IE Tab – my new best Firefox plugin

February 16th, 2009 web browsers No comments

Hi there!

Just seconds ago I discovered a Firefox plugin that cause me to shout ‘wow’! It’s called IE Tab. What it does?! The extension is derived from the famous extension IE View, but instead of opening a new IE window, this extension opens the IE window in Firefox. Sounds great, not (consider Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007 just to mention something :) )?! The extension’s website is located here (or you can download it directly from the Mozilla website: click).

Cheers!

Yet another happy WordPress user…

January 27th, 2009 wordpress No comments

Since I am currently in the buying fase for a self-owned serverĀ on a colocation, I thought it to be the perfect time to move over to a self-hosted blog. Since one of my friends and colleagues, Wouter Goedvriend, is a very happy WordPress user, I too gave it a try :)

Hope to meet you a lot on my new blog! Keep up your good work!

Logging duration with System.Diagnostics.StopWatch instead of using DateTime.Now

Still using two DateTime.Now calls to determine the duration of a certain call execution, like beneath?

DateTime start = DateTime.Now;
DoSomeCall();
double secondsToLog = (DateTime.Now - start).TotalSeconds;

This is not at all necessary: using the StopWatch class. The StopWatch class is more efficient than any other solution provided or created in .NET since it uses low-level API calls and supports a high-resolution performance counter (when there is hardware and software support).

Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch();
watch.Start();
DoSomeCall();
watch.Stop();
double secondsToLog = watch.Elapsed.TotalSeconds;

Windows Explorer from Visual Studio

Windows Explorer is one of my favorites, especially when coding (in Visual Studio). I often navigate to the file, folder, or project I’m currently working on. Clicking “Windows Explorer” in the Tools menu would be helpful if we could manage to get it there… and ‘yes we can!’.

How?
Go to Tools -> External Tools… -> Add.

In the screen you are presented with, enter:

Title: Windows Explorer
Command: explorer.exe
Arguments: /select,”$(ItemPath)”
Leave Initial directoy blank

Click OK. When you click Tools -> Windows Explorer, the explorer will open with the selection on the current file you are editing in Visual Studio.

Visual Studio 2005 and the vaporized Immediate Window

Today I reinstalled my development virtual machine. For a couple of ‘legacy’ software packages I must have Visual Studio 2005 installed as well. Debugging one of those software packages mentioned above, I wanted to ‘hack my runtime’ using the Immediate Window. It wasn’t there!
Since I always have the Immediate Window activated, I cannot remember the shortcut for it (Ctrl+Alt+I :) ). Looking for the menu item to activate it (yes, of course, in the Debug menu) it appeared to be gone. Sadly this is a known bug. The only way to get it back into the menu is using the Tools menu, click Customize, select the Commands tab, choose for Debug commands and drag Immediate onto the toolbar.
For some kind of overview:
Visual Studio 2005 and the vaporized Immediate Window The disappeared immediate window
I simply assume nobody likes it either :)