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.

In searching for a photo sharing solution for my web site, I recently stumbled on dfGallery. If you’re not familiar with it, think SlideShowPro, only better. Why better? ‘Cuz you don’t have to fork over any of your hard-earned cash to be able to use it. Its free. True, it doesn’t have anything like SlideShowPro Director available for gallery management, but managing albums manually using the XML-based configuration file is pretty simple for even semi-geeks. I especially really like the fact that you can point it to RSS feeds from Flickr and Picasa Web Albums and it will display all of those photos for you as well (Fotki and Photobucket are also supported). Very nice feature.

A few minor drawbacks: its Flash based, which some people don’t like. I myself don’t see that as much of a problem because Flash on the web is much like Windows on the desktop…just about everybody has it. Due to the fact that it is flash-based though, you don’t get the ability to link directly to a specific photo though. Again, to me, this is a minor problem. If I want to show a specific photo, chances are, I’m going to embed it directly into a blog entry anyway.

So, if you’re looking for a nice, free solution for displaying photos on your web site, and you’re OK with using Flash for it, you might consider checking out dfGallery.