Entries from December 2005 ↓

Please check out the new look of the consulting company that I’m a partner of. We updated the website and and I really love the new look. Check it out at http://www.veniceconsulting.com

Yesterday I was having all kinds of problems with my internet connection. I felt is was a deja vu all over again like I had with my DSL last christmas. That’s when I switched to cable because my dsl went down for 4 days at christmas! However after a few hours of problems I was notified that they were actually upgrading the system and now I am gettting impressive speeds.

Here is my results from broadbandreports.com

2005-12-23 13:39:30 EST: 5943 / 858
Your download speed : 5943 kbps or 742.9 KB/sec.
Your upload speed : 858 kbps or 107.3 KB/sec.

I went from having 2,000 kbps a few days ago to now roughly 6,000 kbps without paying more for it! What I love even more is my upload speeds. The speed went from 256 kbps to now almost 900 kbps! That may not seem like a lot but its huge when you sending large emails, uploading files to cvs or ssh!

I also found out that for $10 more a month I can get 16 mbps download and 2 mbps upload! I was going to get FIOS from the phone company but everyone I know that has FIOS, hates it! It’s down all the time and the bigger problem is that the latency. I will have to do my homework to make sure thats not the same issue with the new extreme package from the cable company!

However, to be honest, the speeds are not that noticable when surfing the web (as the bottleneck is on the server side). The performance really comes handy when you’re downloading files!

I love this post that Dave Winer posted on his site over 10 years ago! The great thing is nothing has changed since then and it still holds up today.

Another nice feature that will save on time and re-indenting your code is the Surrounds with snippets.  It works the same way as Code Snippets but the difference is that you highlight a section of code that you want to surround your code with.

This example I am going to surround a section of my code with a try catch.  The keyboard short cut is Ctrl + K and the S.

A popup combo box will appear asking you what type.  You can selec the you want to surround with.  Since I am going to use a try catch, I can hit the “T” key and then hit enter.

My code is now surrounded by a try/catch with the Exception object available for me to assign a variable to.

Now that you’ve seen the power of using Code Snippets, the only thing cooler is creating your very own code snippets!

The best tool that I’ve seen to help you create your own is one from Microsoft. It’s actually an open source project that if want to contribute to, you can.

You can download it from the MSDN website.

One of the new features of Visual Studio 2005 is the ability to use Code Snippets.

At times coding can be very repeative and the 9 out of 10 times its the same thing that I am typing.  By using the snippets feature I can reduce this.

So How do you insert a Code Snippet?
The fastest way is from the keyboard Press the Ctrl key + K and then X.

A popup window will appear for you do select the available snippets.  There are several to choose from and you can even create your own!  For this tip I am going to do a Property snippet. Press ‘P’ on your keyboard or scroll through the list and select it.

Your code will now have the snippet template of the property item in place.  Very cool!  However the best is yet to come!  Notice that the private data member type is highlighted. 

Go ahead and change it to the type you need.  I am going to change mine to a string.

To change the name of the private data member simply hit the tab key.  Now the highlighted box is around the private data member name.  Type in the name you would normally give your private data members.

One really nice feature is the set and get values have been modified automatically to the same name as the private data member.

Finally tab one more time and enter your property Name.

Once you like what you see hit the enter key.  However if you want to change any of the values you made you can simply hit the tab key again and it cycle through them all. (You can’t do this after hit the enter key though)

To me this is one of my favorite features and I find myself constantly doing these key strokes when I am in Visual Studio 2003. One more reason to port everything over to .net 2.0!

For the last couple of weeks I have been deep in development on a new project using Visual Studio 2005. All I can say is “Thank you Microsoft!” The debugging tools alone are worth the upgrade. I can’t tell you how much more productive I have been using the new Visual Studio. Microsoft, I take back everything I have said bad about you (for aleast a couple of days, or until something drives me nuts about Windows XP). This is one awesome IDE.

There is a great site I found by a developer at Microsoft. He is presenting his top debugging tips. I greatly suggest if you are using Visual Studio 2005 that you read his tips. They have been extemely useful and I want to pass this on to all (3) of my readers!

Have you ever wanted a online site to store and sync all of your music? How about the ability to stream your own music playlists from any computer via a web browser on any platform?

I found a new site that does just that for you and much more. It’s called mp3tunes.com. mp3tunes.com was created by Mr.Robertson, the same guy who started mp3.com way back in the dot com days. One of the features I like is the tight integration with iTunes and the ability to stream your music from any web browser!

What will be interesting, is to see how long before the record companies decide this is bad and try to shut it down. Time will tell I guess!