Ludicrous speed? Sir, we’ve never gone that fast before!

Posted by indomitablehef | Filed under Visual Studio, Tools, Productivity

For those using ViEmu: A nifty registry hack that will turn your CAPS-Lock key into your Esc key…for even faster keyboarding. Or, use SharpKeys to get the same effect .

ViEmu

Posted by indomitablehef | Filed under Visual Studio, Tools, Productivity

Back when I was in college, my first computer science professor insisted that everyone learn to use the Unix text editor Vi. After my initial few weeks of frustration, I was hooked. I could really fly on the keyboard, without ever using the mouse or the arrow keys to move around. I got my degree, got a job, and I haven’t seen Vi since.

Until now. This nifty little Vi emulator (ViEmu) can emulate Vi in Visual Studio, SQL Server Management Studio, Outlook, and Word. I found it after reading about it from jpboodhoo, and these screencasts from Aaron Jensen at Eleutian (part1, part2, part3) helped me get started. I must say, it’s still painful…relearning all this stuff. I’m currently slower using ViEmu than I was a few days ago without it. But I’m beginning to see the productivity at the end of the tunnel. (I found myself hitting “hhhhhh” several times while writing this blog post.)

more ViEmu goodies:

• Graphical Cheat Sheet and Tutorial
• Tips on Effective Editing with Vim
• Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?

IIS7 and Visual Studio Debugging

Posted by indomitablehef | Filed under .Net, Visual Studio

So, after setting up Visual Studio 2008 on Windows Vista, I had trouble getting the Visual Studio F5 debugging to work. No error messages, but when the browser opened to localhost:1401 (or whatever), it just couldn’t connect. “unable to connect to localhost:1401…” So, I went looking for a solution. I found all kinds of blog posts about trouble with IIS7 and Visual Studio 2005, but nothing for 2008. I walked through all the solutions for VS2005, including making sure I had Windows Authentication and IIS6 compatibility features turned on (like this), but it had no effect. Finally, I decided to just punt. I published the web application (Build, Publish…) to a folder, and then created a new application in IIS pointing to that folder. Sure enough, it worked fine. My plan for debugging was to just connect to the debugger to the browser process. But before I did, I tried F5 again one more time. It worked. I dunno why. But if you’re pulling your hair out trying to get it to work…well, try this.

Collapse All

Posted by indomitablehef | Filed under Visual Studio

This is a “collapse all” macro for Visual Studio 2005. It gets annoying having to scroll up and down, expanding and collapsing folders. Sometimes, it would be nice to just tell Visual Studio to collapse everything, and start clean. This little macro does just that.