David Platt's article in the May edition of MSDN Magazine describes beautifully something I have been trying to put my finger on for a while now. His article is here.

In summary

1. Your software has no value in and of itself.
2. Software increases a user's happiness either by helping a user accomplish task or putting the user in a pleasureable state e.g. games.
3. Users do not want to think about using your software.

Shift-Del in VS2008 very nicely deleted the whole line and if the option "Apply Cut or Copy commands to blank lines when there is no selection" in Tools -> Options -> text Editor was not set it would not replace the contents of the clipboard with an empty string! Duh!

Now in VS2010 Shift-Del no longer works on empty lines unless the above option is set. But now this means that I am overwriting my clipboard with empty text.

Duh!

Update: I have since found that Ctrl-Shft-L will perform an Edit.LineDelete command which deletes the line regardless of what's in the clipboard. I have now remapped this command to Shft-Del and all is good.

A friend recommended that a try a product called DPack from USysWare recently. It has turned out to be a very useful add on. They have just released a beta for VS1010 as well.

One feature that I particularily like is the ability copy and paste project references. Select one or more references, hit copy and paste them into another project.

There are many more useful features however. Alt-S for instance launches the solution browser (short initialisation required) where you can search for text throughout your solution, including filtering on classes, interfaces etc as well as starts with, ends with or contains.

I found an awesome SQL search tool from Red Gate this morning. SQL Search 1.0, which is free at this stage, integrates in with SQL Management Studio and presents itself as a toolbar. Click the search button and a SQL Search document tab is create allowing you to search for text (including exact match option). You can specify an object type (or all objects) and a database (or all databases) on the selected server.

The search is blindingly fast as well. Even across all databases on a server. In my case 25 databases on this particular SQL2008 instance.

You can download from http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Search/index.htm/.

I am settling back into a work routine after the inaugural Australian ALM Conference which I found extremely worthwhile. Similar in style to a Tech.Ed with the important difference being that the ALM conference was all about what you can do here and now not in Tech.Ed style in 6-12 months time.

Speakers that I saw were all excellent and not too many people so that you couldn't get a question in.

Some topics that I found particularily interesting were, Intelli trace and the ability to run and debug code that a unit test was running and the test may have failed. Great step forward for testing and development integration, unfortunately only in the Ultimate edition of VS 2010.

The first annual Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) will be held April 13 and 14 2010 at Luna Park in Sydney. You can check out the full details here. The conference will also incorporate the Australian release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. 

There are two tracks currently available, ALM and Visual Studio (with rumours of a SQL Track) and has a host of big name local and international speakers.

Some of the topics on offer were broached at last year's Tech.Ed on the Gold Coast, but where Tech.Ed is a preview direction and what's possible, this conference will fill the gaps that left you hanging from Tech.Ed.

I can thoroughly recommend a look to see what's on offer.

I had been noticing that it took longer than expected to display the designer in Visual Studio for a web page or a WinForms form.

One of the guys here found an option in IE (Tools -> Options -> Advanced tab -> Under the security group -> Uncheck "Check for publisher's certificate revocation").

This made a huge difference in going from code view to designer view.

No idea why an IE setting would affect WinForms projects or designers in general.

It can be frustrating when a client calls up and reports that the system is going slow all of sudden "with no one else on the system."

After investigating the usual suspects that slow the system down, indexing issues are what can some to mind next.

Needle in a haystack I hear you say!

Well SQL Server 2005 and above very cleverly keeps track of what it considers missing indexes when detetmining query plans.

You can query the sys.dm_db_missing_index_details management view and there are others if you're interested here.

This is information is gathered for all databases since the last time the SQL Server instance was started. Querying sys.dm_db_missing_index_details will return details of missing instances for all databases in the instance your current database is in.

I have been running Windows 7 since Tech.Ed Gold Coast last year and have been quite impressed so far.

One tid bit that I learnt today was the god mode feature.

Create a directory anywhere and name it "GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}" and a special "view" is created where you can change settings etc.

What a bunch (pardon the pun) of idiots. A very popular topic of conversation is bank bashing. People love to hate the banks. Insert other big monolith as banks are temporarily forgotten. But now people can get more specific and hate Westpac. It would be funny as a comedy sketch but to come from Westpac themselves it's beyond belief.

A + B = C right?

Apes + Baboons = Chimpanzees!

Once upon a time the was an interest rate cut, which wasn't passed on in full and certainly wasn't passed on on the day of the cut. Then the storm passed and interest rates went up, on the same day as the offical rate changed and for more than the official increase.

This will be written about in markerting books of tomorrow and people will wondering how people could be so dumb!

You bankers!

Slightly off topic but it's something that has annoyed me. The Breakfast Creek Hotel in Brisbane has great steaks and an unadvertised gem in the form of steak rolls with bacon sauce and coleslaw. Ok so it's not really a promotion for healthy eating and it does take quite a few ks on the bike to burn off (because one is never enough).

Recently on my regular Friday lunchtime pilgrimage I was shocked and horrified that they had gone from $6.50 to $9.50.

They are now using better quality steak they protested when I told them that $9.50 was ridiculus.

I have started an online petition (for whatever that's going to be worth) at:

http://www.petitiononline.com/BCSR101/petition.html

If you love your steak rolls as a reasonable price, let them hear it.

I was running Windows 7 happily today when it blue screened. On restart I was presented with the following dialog to help me diagnose the problem. At least they can't make the event name any clearer. 

What's next? The Xbox informing users that they have a RROD? 

I found a post for the macro code in VS to collapse regions only (and not methods) here.

I have mapped collapse all to Ctrl-R,C and expand all to Ctrl-R,E.

I got thinking about other useful key combinations and found that in the text editor Ctrl-Q is not assigned so I did:

Ctrl-Q,A to close all documents

Ctrl-Q,W to close all but the current document.

I am forever closing all before shutting down VS (or killing the process). 

Sara Ford was a speaker at a very popular session at Tech.Ed last week about visual studio top tips.

There is an entry on her blog about the top 25 here.

I came across a very annoying problem with VS2008 and IE8 where you can't turn off script debugging.

The workaround is documented here where you download the silverlight tools for VS2008 SP1 and turn on silverlight debugging. Because the debugger can't debug javascript and silverlight at the same time, javascript debugging is effectively turned off. Interestingly, to enable silverlight debugging I had a slight variation to the steps below.

Right click on the project -> properties, go to the web tab, and check the silverlight option under debuggers.

The original steps are: 

Happy non-script debugging.