Refactoring your Editing with Resharper 3.0

Jetbrains have release a new version of Resharper.

 

This is simply a fantastic tool!  Though, if you are new to resharper it can be hard to see why its so good.   It's not until you see a Resharper Jedi  at work do you really understand why people rave about it.

 

The real trick to it is learning / customizing the keyboard bindings and then letting them become second nature.

The second major trick is to go through all of the resharper goodies and all  the options and customize the settings.  Make your own live templates, your own file templates, bind it all to keys.  

Now you can refactor your editing.  Any time you duplicate any kind of action / typing, then chances are you can automate it with resharper.  Never type a for loop again, learn the magic of Alt-Ins

 

It also helps with XML and XAML.   Nice for WPF type development, though there's a heck of a lot more Resharper could do for XAML.

WPF Goodness

I've been actively playing with WPF and we are currently converting a "machine simulation"  ( www.compacsort.com )  over to WPF.  I really like it!  It's not perfect, but its definitely a big step up from winforms.

I was browsing through...

http://www.orbifold.net/default/?p=713     (need a free ribbon like toolbar?) and he mentioned only around a 1000 people had downloaded kevins bag of tricks and that he was seriously worried about the future of WPF. 

 

Well, I was one of those people to download it a while ago and was impressed with what you could do!  so if you haven't already (only 1500 odd people at the time of this post), download from http://wpf.netfx3.com/files/folders/10297/download.aspx

 

If anyone else has links to good wpf resources, can you point me in the right direction? :-)

Resuming MSDN subscription downloads

If you quit the Microsoft File Transfer Manager in the middle of it downloading all your goodies from MSDN. Before you do so.... Go to the Options in the transfer manager and select "place application shortcut on the desktop".

Or, if you forget to do that, look in your \WINDOWS\Downloaded Program Files\TransferMgr.exe

Which won't show up in a search or in explorer by default, so simply run it from the command line or your run box.

Mixing WPF into WinForms

Just came across this today.  I was just seeing how easy it is to mix winforms and wpf (completely simple).  The only issues was it came up and said it didn't know what InitializeComponent() was.     This is because it wasn't compiling the XAML.   So...you need  :-

<Import Project="$(MSBuildBinPath)\Microsoft.WinFX.targets" />

in the project file (near the other similar looking import)

Explainable Design

I was reading a blog post called "Four Factors of Agile UX" and one of the "factors" is

"The ability to explain a design efficiently is vital to the success of a project".

I think this is a fantastically good design principle. Anything you design should be explainable in a reasonably straightforward way.

One of the tell tale signs of smelly design is when you do try and explain it and you start doing.... "And then the Widget puts the......oh...hmmm....hang on, that's a bit strange, hmmm, wonder what that's doing?....hmmm....". Suddenly things are not quite as you thought they were. Complexity is pretty sneaky and often sneaks into designs when your not paying attention.

It is important that its explainable in words you say out loud and not inside your head. So you can't cheat and look at a design and say to yourself "yep! makes sense to me! I could explain it!". Of course the best way to do this is to discuss your designs with someone else.