Monthly Archives: August 2005

My family made it through the hurricane in Waveland, MS

Posted on by
Reply

I just got confirmation tonight that my family in Waveland, MS (my hometown) survived the direct hit from Hurricane Katrina.  My aunt and uncle drove into the Mississippi Gulf Coast somehow from Dallas and were able to get a message back to us.

My mom’s house, where 15+ family members and friends had evacuated to, took 6ft of water.  They all piled into the attic and the 2 small upstairs bedrooms, but they all made it.  Now i have to wait to find out about life-long friends still living down there…

Waveland / Bay St. Louis is 95% destroyed, like much of the MS Gulf Coast, but all of my family members from Biloxi to New Orleans are alive and accounted for.  My relatives in New Orleans are okay, and are evacuating the city.

If you’re looking for family or friends on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, check out www.wlox.com  They are taking names of people you’re trying to reach and will post updates. 

Best of luck to everyone trying to find out about their relatives

View original comments

Hurricane Katrina East-Eye Wall strikes my hometown of Waveland, MS

Posted on by
Reply

Update 3: 9/3/2005:  For every 1 comment left on my blog, i’m getting 5 emails via “contact me”.  Unless you know me or know one of my friends, i honestly don’t have any information for you, so i’m going to start posting all inquiries for love-ones on this post as a comment (Scroll to the bottom to view).  Please just click “Post a Comment” (and scroll to the bottom of the page) to leave a message for everyone to see.  If you use “contact me” no one except for me will be able to view your message.

Update 2: As much as i’m hoping this blog will relay information to people, please check out other, better sites for trying to connect with family.  For example, GulfCoastNew.com has several mirror sites to search for hurricane Survivors like http://www.bergedalen.com/katrina/survived.aspx.

Update:  If you are visiting this page from a search engine, please go to my main home page at http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford for latest information, as i keep posting what i hear and found out.  Also check the comments, as people are leaving additional information and asking for status of family.

Many people were coming up to me today saying how relived I must be that the hurricane skirted to the east and avoided a direct hit against New Orleans.  My reply was, “Um, actually, my hometown is Waveland, MS, 30 miles from Slidell, LA, and 45 miles from Biloxi.  It took a direct hit.”  And by the way, Reporters, it is pronounced “Ba-luck-see.”

No word yet from any family or friends.  Most family evacuated New Orleans, but I have my immediate family, relatives, and friends of family that decided to ride out the storm in Waveland.  It was one of those “the house withstood Camille” sorta things.  Some family members in Dallas decided to pack as much food, water, gasoline, etc that they could into a truck and started driving to New Orleans / Waveland.  Word has it authorities are not letting anyone past I-20 right now.

Entergy (the electric company down there) is estimating one month to get power fully restored in all places.  One month!  Wow…

All I can say is my family members in Waveland had better have taken some most-excellent pictures of the eye of the hurricane when it passed overhead.  =)

Seriously though, i’ll keep y’all posted whenever i hear anything.

View original comments

Use Ctrl+Alt+DownArrow to quickly access all your open files

Posted on by
Reply

Today’s tip comes from “some cool dev” who wrote the new Window Management features for Visual Studio 2005.  At the end of the File Tab Channel, there’s a drop-down arrow and a close ‘x’ button.  If you press the drop-down arrow, you’ll get a menu of all the open files in Visual Studio in alphabetical order.  Simply click on a file name, and it’ll open on the left-side of the IDE file channel.

< P>

Now for today’s actual tip.  The command to drop down the menu is bound to “Ctrl+Alt+Down Arrow”.  Anywhere in the IDE, you can press Ctrl+Alt+Down Arrow and get the menu to pop-up.  Now, you can type the name of the file (or the first few unique characters of the file name) to quickly select that file.

Not jazzed about using two hands to access this keyboard shortcut?  Change it by going to Tools – Options – Keyboard, and type in the Show commands containing edit box “Window.ShowEzMDIFileList” and bind it to whatever.  Just make sure you’re in Global scope (you can use any scope, but Global scope makes the most sense for this feature.)

Looking for more Window Management / File Tab Channel tips:  check out these…

Happy Visual Studio’ing!

How to set a string to null using the Watch Window in Visual Studio .NET 2003

Posted on by
Reply

An interesting customer question came my way about how to set a string to null in the Watch Window in Visual Studio .NET 2003.  Note: this issue does not reproduce in Visual Studio 2005.  If you try to set a string to null in the Watch Window, Visual Studio will just ignore you and will reset the value back to the original.  If you try to be more forceful and use the Quick Watch window, you’ll get an error saying, “The value of this variable could not be changed. Incorrect function.”

Thanks to Ben on the C# team for the workaround:

  1. Add the string (for example, named "str") to the watch window 
  2. Change the Name (in the "Name" column) to (object)str to cast it into an object 
  3. Click the + sign to expand the entry in the watch window 
  4. In the row that has Name "string", set the value to null 
  5. Now you can set the Name back to str if you want to

Welcome Visual Studio Developer Center Visitors!

Posted on by
Reply

Just a little background on Tip of the Week…

Sean and I started “Tip of the Day” on my blog back in March 2005 focusing on Editor features and functionality.  It was so successful that I started expanding it to other feature areas of the IDE.  Now that we’re on the Visual Studio Developer Center, I’ve decided to tip just twice a week, in order to provide you with higher quality tips.  Currently, I’m focusing mostly on the IDE and features Visual Studio Core Teams owns, but I’m hoping to expand even further to other features and languages.  So if you’re outside VSCore and are reading this, drop me a line if you want me to feature your areas.

I love getting Tip of the Week recommendations, so just send your tips and trick my way, and I’ll queue them up.  And of course, when I post them, you’ll get full credit.  =)

Happy Visual Studio’ing!

Finally, after 15 years, I’m going for black belt!

Posted on by
Reply

It’s the pre-black belt exam, or what’s called the “pre-shodan” exam, that’s coming up in three weeks. <faints>  The pre-shodan exam is when the head sensei of the dojo grades the students, and those that pass go onto the real black belt exam.  And at that exam, the great, great, great grandson of the guy who founded Shotokan will grade us – no pressure there.  The final black belt exam isn’t until November sometime, but I’m still stressing. 

I made it to 1st kyu a couple of weeks ago (remember, I broke my rib back in April when I should have tested – and I was a 1st kyu back home when I was 17.  I just chose to start over from 3rd when I moved out here).  The only comment was to work on my back kicks.  My old dojo never did enough of those.  Now that I know my results I can finally watch the video of my exam.  I’m my worst critic, so I couldn’t watch the video until after I got the results in.

Did you know… How the Configuration Manager works – Part 2

Posted on by
Reply

Now that you know the different between solution and project configurations, let’s move on to the solution and project platforms.  Once again a solution platform is just the collection of all its projects’ platforms.  If you want all of your projects to target x64 platforms, change the Active solution platform to “x64”, and all of the projects will change.  If you need a specific project to target a different platform, you can modify individual project platform changes. 

For example, you could have one project targeting Any CPU and another targeting x86.  When you build, you’ll see the following:

—— Build started: Project: ClassLibrary1, Configuration: Debug Any CPU ——
<snip>
—— Build started: Project: ClassLibrary6, Configuration: Debug x86 ——
<snip>

Batch Build

Now, let’s combine both sets of combinations (configuration and platform), using the above example, to see what all the possible build outcomes are.  For both ClassLibraries, we get

  • Debug | Any CPU
  • Debug | x86
  • Release | Any CPU
  • Release | x86

Both C# and J# support a “Batch Build” feature that allows you to select which combinations you want to build all at the same time.  To get to this dialog, just right-click on the Solution folder and choose Batch Build.

Batch Build Dialog illustrating the different combinations of solution and project configurations and platforms

Happy Visual Studio’ing!

I’ve moved to the Project / Solution Team!

Posted on by
Reply

As of a month ago, I’ve officially transferred to the Project and Solution team under VS Core!  I have now been on every feature team under VS Core back when we were called the VS Environment team.  It’s awesome that I’ve been able to impact every part of Whidbey that VS Core owns. 

I’m currently owning the following feature areas…

  • Item Management (including solution and project items, solution and project folders, renaming, moving, etc)
  • Build (configuration manager settings, solution and project configurations, solution and project platforms)
  • Source Code Control Integration (checking in and out projects, solutions, items, renaming items, etc)

To recap my feature areas since joining Visual Studio 4 years ago:

  • Environment SDK Samples 
  • Driving Accessibility 
  • Visual Studio Integration Program 
  • PIAs (only for a few months) 
  • Text Editor Object Model (only for a few months) 
  • Profiles – aka VS Settings found in the Tools – Import / Export Settings dialog  (my first feature from M0 – meaning that I owned it before it was coded)
  • Window Management, including tool window docking, IDE Navigator, etc. 
  • Command Window, Immediate Window 
  • Driving the UI Consistency Testing effort 
  • Statement Completion, quick tips and parameter info (Intellisense) 
  • Tracking Changes, Incremental Search, Fonts and Colors 
  • Basic Editor Functions, like Cut, Copy, Past, Undo, Redo, etc. 
  • Editor Emulations like Brief and Emacs 
  • Code Snippets (not the actual content of the code snippets, but the mechanism in which you apply and edit the snippets) 
  • And now Project / Build / Solution features

I should point out that moving around a lot isn’t typical of the environment here on the team. Almost everyone here has stayed on their feature team or has only moved once in the past product cycle.  I guess I’m just the exception to that rule.  =)

Did you know… How to use Project Templates

Posted on by
Reply

What are Project Templates

Project templates are sample projects you can use to create new projects, ie Windows Applications, Class libraries, Websites, and so forth.  For Whidbey, templates are stored on disk as a single zip file (no longer multiple files in multiple locations).  The VS Installed Templates are stored at Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates and \ItemTemplates.

User templates, the ones you and I create, are found by default under My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Templates.  If you want to add a user-created template to the VS Installed Templates list, you’ll need to 1. copy the template to the default location for templates for the given language and 2. run the devenv /installvstemplates switch.

Whidbey also supports multi-project templates.  I’m going to turn you over to Craig’s blog that goes into more details about this. 
http://blogs.msdn.com/craigskibo/archive/2004/10/08/240134.aspx

How to create user templates

The easiest way is to just use the Export Template wizard.  First, create a class library project and let’s add an icon to the project.  Now go to File – Export Template.  The wizard first asks whether you want to create a Project Template or an Item Template.  It also asks which project to use as your basis for creating either.  Next page we get to customize our project template, so I’m going to call mine “SaraProject” w/ “This project was created by SaraF” for the description – exciting I know.  There’s an option whether to immediately import your template into VS (ie, copy the template from My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\My Exported Templates to My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Templates\Project Templates automatically), and the other option is to see what was created in Window Explorer upon pressing Finish.

What’s inside the .vstemplate

No real surprises here – just the files associated with the project and an xml file (.vstemplate) needed to define the characteristic of your project. 

The xml file contains things like the name of the template, the description, whether to provide your own default name for your project like “MySaraFProject” (and whether you’re like VC and you have to provide a specific name, no lazy naming), and its sort order in the list.  The second section refers to where additional files.

Happy Visual Studio’ing!

See you at PDC!

Posted on by
Reply

Sweet… I’m going to PDC!!  After missing out on the fun at TechEd, I made sure it was crystal clear that I want to attend conferences, like PDC, TechEd, etc.  And it worked!

I will be down there the entire week.  I’m not certain exactly when and where I’m going to be working at our booth, but you can be sure I’ll post it here when I know. 

As I said in the above-linked TechEd post, I want to meet our customers, hear about your experiences with Visual Studio, especially any issues or bugs you’re running into.  Let me know if you want to sync-up and talk about Whidbey, Testing, Microsoft, Shotokan karate, or whatever.

See you there!