programming languages
In What You Can't See You Can't Get I mentioned in passing how frustrated I was that the state of the art in code editors and IDE has advanced so little since 2003. A number of commenters pointed out the amazing Bret Victor talk Inventing on
fonts
I've experimented with programming fonts and IDE color schemes plenty in the past. But now that I've given in to the inevitability of ClearType on large LCDs, I've basically settled on Consolas. It's hard to beat Consolas. It's darn close
c#
Over the last four years, I've basically given up on the idea that .NET is a multiple language runtime. * The so-called choice between the two most popular languages, C# and VB.NET, is no more meaningful than the choice between Coke and Pepsi. Yes, IronPython and IronRuby are
firefox
Although I prefer IE7's native speed and feel for day-to-day browsing chores, there's no doubt that Firefox is my primary web development IDE. Whenever I need to troubleshoot HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, I immediately reach for Firefox. That's primarily because of two incredibly powerful
font settings
Scott Hanselman recently brought up the topic of IDE font and color schemes again. I've been in search of the ideal programming font and the ideal syntax colorization scheme for a while now. Here's my current take on it. As you can see, I've
programming languages
Inspired by my recent post on C# code snippets, I found a little console app by Francesco Balena* that enumerates all the snippets on your system along with their shortcut text. I improved his console app and turned it into a convenient IDE macro along the lines of my keyboard
visual studio
Here's a handy little Visual Studio .NET macro which searches for the currently highlighted term in Google. The search is launched as a new tab within the IDE when you press Alt+F1 I know what you're thinking: you've seen this macro before [http:
html
If you've ever tried to cut and paste code from the VS.NET IDE, you may have noticed that the code generally comes across looking like crap. The root of this problem is that VS.NET copies code into your clipboard in the accursed Rich Text Format. If
programming languages
On Bruce Eckel’s Static vs. Dynamic [typing]: Despite this, I’ve had some leanings back in the direction of static type checking. As you point out, the goal is to create solid components – the question is how to accomplish that? In a dynamic language you have the flexibility to
ide
In VB.NET vs C#, round two, I realized that choice of IDE has a far bigger impact on productivity than which language you choose. Lately I’ve started to think the relationship between language and IDE is even more profound: the future of programming languages isn’t a language
refactoring
There was much handwringing last week when Somasegar announced what we already knew: VB.NET 2005 will not have refactoring. This resulted in a few emotional outbursts: We don’t need toys like [the] MY [namespace], we need working tool like Refactoring!! How can Microsoft refuse us those magical software