The Pensieve

Visual Studio - tread safely Wizards - A slowdown to productivity? Had a chance to write a few small apps in C# using the IDE. One thing that felt a bit daunted was the amount of code that is being generated automatically specifically with the GUI initialization code and the resx files. Intellisence? Not for the 'declare later' group The second is how intellisence interferes with your code. If you use a variable without declaring it (say in a for loop), intellisence inserts the nearest matching class or type name or variable in code, which I have to backtrack to remove and the go back and declare the variable and then specify that in my loop. The mystic resx files Whenever you start including images or other resources, they get compiled as a resx file which is xml file with the binary data embedded into it (using base64 encoding?). Though I have included the core resource files in the project, the resx files becomes difficult to manage, especially when multiple members are work...

Dot Net development the free way There is a new trend catching up... More mainstream application targeted towards the x86-architecture tend to move towards the Dot Net platform as compared to Java since a few years back. With majority of the users holding their roots to Windows, Dot Net seems to be better in terms of performance as well as integration with the OS. That's why I decided to learn Dot Net programming. With learning to programming using the Dot Net framework, comes the question of getting a compiler, editor or an IDE. Microsoft has provided the framework SDK for free for anyone to install. But unfortunately this comes along with command-line tools like the raw compiler or the console based debugger. Agreed, Visual Studio 2005 is there. But, it does not justify the cost to just learn a new programming model. The alternatives? A few exists. SharpDevelop , an open source IDE is available for those who are interested in a true blue open sourced IDE. But it has many kinks th...