Dan Crevier's Blog : Utilities

Inline Search in IE

dancre — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 21:03:37 GMT

Inline Search from IE Forge is a must have utility for Internet Explorer. It gives new FireFox-like inline search UI to IE and does find as you type. Find has also been a feature I haven't liked in IE. I can never figure out what it highlighted on the page! And the modal UI is annoying.

Thanks to Omar for helping me find this again. I'd reformatted my machine with Vista and lost it. I couldn't remember where I installed it, and was missing it every day!

Console is a nice cmd.exe replacement!

dancre — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 18:03:32 GMT

Long ago I complained about cmd.exe. At the time, I tried out some of the replacements and didn't find anything I liked. But, I just tried out a Console 2.0 beta, and I love it! The way it hosts cmd.exe is necessarily a bit of a hack, but they pull it off well. Here are some of the features I love:

A regular selection model - no stupid rectangular selection!
You can drag a file into Console and it puts the full path in. You can't drag text out, but that's not a huge deal.
It's a regular application with a menu bar and a regular window.
Copy/paste work as expected. You can also map them to any keys you want. I'm still not sure which keys to use. One nice thing on the Mac is that it has a command key used for commands so you don't have to worry about conflicting with control-C.
Having tabs is nice. You can configure the New Tab submenu with new command defautls. This is really handy.
You can remap colors which is a little better than just changing the defaults for the background and text. I tried getting black text on a white background working, but I was seeing some strange behavior and couldn't get the cursor to work properly.
It lets you choose any font without hacks (I like using Consolas).

Overall, it's a huge improvement.

Snoop - an awesome WPF debugging utility

dancre — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 06:32:42 GMT

Pete Blois posted an awesome WPF debugging utilty called Snoop here.

Windows Live Writer Beta

dancre — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 07:21:33 GMT

I've used Windows Live Writer Beta for my last few posts and it's worked pretty well. It's much nicer than typing posts into IE, and I'm not worried about hitting the wrong key and losing them. Unfortunately, code doesn't retain it's style when pasted in, but I've been using CopySourceAsHtml for that.

I was out over the weekend. I plan to return to the data/view model stuff soon!

Microsoft Acquires Winternals/Sysinternals

dancre — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 18:36:59 GMT

News story here. This is exciting. Those guys are brilliant. The Windows Internals book is awesome, and I love the tools at http://www.sysinternals.com. I use them all the time. I hope they'll be able to keep cranking out tools.

VirtualPC is now free!

dancre — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 06:59:01 GMT

You can get it here. Virtual PC is really useful. It's great for running multiple versions of the OS and for trying out software without risk of screwing up your system.

GhostDoc is a great tool for inserting documentation in Visual Studio

dancre — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 07:54:00 GMT

I've just started trying out GhostDoc. You can select a method and it will fill out the XML document comments for the function. For example, here's what it generated for the CanHorizontallyScroll method from my VirtualizingTilePanel:

/// <summary>

/// Gets or sets a value indicating whether this instance can horizontally scroll.

/// </summary>

/// <value>

/// <c>true</c> if this instance can horizontally scroll; otherwise, <c>false</c>.

/// </value>

public bool CanHorizontallyScroll

{

get { return _canHScroll; }

set { _canHScroll = value; }

}

I don't actually understand it's rule system yet, but it seems suprisingly smart. Arguably, if GhostDoc was smart enough to figure out the comments, another developer can probably figure out the same information without the comments, but it's a great starting point for adding more information.

I love the birds eye view in local.live.com

dancre — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 19:36:00 GMT

http://local.live.com is now live (no pun intended!). I love the new birds eye view and the ability to look at something from different angles. I'm looking forward to have birds eye view available in more locations.