The Trouble with Checked Exceptions — The other day me and a coworker were having an interesting discussion regarding exception handling. While searching for some information about the one or other question that arose, I somehow managed to find the linked interview in the wide archives of the internet. Although it's a quite old interview with Anders Hejlsberg, the C# lead architect, I personally found it a very interesting read. Hejlsberg discusses the decision of omitting checked exceptions from the C# language, and also tells why scalability and versionability can become tedious when working with checked exceptions.

» www.artima.com · ∞ · 21.06.2010

Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 Default Key Bindings: Simplified Reference Card / Cheat Sheet

Written by Giu · 09.06.2010

I work daily with Visual Studio, and I use the provided keyboard shortcuts to perform various repetitive tasks all the time.

There are keyboard shortcuts which I use quite frequently, and there are others that I always keep forgetting about because of the sporadic usage.

One day I started to look around for Visual Studio cheat sheets, and quickly found two posters published by Microsoft; one for Visual Studio 2008 and another one for Visual Studio 2010.

I had a look at both of them, and I personally didn’t like what I saw.

First of all, both posters just contain too much information; I would spend more time searching for the shortcut on the posters than in Visual Studio. Moreover, I don’t need to know about all the keyboard shortcuts; I only use a subset for my tasks.

Second, I didn’t like the posters from an esthetic point of view; because of the many colors and images used, the content isn’t emphasized as it should¹.

After failing at the attempt of finding a simple cheat sheet on the net, I decided to create a simplified key bindings reference card for both Visual Studio 2008 and 2010:

Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 simplified reference card

The result is a cheat sheet that emphasizes the content, contains just enough information, is readable, and can be printed on a DIN A4 page.

You can have a more detailed look at the final result using the Google docs viewer, or you can just directly download the reference card (PDF)².

I added the keyboard shortcuts to the reference card that I thought the majority would use either frequently or sporadically. If you are missing a crucial keyboard shortcut or have any improvement suggestions, don’t hesitate to let me know; constructive feedback is always appreciated.

Oh, and I would also love to hear from you if you’re actually using the reference card; that surely would be cool.

¹ They actually put a pic of a guy on the Visual Studio 2010 poster
² License: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Generic

Comments · ∞

Deploy a Project Using Git — For every project I'm working on I use Git for revision control. A current project of mine is the redesign of my journal, and I'm frequently required to move files from location A to B to see the theme applied on a local WordPress installation before uploading it (no VPS for me!). At this point you have to know that I'm pretty new to Git, so in midst of the redesign I was searching for a way to deploy the theme to a specific location using Git, without having to copy all the files manually. As always there was already another person that was in the very same situation as mine, and asked the specific question in an internet forum. The questioner then got a very good answer, which mentions the configuration steps needed to accomplish the trivial task of deploying a project with Git. After configuring everything locally, I started to type in git push location quite heavily, and had another reason — among various others — to love Git. As I already mentioned before I'm currently at the beginning of my Git adventure, but I have to admit that I'm already hooked thanks to Git's simplicity, speed, and power. The next step in my Git adventure will be to put my long registered GitHub account in use and release some source code. Until then I'll continue to dive into Git.

» stackoverflow.com · ∞ · 31.05.2010

Nature by Numbers [Video] — The first version of this text contained quite a lot more characters, describing how beautiful this short movie is. But trust me, words can't describe it. You just have to watch it for yourself. It's a masterpiece! The animations, the music, everything's just perfect. I especially love the animation of the Fibonacci Spiral. It's just awesome. I'm baffled. Math is beautiful!

» vimeo.com · ∞ · 11.05.2010

Studio Styles – Visual Studio Color Schemes — This is one of those sites, that when you visit it the first thing that comes to your mind is "why didn't I come up with that idea." But, the page's only interesting part surely isn't the possibility to download all those color schemes. Once you'll find out about the existence of the ingenious color scheme creator (CSC), you start to understand why I wanted to post this linking. The CSC let's you define a new, own color scheme in a rather simple and very comfortable way. Everyone who once tried to define an own color scheme in Visual Studio 2008 knows how tedious it is to accomplish this task. Now, with the CSC things surely have changed. Also nice is the fact, that each available color scheme can be used within Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010.

» studiostyles.info · ∞ · 03.05.2010