tOMPSON’s blog

Jeff Atwood does it again: his post about Spartan Programming hits the nail! If I did not wirte this before then I have to do it now: if you are a Software developer I encourage you to subsribe tho his blog Coding Horror.

I feel good because the way I am trying to write code follows more and more the principles described on this wiki page:

Spartan programming strives for simultaneous minimization of all of the following measures of code complexity:

1. horizontal complexity, that is, the depth of nesting of control structures, just as the total line length.
2. vertical complexity, that is, the code length in lines.
3. token count
4. character count
5. parameters that is the number of parameters to a routine or a generic structure.
6. variables
7. looping instruction, that is the number of iterative instructions and their nesting level.
8. conditionals, that is the number of if and multiple branch switch statements.

Check out the post and this example!

Aaron postet two screencasts on his blog showing how to use VIM. I really love VIM - I thought about installing the viPlugin for my favorite IDE Eclipse some months ago. Now these videos made me think again - I think I will give it a try. Checkout the two casts:

1. VIM Screencast 1 - basic usage (navigation, modes, …)
2. VIM Screencast 2 - commands with motion (yank, change, …)

There is even a vi emulator for you Visual Studio users out there - it is called ViEmu.

Maybe you have noticed my new booklist widget in the right sidebar. In the last years it occurred very often that somebody asked me if I know a good book on a certain topic. I recommended books to my colleagues, students and friends.

Some weeks ago I thought that it would be easier to have place where I list my favorite books so I could point to the list if somebody asks me. Now this is what I have done with the booklist.

I read all of the books in the list by myself and I really recommend them. Of course every book deals with a special topic but mostly the are related to software development.

In the future I want to do more detailed summaries and recommendations of books I just read.

I did never really bother about what fonts to use for programming. The default of the the IDE was fine for me. Then I came across this article of Coding Horror about a month ago. One sentence in the conclusion of it made me think:

Please don’t use the default Courier New typeface. Be kind to your eyes.

So I took a closer look on what ClearType really means. This wikipedia article and the Microsoft page about ClearType helped a lot. I had ClearType activated on my Windows XP a very long time but I never cared if a font is designed for ClearType or not. There is a tool from Microsoft (the ClearType Tuner in PowerToys) that allows to configure ClearType exactly for your display - it improved my screen a lot.

After knowing the “plus” of ClearType I downloaded and installed the special fonts pack from Microsoft. It changes the default font in Visual Studio 2005 do Consolas which is special ClearType font. As you can see in the screenshots below it looks really bad when used without ClearType activated:

When ClearType is activated it looks like that:

I changed the font settings in my favorite IDE Eclipse to Consolas too and I am very happy with it. It is a subjective impression but I thinks it is better to my eyes

Compare it to Courier (which is the default font in Eclipse) with ClearType activated:

or Courier without ClearType:

There is a difference.

Fortunately there is a font called Inconsolata that is free and is very similar to Consolas which is perfect for programming under Linux.

Some days ago I was asked by a student if I knew a issue tracking system implemented in ASP.NET. He needed one for a study project.

I told him that my favorite bug and issue tracking system is still bugzilla. Im am using it for every project since five years now. But maybe there are better ones out there now - trac looks nice and has some cool features, I would give it a try.

None of these two is based on ASP.NET so I told him to look on the wikipedia page for issue tracking systems and tell me which one he choose afterwards.

Today I got mail again saying that the chosen one is BugNET. Looks like a good one I never heard of before. If you got the same restrictions or preferences (ASP.NET) this could be the right one for you too. Thanks Werner for this info!

Today I searched for a way to address an element in an ASP.NET page by JavaScript. My problem was that the ASP elements do not keep their given ID - it is transformed into something like ctlXY_blabla_andSoOn. I found that Bill Pierce wrote a nice little function that acts like the $() function of Prototype for ASP elements: $n() - see the code on his blog.

Some weeks ago I tried to access the ASP.NET Development Server running on my workstation from a virtual machine for testing purpose. I was not able to get a connection. After checked firewall settings, other computers and did some Google searches I gave up because I did not want to spend more time.

Today I did another Google search and found this MSDN page. It says:

If you cannot or do not want to use IIS as your Web server, you can still test your ASP.NET pages by using the ASP.NET Development Server. The ASP.NET Development Server, which is included with Visual Web Developer, is a Web server that runs locally on Windows operating systems, including Windows XP Home Edition. It is specifically built to serve, or run, ASP.NET Web pages under the local host scenario (browsing from the same computer as the Web server). In other words, the ASP.NET Development Server will serve pages to browser requests on the local computer. It will not serve pages to another computer.

I think have to live with that because I do not want to install an IIS on my workstation.

I am using CVS since about five years for my daily work. Some may ask why I do not use Subversion which is newer and has more features - the reason is that Eclipse has much better CVS support built in than any third party Subversion plugin offers.

For one of my current projects I am using (or have to use ) Microsoft Visual Studio and Subversion. First I was shocked that there is no built in support for Subversion (is that a strategy?). So I tried tortoisesvn and was quite satisfied with its features.

It did not take very long and I had to find out that I need a plugin for Visual Studio to support Subversion operations inside the IDE. Renaming or moving files has to be done with the Subversion tool to make the repository aware of the changes and if I used tortoise the Visual Studio project did not recognize the changes. So I installed AnkhSVN.

Another one or two days later I still was not satisfied with my solution. So I read some web pages about SVN usage and came across many people using Eclipse just as SVN client even if they work with other development tools. And so I came to the best solution for me: AnkhSVN in combination with Eclipse and subclipse.

Subclipse allows me to synchronize with the repository as I am used to inside Eclipse, let me view the changes and compare files in a superb way, see the history of files and much more. Is it just because I am used to or is it the best solution?

If you are used to the perfect combination of Eclipse and JUnit it is a little bit hard work with Visual Studio and NUnit. Staring NUnit as an external program and running your tests works as long as everything does as expected. When you need to set a breakpoint and debug your code you have to start NUnit from within Visual Studio.

To do so you have to open the Project Properties Dialog and select the Debug tab. Under Start Action select the option Start external program and choose the NUnit executable. Now every time you click on Start debugging the NUnit GUI opens and the program will stop at the breakpoints you set when running your tests.

I found this tip on xprogramming.com.