Customising Visual Studio 2010

There is no denying - Visual Studio 2010 is a world class development environment. However, everyone has the little things they like, keyboard shortcuts and the like. Changing keyboard shortcuts is easy enough (Tools
> Options > General > Keyboard) but I've recently looked into extensions. Some of them are great - here is a showcase of the ones I've just installed.

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Productivity Power Kit - Published by Microsoft
This kit has lots of useful parts to it - what I mainly wanted it for was the auto close bracket functionality, but it has other useful parts to it that I think I will make use of - custom scrollbars, middle click scrolling, Solution Navigator, Tab Well UI and lots of little options and tools that make Visual Studio nicer to use! Recommend this for any user of Visual Studio.

Color Printing - Published by Microsoft
Kind of self explanatory, allows you to print code out in syntax highlighted colours. Great little tweak that should probably be a tickbox for default printing.

Spell Checker - Published by Noah Richards
Checks the spelling in comments, strings in source code and HTML. Makes the little squiggly line similar to Word. Again, should be a default setting really but glad someone has fixed it! Noah Richards also makes some other nice little tweak like extensions which could be useful!

Indent Guides - Published by Zooba (Steve Dower)
This was one of the little gripes I had with Visual Studio when I started using it - I was used to Notepad++ where the indent lines were used by default when I used to do Python - I find them incredibly useful and makes the code, for me, far easier to read! If you don't get what I mean, here is a screenshot of it in action.

Hide Main Menu - Published by Matthew Johnson [MSFT]
A nice little tweak - simply hides the main menu from view when you don't need it. You can access it by simply pressing the Alt key, or by using other shortcuts to access the menus (such as Alt + F to bring up the File menu). Just personally, I like this very much - I like all the screen estate I can get!

Visual Studio Achievements - Published by Microsoft/Channel 9
As it says on the tin again - Microsoft in all its wisdom have decided to add achievements to programming. I think this is a great idea to get new programmers more into it, and exploring more complex aspects of coding. However, I do think that getting current or veteran programmers into it will be more difficult. I installed it for fun, and maybe I'll publish that i've done a hard one from time to time!

So that's my rundown for now. If you have any you like using, comment away!

Computer Build: Part 2 - Recieving The Parts and Building

This post is massively behind and I do realise that... haven't had time to update the blog! So the parts arrived after a driving lesson and sat in the huge box they came in. I put them on the bed and laid them out - here they are.

I couldn't build it until the 27th of June - I had exams to concentrate on and I knew that once I had finished exams I would have plenty of time to spend as much time as i wanted building and tweaking it!

So I had the exam (a 2 and a half hour computing exam if i remember correctly) and then proceeded to build it when i got back - with the help of a friend, we had it built within 2 hours, installed Windows 7 within 10 mins (SSD installs are fast!) and like that, it was working perfectly! Have to say, it was quite surreal seeing it up and running and realising that it all worked and that it was done!

Since I have built it, I have made a few modifications

• I tweak the Matrix Orbital GX Typhoon display often, my main display looks like this most of the time, but I also have iTunes data on there from time to time too.
• I now make use of the internal USB 3.0 headers instead of having the cables going out of the back and plugging into the back - looks less neat but it frees up 2 USB ports on the back. 
• I also have a wireless card installed in the PCIe 4x port
• I have a top 200mm fan which moves a lot more air than the original fan and has blue LED's in it to match the rest of the lighting. 
• The SSD is kinda faulty, needs RMA'ing. 

I will upload some more pictures of it soon, it is under my desk at uni with me and is running great! With the water cooler I get temps as low as 25 degrees idle and 36 degrees under load!

Computer Build: Part 1 - Working Out and Ordering

For my birthday on the 16th of June, I asked family members for money towards a new project i wished to undertake: a kick ass computer with which to play games, do programming projects and photo editing (which I do from time to time). So I set about researching it, giving myself a budget of £900 as this is what I thought my family would give me (at an estimate, as they are a generous bunch).

So i set about on my favorite website overclockers.co.uk looking for parts that would fit in my price range. Needless to say, it got me a decent PC spec up and running. Needless to say, my birthday came around and my family were even more generous than I had predicted and I had around £1500 on which to spend on a computer! So I upped the spec a little, and this is what i ended up with (ordered this morning):

It has a top of the range unlocked (heavily overclockable) Core i5 2500K processor and an SSD, which should help bring boot times of Windows down, as I think i will only really keep Windows 7 on it, as it is only 60GB (SSD's are expensive!). Also I got a bundle with Windows for one hard drive, which I am going to use as my games HDD, and I have another 500GB at home which i will most likely use for media storage (i have a large music library). The 2TB is for backup purposes.

So that should be with me tomorrow (yay!!) and will be building it on Thursday after my last exam finishes at around 11:30!

I also have a Matrix Orbital display coming with it from another website (wasn't cheap...) which should look great. I'm going for a blue light colour scheme so it should fit right in. 

Pictures when the parts are delivered (hopefully) tomorrow!