Rick Wright

RIP Rick Wright.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7617363.stm

ReSharper

I'm a huge fan of ReSharper from JetBrains. I've been using it for over three years now and I think I'd be lost without it. Take away my ReSharper and I might as well have notepad.

I think my top five most used features are:

1. Ctrl+left mouse click. This takes you to the thing you clicked on's definition.
2. Ctrl+E+C. Code cleanup. I have a custom rule that is called 'Everything but 'var'.
3. The NUnit integration. If you use NUnit in Visual Studio, you need ReSharper.
4. Find Usages
5. Ctrl+R+R. For renaming.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. It's just probably what I use most day in, day out. Just go buy it. I promise that the first time you use a foreach snippet after defining something that's IEnumerable you will be smitten.

Project Euler

http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems

For when you need to use your laptop outside in the sun.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Laptop-Compubody-Sock/

VI emulation in Visual Studio

Every once in a while something comes along that makes you glee. Vi emulation in Visual Studio (and Word/Outlook/SQL MS) is just one of those things. I'm going to be trying this out today and I'm fairly sure I will parting with the $79 to get a full license for VS.

http://www.viemu.com/

Let them eat cake! (but you may have to pay the Man)

Glenn Jones (with whom I'm currently working at Madgex) has a nice post about how the taxman is graciously letting the company off the burden of paying tax on a couple of cakes that a purchased each Friday.

It makes you wonder if anything safe from Mr Grey and his PF2345 (Cake) form. The same issue cropped up with Friday Pizzas at Micromuse. Because someone in accounts was worried about the tax implications, they were stopped. A few weeks later it was realised that Friday lunchtime was the only time some of the developers, testers and support guys met face to face. It had an unbelievably bad effect on the communication within the company.

If anything like this is left up to the accountants they want to can it immediately. The trouble is that it's difficult to quantify the benefits of gestures such as cake or pizzas.

Also at 'muse there was the case of the Mont Blanc pens. Pens given as presents to commemorate 5 years service - which in this industry is a lifetime. The trouble was that the pens were showing up in people's wage slips. Yes, someone in finance really did think that it would be the done thing to charge the tax on those pens to the recipient.

Naturally on principle some 5 year veterans told the bean counters to stick their pens where their solar powered calculators didn’t work.

Happy New Year

Welcome to 2008. The golden age of novelty glasses continues.