Contents tagged with Visual Studio
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A Day In The Life Of An ASP.NET Developer
I've been busy all day long and it is sometimes interesting to read about a day in the life of a professional. I learned a lot of new things today in the course of my work. Since it was the end of the month, I totaled up my hours and sent a client an invoice. I should probably do something to make this less of a chore. Preparing an invoice means copying all my activities from a list I keep in a notebook into a table in a web page. Then I have to add up the hours which aren't totaled automatically in a web page. We used a Quickbooks Timer in my old job but it was a funky DOS application that kept crashing.
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Hidden Gems In The MSDN Library
How many Microsoft developers use the MSDN Library? Probably not many because I've just read a blog post where someone recommended not even installing it. I have to admit that I never even opened the Microsoft Document Explorer until I learned how to add my own notes as a custom help collection. Now I use the Microsoft Document Explorer every day. I'm a bit concerned that I am duplicating content that is already baked in so I've spent some time browsing the MSDN Library. You can save interesting help topics as favorites and here are a few of my favorites:
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Sound Events For Visual Studio
Did you know you can assign sounds to a few Visual Studio events? You can assign a WAV file to play when a build fails or succeeds. Just open the Control Panel, select Sounds and Audio Devices and then click the Sounds tab. Scroll down to Microsoft Development Environment. I assigned my Build Succeeded to a WAV file of Darth Vader saying "All Too Easy" and my Build Failed to a WAV file of Han Solo saying "I got a bad feeling about this."
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Custom Help Collections
I have been keeping an extensive set of technology notes since 1999 which I used to keep organized in a compiled help file. Being a web developer, I liked to write my notes as web pages rather than use a word processor. I could even include sample code and functional examples in my notes if the topic was JavaScript or anything that runs client-side in the browser. I liked a compiled help file because it provides a navigation structure, searchable indexing, and reduced everything to one file which I could easily copy to other computers and thumb drives.
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XSLT For A DataSet Designer XSS File
XML is being used for a lot of configuration files and to store application and system settings. It is also used extensively to define the presentation layer; Windows Presentation Foundation and Mozilla's XML User Interface Language for example. Therefore it is often useful to be able to transform XML into a more readable format for documentation.