Testing Grounds

I’ve been using Jetbrains Resharper for seven months now, and continue to find fantastic shortcuts. I can’t imagine going back to programming without it. It doesn’t just make things easier, it dramatically increases the likelihood that you’ll tackle important changes to your code base. Press ALT-INSERT and a window pops up that let’s you add constructors, properties, or overrides, each of which gets inserted with the proper signature and access level. That saves a lot of time. Better yet, you can write code that calls methods that don’t exist and Resharper will put an icon next to the call. Click in it and it offers to implement the method for you — in the right class, in the right module, and (to the best of it’s abilities) with the right arguments.

It also lets you jump through the code intuitively. If you’re looking at a function call, and you wonder, what does that function look like? Press CTRL-B and up comes that function. If you then wonder which other functions, if any, call the function you’re looking at, press ALT-F7 and a window pops up with every usage in the project.

There’s a complete list of Resharper shortcuts here.

Tags: C#, VS by stan
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Incredible as it seems, I’ve been at my new job for seven weeks. In that time I’ve worked on four different projects, and gotten my Sitecore level one developer certification. I’ve learned a LOT, but not any one thing very deeply. It’s been very much a survey of web technologies.

Codehouse specializes in Sitecore, a Content Management System (CMS) that is very impressive. The entire authoring and development experience is browser-based. That’s not revolutionary, but in this case the UI looks like Windows. It has a start button, start menu with applications, a control panel, etc. It feels a bit like you’re in a virtual PC image, but you’re just in a browser.

On the one hand it’s profound — one can really see that the browser is becoming the platform. One can imagine that computers will become little more than dumb terminals that run either IE, Safari, or Firefox, and all applications will be written in Javascript and Flash. (Except games, of course, but they’re all headed over to XBox and Wii anyway.)

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Tags: ASP.NET, C#, DB, XML by stan
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Picasa is a great little program. It has some faults, but it’s free, so complaining would be silly. One nice feature is that you can generate HTML photo galleries. Then you just upload the output, and your photos are on-line. That’s fine, but I wanted to have these galleries inside my blog, and use a nice viewer like Lightbox instead of the boring HTML that Picasa produces. Here’s an example of the Picasa HTML.

So I wrote a C# tool that takes the Picasa HTML and converts it to HTML that you can drop into a WordPress entry. Here’s the same gallery as above, but in a WordPress entry. The tool even grabs the captions from Picasa and uses them as the “alt” and “title” tags in the resulting HTML, so Lightbox displays the caption under the image.

Right now the tool is a bit inflexible, and it’s a command-line tool, but with a bit more time I hope to add a user interface and support different configurations. In the meanwhile, don’t hesitate to ask if you’re interested.

Tags: C#, WP by stan
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