VSEditor's WebLog

Holden Karau's last day

Today is Holden's Last day.  Please join me in wishing him success in finishing up his schooling.

 -Sean Laberee 

Good Times

This is my last day at Microsoft, and as such my last MS blog post. As part of the requirements of a Co-Op term with my university I created a brief <a href=” http://www.holdenkarau.com/~holden/workreports/msft/”>work report comparing the effectiveness of different performance counters at detecting regressions</a>. The results of the analysis aren’t at all what I expected.

While I am leaving Microsoft I’m not going far, I’m going to be coming back to Seattle for the summer. Hopefully I can get to some raving like I had planned to this term. Now that I’m leaving Microsoft I’m going to continue updating my other blog (aptly named <a href=http://blog.holdenkarau.com/> Holden’s blog</a>).

Keep it classy J

Holden

Free Stuff For Canadians! (if they happen to be University students J)

Holden asked me to post this on his behalf. 

-Sean Laberee (also a Waterloo Grad)

Recently, during a talk at Stanford, Bill Gates announced that US students would be able to get Visual Studio (the product I work on), and a number of other products for free under a program called DreamSpark student program. Since there are a lot of Canadian’s at work there was some question as to when/if DreamSpark would be made available to Canadian students. According to this morning’s University of Waterloo Daily bulletin, in his talk at my university, Bill announced that the DreamSpark student program will also be available to Canadian University students, which is excellent news.  On the down side it means if I screw up the performance work I have to worry about being chased down by my class mates, but I’d prefer to look at that as an incentive.

On a slight historic note this is the third time that Bill will have talked at my University, his first time was all the way back in 1989. The audio recording of Bill Gate’s original talk at UW is online. In addition the now lead architect on the Visual Studio team gave a talk to the computer science club on the software tools industry awhile back as well.

-Holden Karau

Visual Studio 2008 Find Crashes on Windows XP 64 & Windows 2003 Server

I know that quite a few people are running into an issue where any edition Visual Studio 2008 can crash when users open the find dialog if they are running on Windows XP 64-bit or Windows 2003 Server.  There's a patch available for Microsoft Support.  You can track the status of that fix here: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=311712

I've heard from quite a few people that aren't happy about contact support and I wanted to explain the rationale behind it.  When we ship products at Microsoft we literally spend thousands of hours of human and computer time running manual and automated tests on the final versions of our product to ensure their quality.  When we create patches for a particular issue, we can't expose the patch to the same rigorous testing so there is a chance that this will cause a regression somewhere else.  To minimize that risk, we have customers call support to ensure that they are indeed experiencing the exact issue and give them the patch free of charge.  If there's ever an issue with the patch, support is able to contact all affected customers.  Typically, these patches are integrated into the next service pack or version of the product at which point they are exposed to the more rigorous testing. 

I've also heard from a few others that there have been challenges getting the patch from support. If have a few tips for getting this patch from support to help make things smoother:

• This is a good link to start from to get support: http://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?&c1=501&gprid=12913 
• My standard tip for dealing with anyone in a customer support roll is to first get the name and some sort of reference number of the incident.  This will always enable you to have some continuity if you ever get disconnected or need to call back. 
• The patch is only labelled for Windows 2003 but it actually works for Windows XP (64 bit of course). I'm working with CSS to get that fixed.
• If the support rep tells you that it is no longer available, please get the SRX Number and the name of the CSS rep and contact me via the blog link so that I can track down the problem.

Thanks!

Sean Laberee

Program Manager - VS Platform

Free Stuff Galore!

Here's another blog post from Holden Karau:

Thanks!
-Sean

One cool thing about being an intern is you get free stuff. Yesterday was a glass blowing event where everyone made semi-ornamental glass balls during the day (at bit of a change of pace from software J) I drove up with two other people, and managed to get us lost a grand total of three times while driving there,  eventually we met up with another car from Microsoft (you can tell by the blue parking pass) and they had a better sense of where to go. One of the things I like to do when I’m with other PM interns is find out what being a PM in their division involves (it seems to vary quite a lot). When I got back to the office I ended up staying late to respond to some e-mails and managed to score a free dinner too (which is good since I had all of $7USD until pay day).This Monday is a Sonic’s game, which should be fun. I’m not a big sports person (not even really hockey), but free is a pretty good price. The tricky part is there is also a VSIP dinner that night which I really want to go to as well (free food! If my mentor is reading this, I mean a chance to find out more about customer pain points :P). I also got a free T-Shirt today (my first free MSFT shirt since starting here) which is good times. I’m hoping there will be some left over shirts and I can grab a few more, I don’t really like having to do laundry every week J I also got a free hippo (sadly not a live one, just a stress toy) for e-mailing someone. I’m told that other divisions and especially interns in the summer get way more free stuff. 

Now trying to tie this vaguely back to the subject of work I will make the absurd conjecture that choosing what free event I should attend and which performance work should be investigate are. Some common characteristics of these problems:

*imperfect information (what exactly is the free food?, what exactly will happen if we make this change and will users notice?)

*impacts more than just the core decision (if I go to the VSIP dinner I can’t give some people a lift, if we make this improvement then there won’t be time to finish another feature)

*people available to consult (others know what size are the hotdogs at key arena, other how many users have reported this)?

*hard deadlines (game happens at 7pm, slides need to be done by midnight)

So, based on these shared characteristics I will now make the claim that the time spent researching which free food event I should go to is actually training and should count as work :P.

[Note: This post is slightly back dated. The Sonic’s game was last week, I already grab the left over t-shirts and delayed doing laundry, and got free beer at the company meeting! I also got paid so I was temporarily less broke (but then I spent it all on shiny things :P). The free food at the Sonic’s game was better than the free food with the VSIP partners so I think I made the right decision there, lets hope my performance work goes as smoothly J]

Welcome Holden Karau to the VS Editor Team

I'm pleased to welcome Holden Karau to our PM team as an intern driving performance.  I'm really excited to have someone on our team dedicated to driving the performance across our team so that we can improve in this area for future versions.  It appears that we have a policy that interns aren't allowed to blog themselves so as his mentor I get the honour of posting on his behalf. 

-Sean Laberee

Hello World

My name is Holden Karau and I am a new Performance PM intern on the Visual Studio platform team. Since I am an intern here at MSFT I’m not allowed to create a blog, so my mentor has kindly agreed to post on my behalf to this blog. What exactly being a performance PM involves is a matter of some debate, but it certainly does involve a lot of meetings.

Most of my work recently has been focused on getting our stuff ready for SP1 and trying to figure out what exactly is going on. Evil gremlins have been trying to prevent me from getting a good idea of the existing performance numbers. J 

There are a lot of tools for providing information about what issues our customers have and I am going to be reviewing them. In addition I will be at the upcoming VSIP summit and hope to get some information there. One thing is for sure, I really want to here anything you have to say about VS performance (what areas are too slow, what is barely good enough, what is really awesome, etc.). 

Focusing a bit less on work, I’ve decided that I am going to “get in shape” and learn a bit of hindi this semester. Part of this is to prevent my self from staying at work just to play sky-shark and drink as much free pop as I can get down (I normally don’t feel so well after all-you-can-eat buffet style places if you get where I am coming from). The other part is that I might as well do it while I don’t have to pay for it J

 P.S.

If you know anything about the Seattle rave scene let me know, I’m trying to get involved.

New Font for the Visual Studio 2005 Editor

I've got good news!  Consolas, a cleartype font designed specifically for to make code more readable is now available for download for users of Visual Studio 2005 from the Microsoft Download Center. 

One important thing about Consolas is that it will only look good if you have ClearType enabled.  You can check the setting from the Display applet in Control Panel.  On the Appearance Tab click the Effects button.  Ensure the the check box "Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts" is checked and that it is set to Clear Type.

Thanks,
Sean Laberee

Looking for Feedback on Ctrl+F3 (Edit.FindNextSelected)

I'm investigating the MSDN Product Feedback Center issue where Find Next Selected should not use regular expressions or wildcards(http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/ProductFeedback/viewFeedback.aspx?feedbackid=18ff6379-d9e2-4baa-9c61-3a99889c6ba1).

The intention of the command is to take the text that is currently selected and find the next occurance of that text.  Our current design has this tied to the options in the Quick Find/Replace dialog.  This means that it will respect the Look in scope, Match case, Match Whole Word, Search Hidden Text and the options to Use Regular Expressions/Wildcards.  The problem is that this command does not make sense to use with regular expressions or wildcards. 

We are considering making a change to this command such that it will always search the Current Document, with Match case, Searching Hidden Text but never match whole word, nor use Regular Expressions or Wildcards. 

Since this is a commonly used command, I'd love to get more feedback from users before making this change.  Please let us know what you think!

Thanks,
Sean Laberee

Bonus:  For those of you who want to try out the new behaviour, I've written the following macros to demonstrate what it would be like!

Snippy Released!

We have released a new powertoy Snippy.  It is a Code Snippet editor that will allow you to create new code snippets or modify existing ones.  Please let us know if you have any problems installing or using it.  There are two versions posted, one for the Beta2 version of the .NET Framework and another one for the current release candidate.

-Meghan

Tabs, Backspace, Delete and other commands not working in the editor

Several people have been reporting problems on MSDN Product Feedback with Visual Studio Beta 2 in which the Editor stops responding to most commands but still allows typing.  The good news is that we have identified a fix for the issue, we know how to prevent it and how to get out of the state when it happens.    The problem stems from auto-hiding tool windows stealing focus from the editor without actually popping up.  To avoid the issue, try not set tool windows to Auto-hide.  If you do happen to run into this issue despite the previous advice, then the easiest way to get out of the situation is to activate the tool window by clicking on the tab and then clicking the X in the top right hand corner to close it. 

Sean Laberee
Visual Studio Editor Team

Emacs and Brief Emulations in Visual Studio 2005 (aka Whidbey) Beta 2

I hope that everyone has had a chance to download Beta 2 of Whidbey as there have been many improvements since Beta 1.  If not, you can download it here: http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/get/.

Two of the features that we've improved since Beta 1 are Brief and Emacs emulations.  We've made many changes based on customer and internal feedback to try to re-create the basic editor experience of these two Editors.  We've eliminated the requirement that you need to set two separate options to use the Emulations.  You can now simply go to Tools Options/Environment/Keyboard and choose Brief or Emacs from the drop down list. On some SKUs the Brief and Emacs keybindings were omitted.  If you can't find them in your list of Keyboard schemes, download this file and extract the contents to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE (or the installation path you chose at install time).

Let us know if you have any feedback on the emulations! Feel free to comment on this blog or use MSDN Product Feedback.

Thanks,

Sean Laberee

Cool new little Editor feature in the Dec CTP – Edit.PasteParameterTip

Check out the new Edit.PasteParameterTip feature in Whidbey Dec CTP...

http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2005/01/21/358393.aspx

Upcoming Visual C++ Editor and IDE Features Chat

This is just a quick post to let everyone know that the VS Core Editor Team and the C++ Editor team will be having a chat this Wednesday at 1 PM Pacific.  We'll be there to answer questions about new Whidbey features such as Code Definition Window, Call Browser, Emacs & Brief Emulations and XML Comments.  You can find the chat on http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats/ or through the direct url for the chat http://www.microsoft.com/communities/chats/default.mspx#05_Jan12_VC_IDE

We look forward to chatting with you.
Sean Laberee & the VS Core Editor Team

Customizing Context Menus

I've been getting this question a lot in the past few weeks, so I've decided this would make a quick blog post.  In Visual Studio 2005, we've added the ability to customize many of the context menus that you see in the product.  Here's how:

1. Go To Tools.Customize. 
2. On the Toolbars Tab, check "Shortcut Menus".  You will notice that several new items on the main toolbar with the title shortcut menus. 
3. Switch to the Commands Tab and drag the command you want added onto the appropriate menu.  There are default groupings for Solution Explorer, Class View and Debugging context menus.  Other Shortcut Menus contains the remaining list of uncategorized context menus.
4. Click Close

If you want to add items to the editor context menu, you can add them to the Code Window group under Other Shortcut Menus.

-Sean Laberee

Guidelines - a hidden feature for the Visual Studio Editor

Guidelines are visible column indicators for the VS Editor.  For more info on how to enable them, check out

http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2004/11/15/257953.aspx

Thanks,

-sara

I've moved to the team!

Hi VSEditor readers,

I’m Sara Ford.  I’ve been at Microsoft and on the Visual Studio testing team for 3 years now.  I just moved to the Editor / Code Navigation team from the Core IDE team where I’ve owned Window Management.  I’m going to be testing the Editor as my new feature area ownership.  I’ve created an Editor category on my blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/category/7211.aspx, but I’ll do my best to cross-post here whenever I blog about something cool with the Editor.

I’m looking forward to blogging about the Editor, so if you have any suggestions for future blog topics for me (provided they reside in my feature areas), let me know!

Thanks!

-sara