I shared this yesterday, but I just don’t think that’s enough to give it the nod that it deserves.

Code review is an essential part of any good software development process. The problem with it is that it can be a very tedious and sometimes painful process if not done correctly. This is the reason that a lot of organizations just choose not to do it at all.

Fortunately, over the past couple of years, a few tools have come on the scene that make code reviews much more efficient and much less painful. My hope is that this will encourage more organizations to make code reviews a more common part of their software development processes. The most recent one that I heard of was just yesterday, and its called Review Board. Its web based, and uses changesets taken from the version control system that it is integrated with (yes, you have to be using version control too…and if you’re not, you really should be) to organize reviews.

It appears to work very similarly to Crucible, which I’ve become very fond of, but it hasn’t been around the block as many times, so its not quite as mature. The most notable difference between the two is the price: Crucible is fairly expensive, while Review Board is open source, and thus, free.

My new favorite feature of Visual Studio: the Class View search box. Ever been working on a large solution with hundreds of files, looking for a file that you know is there, but can’t remember which project its in? You know the name of the file, but can’t remember where its at. I needed a way to be able to search my solution for a file name. Voila! Ctrl + K, Ctrl + V pops open the Class View and puts the focus in the search box and lets you search for the class you need. The only caveat is that it searches through the .NET framework assemblies too, so it can be moderately slow at times, but I’ve not noticed a real problem with that so far. I’ve never had a search take longer than maybe a couple of seconds. Anyway…I found it very useful…though you might too.

Computers are so unreliable. You’d think that with as long as I’ve been working with computers that I would’ve learned my lesson by now and gotten some sort of reliable backup and recovery plan in place at home. Unfortunately, if you did think that, you’d be wrong.

I’ve said for a long time that I was going to get some sort of plan in place. As a matter of fact, I’ve been working on writing my own application for backing up data off and on for quite a while now (I’ve run into a few snags that I’ve not been able to figure out how to get working, which is why its not done yet, but that’s another story for another time). Anyway, the system disk on my server at home crashed last week, which is why Yexley.Net was down for a while.

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So…my new toy arrived yesterday afternoon, and I got to play with it for the first time last night. Obviously, its too soon to gush too much, but I will say that, without a doubt, the out-of-box-experience was nice, and the first six hours with it were very nice…and maybe most importantly, stable. I was able to watch videos, listen to music, read documents…SCROLL…all without a single problem or crash. VERY refreshing indeed.

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At a previous job I was on, we made pretty heavy use of a tracer class that was really helpful for debugging and performance tuning. By injecting some trace commands in your code at the beginning and end of operations that you wanted to analyze, and flipping a switch in the application config file, the tool would generate a nice, indented/formatted output to your Visual Studio output window that would give you a nice, easy way to see exactly what was going on in your code at runtime. Since I left that job, on several occasions I’ve thought how nice it would be to have something like that available to use again.

I recently downloaded and installed a nice little utility that I’ve used off-and-on for a long time now called the Snippet Compiler by Jeff Key. That guy just cranks stuff out left and right. He’s got all kinds of little time-saving utilities for monotonous tasks that a lot of developers do all the time. So, after I downloaded the Snippet Compiler (recommended), I was browsing through all of the other stuff that he had, and lo and behold, he has a tracer assembly available for download. From the looks of his write-up on it, it looks to be just like the one I’d used previously, only better…as it looks to output even more details about what’s going on in the code. Very, very nice. And of course, like most of his other utilities, its free and source code is provided in case you want to see how it works or do any tweaking to suit your own needs. Thanks Jeff. Keep up the great work.