Review – VI emulation for Microsoft products
If you, like me, find yourself using Microsoft products for your daily operations (or are forced to as some) yet you have a background in which you have a comfort level using vi, the *nix based text editor.
The percentage of people that prefer to use vi is probably small compared to the people using notepad, emacs or pico or other simple editor. It takes a certain amount of masochism to plow through the various commands used to move around, edit, replace etc.. inside of vi but for those of you that have that trait as I, vi gives you a productivity increase that is unparalleled, in my opinion.
Now, if only we had that in Windows!
Fortunately we do. For several years now the vi project has had a Windows text editor which I use. It is a very good implementation within the Windows environment. For editing text based files where you do not need any further functionality, I highly recommend it.
Now, on to the fun stuff!
Jon at NGEDIT Software has a few products that have made my life a lot easier. It falls under the heading of VIEmu, the vi-vim editor emulation for Visual Studio, Word, Outlook and SQL Server. I can tell you that, after downloading the Visual Studio trial and running with it for a few weeks, I have purchased all 3 (Word and Outlook are combined in 1 package) products. They are wonderful!
You should not expect 100% vi-vim compatibility, there are some things that just do not work quite the same, however most of the basic and much of the advanced functionality is available. There are a few quirks as well, such as the need to use Shift+Esc instead of just Esc to get out of some modes, but they are workable once you get use to them.
I should say that this review was not sponsored in any way, nor did Jon or anyone at NGEDIT Software know about my writing of this before publication, I do believe in full discloser of sources and sponsorship when posting (thanks Robert Scoble for the inspiration), this is purely a fan-driven review of these products.
The Word and Outlook version is a bit young, only version 1.0, however the Visual Studio product has been around a while and the SQL product just a bit less time. So far all have been performing well and my productivity has increased, at least I believe it has.
If you are/were a vi-vim junkie living in a Microsoft world, I urge you to head over and try it out for yourself. I think you will be happily comfortable again within the embrace of vi-vim!
Viewstate Helper from Binary Fortress Software
Wow, I am going to be accused of becoming a Scott Hanselman sycophant if he keeps up the pace of the great posts he’s had lately! In his most recent post (as of the time of this writing) he points out a piece of software recently discovered. After reading through his review I had to try it out for myself. It is the ASP.NET Viewstate Helper from Binary Fortress Software. This is a very nice tool!
It sits in the background monitoring the HTTP conversations that IE has. It presents a historical list of the pages visted along with some stats about the size of the page and the Viewstate, if it has one. It also allows you to double click on a page to see the decompiled version of the Viewstate.
It tries to display the viewstate in a tree view, although I have found it doesn’t always work. It does give you a text representation that will get you what you need although you may have to search through it a bit if the viewstate is complex.
The one downside I have found so far is that it does not work with Firefox, or at least I have not happened upon how to do it. For the time, I can live with that. The information that it provided on a few of the sites we’ve created has already been eye-opening.
Reflector for .NET 5 is available
Lutz had released version 5 of Reflector. If you are a .NET programer and you do not use it, get it now! Also head over to Codeplex to get some of the excellent add-ins for Reflector.
In Search Of…
A solution! Since I have yet to find one, I’ll settle for a little rant.
<rant>
If you are a developer using the Visual Studio 2005 IDE you may have run across the infamous “unable to copy file…..” error when trying to compile your solution. If you work on anything somewhat complex with many projects in one solution, you may have experienced this a lot.
Formerly I put the blame on Visual Studio itself. I have been informed that it is not a problem with VS, but rather an issue with the .NET Frameowork. I’ve ready many posts about the issue, but have yet to find anything that fixes the problem. It wouldn’t be so bad, however the project I’m currently working on has 18 projects in the solution and reloading VS every time this happens is a real productivity killer!
</rant>
Whew, now that I’ve got that off my chest…if anyone finds a solution that works, please leave me a comment about it!
Thoughts on VS 2005
First impression? (ok, maybe not first since I’ve been using it a while) It’s very nice. There are a lot of little things that seem like they’ve been a long time coming. The integration with the “code ahead”, as we call it (the code in aspx/ascx pages vs. the code behind class files) is wonderful. Intellisense has come a long way! I do have to say however that the new model for websites is a bit cumbersome.
I know that there are a lot of fundabmental improvements in the way some of it works, but if you are working on a site that uses a lot of user controls, sometimes nested within each other, and there is an error on one of the pages it really slows the IDE down.
Recently I’ve been working on a project where I have had to pull some functionality out of a page and put it into user controls. On one in particular there are controls nested within controls 3 layers deep, not a big deal IMHO. The problem comes when there is a compile error somewhere in the lowest level The page containing the top level control reports an error.
That’s fine to a certain point, knowing there is an error is a good thing! After fixing the error, the change did not appear in the topmost parent so I decided a compile of the website was in order. Wow, it took 3 minutes! That may not sound like a lot, but when you have to do it several times during an hour, it starts to add up.
I suppose the slow down has something to do with the way pages are compiled dynamically, which is a nice feature, but the overhead really cuts down on productivity at times.
What constitutes a “build”
We had a recent discussion about the path we are moving towards with our development, QA and deployment processes. In that discussion someone commented on “building a build”, which of course garnered some laughs as being redundant.
Or is it?
Jeffrey Palermo has written a good article describing what a build means. Very interesting stuff. Way to go Jeffrey.
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