I'm a big fan of screen real estate. I love big monitors and multiple monitors. I ran dual 19" CRTs for years, and switched to dual 19" LCDs a few years ago. That's still what I run at home, but I recently started a new job where I wrangled a big hardware budget and promptly blew a bunch of it on twin 24" monitors. I really love thes...
OK, I know this is kind of subjective, and I apologise for that, but hear me out. I have to admit, like most geeks, I got into computing at an early age, this means I never even considered things such as typing speed etc. Now, I was chatting to my colleagues the other day, and we all admit, while we can type reasonably fast, for the mo...
I've tried 2 different methods of reusing code. I have a solution full of just class library projects with generic code that I reuse in almost every project I work on. When I get to work on a new project, I will reuse code from this code library in one of 2 ways. I have tried bringing the projects I need from this code library into my pr...
I'm sure some of you would have read Jeff's Atwood's Don't Go Dark article. The gist is that it is anathema to go "lock yourself in a room" and perform a development task or project for long periods of time. The best practice would be to have a team (at least another person) with you, commit early and commit often, do your work iterative...
We know that disk speed is an important performance component of a development machine. I'd like to understand how the multiple drives in my Windows Vista machine compare. Vista will give me a performance index for the system but what's a good (preferably free) benchmarking tool for measuring each drive's performance? ...
When you are working on hobby projects at home, how do you make yourself productive? Is it planning and self discipline? Do you make notes etc? Creating the right environment? Music? Silence? Good desk? PC set up? Taking the phone off the hook?! If you have a couple of hours and you want to get stuff done, what do you do to make the ...
I'm writing up some productivity/metrics tools for myself to help monitor my focus throughout the day. Recently, I've noticed that I tend to get off track more than usual and feel the need to get up and go for walks/drinks/etc and I'm concerned that I'm "wasting" too much time. Since I always lock my computer when I go anywhere, and I u...
I know this is the sort of somewhat open-ended question that we're discouraged from asking, but there are lots of open-ended questions around already, and this is something quite relevant to me right now. Do you ever get those times when you're about to start work on a new function/feature of an established system, and you get "coder's ...
Last place I worked at had a massive NIH issue. They ended up rewriting the complete ASP.NET stack (forms, controls, validation, postback handling, ajax library etc...) What is the worst case of NIH you have had the misfortune to work on? ...
My LCD rotates. The software that comes with my ATI card to rotate the desktop just crashes (I've uninstalled, reinstalled and rolled them back, still crashes). Is there any other way to rotate a Windows XP Desktop by 90 degree increments? I am looking for either software or code (any language is fine.) I know I have seen 3rd party s...
Some of the features I think it must include are: Print Entire Solution Ability to print line numbers Proper choice of coding font and size to improve readability Nice Header Information Ability to print regions collapsed Couple feature additions: Automatically insert page breaks after methods/classes Keep long lines readable (near...
We have discussed keyboards. But take a look at the small piece of plastic to the right (or left :) ) of your beloved keyboard! This humble creature helps you to draw nice forms, and click all around the web. A real programmers mouse must be precise and comfortable, so which mouse would you make a companion to your keyboard? Currently I...
What do you use to capture webpages, diagram/pictures and code snippets for later reference? ...
Almost everyday I see new stuffs coming out of Beta or CTP releases from Microsoft. It used to be exciting but the list of products and technologies is getting bigger and bigger everyday. WPF, WF, Silverlight, Powershell, SSIS, SSDS, EF, LINQ, WCF, Data Services, XAML, Asp.Net AJAX, Asp.Net MVC blah blah.. Since I am in a Technical rol...
We all know that a programmers working environment is vital for productivity. What techniques have you guys used to sway your employer to improve your situation? Improvements include: dual monitors faster computer ergo chair quiet working environment (not by the photocopier, sheesh!) well-lit desk don't block access to gmail/hotmail/...
I experimented with DocBook XML a while back, and also used it professionally for documenting a few software projects, but since the tool support at the time was not very good, I soon abandoned it in favor of hand-written LaTeX, and later LyX. Now I'm considering taking another look at DocBook, and I was wondering, what are the best to...
When I'm working on software, I find that as soon as I have to wait more than around 6 seconds for the compiler or for the program to start (or simply for Visual Studio to process some really complicated command like, say, Space Bar), I tend to fire up the email client, or go read stuff on the Internet, or post questions on StackOverflow...
What do you do when your source control / bug database / network / email system is temporarily unavailable? This is to guage how productive we can be under such a situation? ...
I hope not everyone is using Rational Purify. So what do you do when you want to measure time taken by a function peak memory usage code coverage At the moment, we do manually [using log statements with timestamps and another script to parse the log and output to excel. phew...) What would you recommend? pointing to tools or any ...
What is the best/most productive tools you use for time tracking? Specifically, I'm looking for time tracking tools that: Allow you to tag/start/stop time sessions quickly and as automatic as possible. Has an efficient organizing feature. Take up the least amount of workspace, preferably desktop-based. The organizing feature is a bi...