I’m glad I called this blog series semi-regular. :) I’ve not had a chance to finish up my latest installment so I thought I’d throw a post out that just had some odds and ins in it about productivity.
As developers we spend a LOT of time typing, writing code and working in applications. We can increase our efficiency quite a bit by becoming very familiar with the tools we use by learning shortcuts, new features and maybe even generating some macros.
Jim Holmes recently posted a blog entry about an interesting use for the immediate window :"Using the Immediate Window in VS to Explore APIs". He is basically using the immediate window to test out API calls and see how an object works. Something I stumbled on recently is something built right into Visual Studio 2005 to accomplish this in a different way: The Object Test Bench (if you have VS Professional or higher that is, whereas the immediate window is included in all versions of Visual Studio).
In the last .Net Nugget I talked about streams. One of the most common uses of streams is to read files in or write files out. I’ve written many applications that needed to read data from physical files as either a data input mechanism or to read configuration. Reading configuration these days is very nicely handled with the System.Configuration namespace objects, but there are many times we need to read in a file and parse it’s contents.