In Absentia

Every whisky lover gets, at some point, to experience whisky from the island of Islay in Scotland. This experience will be remembered throughout his life – it can be either love at first taste, or loathing for eternity. Not everybody can handle the intensity and the powerful peaty flavor of (most) Islay whiskies, some may even stop drinking whisky altogether. Others, like myself, fall in love with the flavor and rarely able to drink anything else.

I use the awesome Fiddler2 to debug HTTP, and I needed to compare sessions. Fiddler has a support for this, but when I clicked Tools – Compare Sessions, it prompted me to install Windiff.exe.

Google recursion.

Here’s a strange bug I’ve encountered today in a WinForms application. Usually, double clicking on a collapsed tree node (which obviously has child nodes) will expand it. Most of the time when we need something to happen when a child node is double clicked, but not the parent, we write something similar to:

Say you need to paste a chunk of XML (or WKT) into Visual Studio as a string literal (for your unit tests, or what not). How would you do it?

In C#, string literals can be represented in two ways:

Here is something I wish I’d known years ago – you can make the View Source action default when you double click on a WinForm control.

There are tons of options when it comes to configuring your coding style in ReSharper. Somehow I managed to screw the indentation of array and object initializers’ variables. This is what it looked like (I use At Next Line (BSD style) setting):

[Update: this article is now obsolete, and the links below might not work. Please download the latest ReSharper version from the JetBrains website.]

JetBrains just announced that ReSharper 4.5 has reached Beta status, and now available to download.

I just found out that it’s possible to copy the text from any message box to clipboard by pressing Ctrl-C when the message box appears! Think of all the times you needed to search for an exact error message text, and needed to switch back and forth between the message and your browser window.

I love ReSharper. It has completely changed the way I think about code. When I have to use Visual Studio without ReSharper installed, I feel like I’m writing the code in Notepad. As my first actual post on this blog I’d like to present a few features of ReSharper 4.1 that help me code faster, better, (stronger) and with much higher accuracy.