I'm evaluating Visual Studio productivity addons for my development team, which includes some folks who are very new to C# and some folks who are very experienced. We don't use VB.NET. I personally like ReSharper, but before I suggest something that I personally like, I would like some opinions for and reasoning behind using a different ...
Could someone point to some online resources about how to track developers productivity (tools, article and so on) or point to some article where it's debated that productivity of developers can be really measured? I've found some document and presentations from an old Gartner group CD but they are pretty old (2005), maybe in the years p...
Is it only me, or is coding getting slower and slower, until a product("a project") is finished? This question came to me as I saw the "Write a program in 30 minutes": I thought it is impossible to write a decent piece of code which runs smoothly. As I am getting older I see on all projects, even simple ones a lot of additional work,...
We've all had that moment when we realize that we have just spent hours fiddling with .conf and .rc files, adjusting keymaps, recompiling/emerge world'ing our entire system, hunting down .dll's, slaying dragons and saving lusty wrenches, and occasional wizardry, in order to do a few minutes of actual coding. I wonder, what is the most ...
How often do you upgrade your development PC? I upgrade mine every 3 years or so. I'm just curious. Do you upgrade when you find your computer slowing or for other reasons? ...
I've been a programmer for about 5 years now, and one of the things I've noticed is that some days I might code all day and feel fine, and some days I might have that "I've been staring at the screen too long" feeling by 11:30. What are some ways you've come up with to make sure that you stay fresh and mentally alert during the 8-hour w...
Every software development professional (and especially project managers) has to deal with a never ending stream of e-mails. What is the best way of organising them in MS Outlook? Obviously some fancy issue tracking tools give more flexibility but I am interested in plain vanilla approach that can be deployed within most organisations. ...
I really don't like the VS2008 Start Page. I don't need the RSS reader, Getting started or Headlines. The only thing useful is "Recent Projects" Is there a way to customize it or replace with a better one? It will be nice that the page contains Favorites Projects and Recent projects. P.S. I know that I can disabled it or replace it wit...
I am sure we have all been in this boat. You have two or more projects that are both critical and need to get done. How do you split your time to handle each project? Ideally you could go to the stakeholders and get them to decide the order. Well, that's what I would do. But let's say they both need their projects progressed for so...
I've tried various virtual desktops and they seem to do what they advertise. However, my problem is coming up with a good set of rules, like which set of windows should I keep on each desktop. I typically have programs like these running: VS.NET, Explorer, Browser/mail, Task manager, command windows etc. So the question is: How do you...
Do you have a less well known but powerful feature of ReSharper? ...
What is that single action you do over and over again during your development time? What task eats your development time like nothing else? What is the task you want to perform, but you never convince yourself to do, because it would take forever to accomplish? Please, provide environment information relevant to the task you mention...
We all have had the experience... Somebody opened our eyes at some point with a very good blog post about our work as developers. And from that day with strive to do a better job. What was the most influential development blog post for you? And how did it effect you in realizing or doing something different from that moment on? ...
Estimating how long any given task will take seems to be one of the hardest parts about software development. At my current shop we estimate tasks in hours at the start of an iteration, but once the task is complete we do not use it to aide us in future estimations. How do you use the information you gather from past estimations to refi...
In Peopleware, DeMarco and Lister write about the "Coding War Games", which was a project they ran between 1984 and 1986 (possibly longer) to help assess individual and workplace productivity. Each task was a small-to-medium sized independent program which could be implemented in any programming language. My question: where are these ...
... which you probably wouldn't have done or done much better if you wouldn't have been under time pressure or basically any form of stress? What did you do? What were the circumstances that caused stress and pressure, and how it affected your judgement/behavior? What was the outcome or repurcussions? Examples: You wrote a terrible ...
There have been lots of times in the past where a good programmer-oriented calculator would've saved me a lot of time. Lately, I've been doing quite a lot of bit manipulation, and having to do build/run to debug my calculations feels really slow. I've looked for something like this in the past, but found nothing that worked very well. ...
I'm sat here tonight bashing out some Project Euler with Python for virtually the first time and as a .Net developer, I am a little out of my comfort zone. (Maths is not my strong point and I am diving into python). Part of me wants to fire up Visual Studio and get the problem's solved but there is another side of me that wants to do th...
does it cost cost effective ? how can i profile the Sql calls to the server? ...
(Same as above) Is there an equivalent tool to TimeSnapper for MacOS? ...