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October 2005 - Posts

Sunday, October 30, 2005 5:10 PM

Tabs vs Spaces

Of course, there is only one answer to whether tabs should be allowed in a source file. The utility of one is just so obvious I'll simply avoid commenting on it. :-) If you must wander from sources written with one convention to those written in another,
Posted by SteveJS | 15 Comments
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Thursday, October 27, 2005 12:13 PM

Data Breakpoints

The VS debugger allows two types of breakpoints. There are location breakpoints and data breakpoints. Each has lots of bells and whistles. However, sometimes people confuse a Location bp with a condition, for a data bp. That's unfortunate because a data
Posted by SteveJS | 5 Comments
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Sunday, October 23, 2005 6:07 PM

Stop Mid Func Eval, Nested Break States

A coworker mentioned Func Eval sounds like "Funky-val". Stopping at a breakpoint in the middle of a function evaluation could be considered funky. It is also useful. VS Whidbey allows stopping at a BP or Exception during a function evaluation in C# or
Posted by SteveJS | 3 Comments
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Thursday, October 20, 2005 9:47 AM

More hours in the day

In the summer of '94 I sketched a design for my ideal 'mp3' player. I didn't spec the compression format. If I had, it would have been called a 'bit' player back then. I wanted a walkman replacement. However, the feature I most craved was understandable
Posted by SteveJS | 7 Comments
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Tuesday, October 18, 2005 9:27 AM

PsuedoVariables and Format Specifiers

The VS debugger has a history of tiny but useful features hidden in the expression evaluator. These features are like the yellow shirted ensign in star trek. They are useful, but unknown and expendable. Developer's learn about them by attending a Power
Posted by SteveJS | 3 Comments
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Monday, October 17, 2005 9:23 AM

Login fun

Jeff Atwood argues that the Login dialog should infer the username from the password: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000413.html . That reminded me that many user's of XP home don't have a password, which is even simpler. If you are cringing
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Saturday, October 15, 2005 3:18 PM

$env=0

Winning the award for the least understandable UI metaphor: the ability to view the environment variables in the target when native debugging. This is yet another tiny undocumented feature of the native expression evaluator in VS. $env falls under the
Posted by SteveJS | 2 Comments
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Saturday, October 15, 2005 12:36 PM

Full Impact Dance Nostalgia

Shai is an artist in crunch mode, so I was a lone bachelor at the Dance Underground last night. Lindy Hop is my Performance-Art-Sport relaxation. Simple basics with a tentative newcomer, or stanzas of movement with a confident pro, are a joy after a long
Posted by SteveJS | 1 Comments
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Friday, October 14, 2005 9:41 AM

Assembly language survival guide (for Debugging ... not writing)

Knowing just enough assembly is a really powerful aid in Debugging. These are short articles that hit the sweet spot of enough information to be very useful, but not so much that it is a chore to learn: Matt's Just Enough Assembly Language to Get By:
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Thursday, October 13, 2005 9:15 AM

Devenv stealth feature, Poor Man's Profiler

This feature is unsupported. It is undocumented. If you call help desk about it nice people will say “huh?” If it breaks, people will nod knowingly and say “I told you so”. In later versions it may simply disappear. It could decay right now as I speak
Posted by SteveJS | 1 Comments
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Wednesday, October 12, 2005 9:37 AM

Keeping My Note Flag Customizations

OneNote's Note Flags feature rocks. However, after I started using them I ran into a funny, subtle bug. My Note flag customizations never stayed around after OneNote shutdown. All two times I restarted OneNote I had to customize the Note Flags again.
Posted by SteveJS | 0 Comments
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Tuesday, October 11, 2005 11:33 PM

Edit & Continue trick for Conditional Bps

Using Edit and Continue to fix a bug is handy, but don't wait until you've found the bug to start editing. One powerful technique is to use E&C when you are still trying to find the problem. Edit and Continue allows you to make any conditional bp
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Wednesday, October 05, 2005 9:39 AM

Is there such a thing as a good bug?

I was dreaming last night that Shai and I were cleaning an old apartment, when a hockey puck sized bug crawled onto Shai's hand. In real life there would have been screaming. In the dream she lifted it up so we could both look at it. I am not an entomologist,
Posted by SteveJS | 5 Comments
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Tuesday, October 04, 2005 9:03 PM

unread writer

I've never read a book by my favorite writer. Joss Whedon created the TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly. Now, he's created the movie Serenity. Orson Scott Card (also not bad in the writing department) says Serenity is the best sci
Posted by SteveJS | 3 Comments
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Monday, October 03, 2005 6:08 PM

Random Repros

Adi Oltean continues a great series of blogs about supportability, with this one about Random Repros . Stop reading this. Go read that. And reply in his comments, if you have any ideas nearly as good as his. There are a couple of reason tough bugs are
Posted by SteveJS | 1 Comments
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Saturday, October 01, 2005 7:56 AM

Using Note flags in Onenote

How I expected to use note flags was very ambitious. How I actually use them is much simpler. I like the ability to flag TODO items more than the ability to browse by bug, email alias, etc. I use check box style flags and keep the summary set to show
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