotor is available as a research license but we weren’t sure it was the real .NET framework also it wasn’t usable from Visual Studio. Although the current license will allow only as a reference the code rather than using, I assume there will be some further movements to be more open, we’ll see. Also now you could see the news on Slashdot and digg so everybody is talking about it which is absolutely perfect

XNA team today released XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 with XNA framework 1.0.

• XNA Game Studio Express Main Page
• XNA Game Studio Readme
• XNA Framework 1.0
• XNA Game Studio Express 1.0

I am working with XNA for a couple of weeks, I will definetely post some samples and give more examples and reference about the framework in later posts.  I really liked that technology and the facilities it provides. Beside that my new project might use XNA, don’t know yet

Although Visual Studio 2005 includes a conversion wizard for old projects, this does not work properly with web applications, because Microsoft removed support for web applications at the beginning. We don’t have a web project, we have a web site. The wizard tries to convert all the files to the new framework. This fails at first compilation, so many errors reported and I don’t want to fix all of these errors, since there exist an easier solution.

ASP.NET team stepped back and gave support for web projects through an add-in for Visual Studio 2005. Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Projects is the easiest way to migrate from ASP.NET 1.1 to ASP.NET 2.0. Because we are able to open our project file, visual studio converts only the project file. So all the files in ASP.NET 1.1 stays and only the project file changes. This is also useful because my code under source control doesn’t have to change.

However in Windows Vista, you don’t have the administrator rights by default and the installation of WAP fails. The solution to that problem is already defined here. The process is simply to write a bat file and run the bat file with administrator rights.

msiexec /i WebApplicationProjectSetup.msi