opinion

Dear Google/Live Search/Yahoo Search/And anyone else

Jay Kimble — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 15:48:03 GMT

I have been a big fan of your services for a long time and have used each of you off and on. Google right now you have my business and that ad revenue you currently get from me using your search may be in jeopardy.

The first one of you to ban (yes, ban!) people like Experts-exchange or SqlServerCentral from all searches where I am looking for a tech answer will get my business... Seriously, they are a bane to your business as they pollute the search results.

Whenever I click on a link that implies that there is an answer waiting for me and I find a page describing what could be my problem and then an invitation to join or sign up for a trial, absolutely ticks me off! These folks are a blight IMO...

[Maybe I should create a little SL2 app with Live Search and auto remove these sites from the results... Seriously it ticks me off...]

You have been forewarned. I will move on to the next decent search engine that eliminates crap like this when I need an IT/Dev answer (because I don’t want to join and be spammed or to pay to get info).

Signed your friend,

Jay

Core Addin Challenge: 1 week with CodeRush/Refactor Pro

Jay Kimble — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 02:29:28 GMT

[UPDATE 8/5: Rory noticed a couple spelling errors in people's names and also noted that I should give Koen HanHoefkens credit for his excellent CR_RESOLVE plugin]

I have survived my first week with CodeRush/Refactor Pro (CR/RP). I have discovered a few things about my development habits:

I don’t memorize all that many shortcut keystrokes... I tend to look for the "one keystroke to rule them all." Interestingly enough I avoid mouse usage as well
With the competing produce (R#) I use about 7 features:
- Improved Intellisense
- Rename Refactoring (which is also available in VS)
- Extract Method (also available in VS)
- Code Analysis
- Auto-create add using/import
- File Templates
- Find Usages

I’m also discovering some things about CR/RP

I’m discovering that I need to tweak CR/RP’s default settings to avoid some of the "annoyances" (CR/RP can take over at times when you don’t want it to)
I think If I can get over the hump I am going to find that I’m MORE productive with this thing (although it has been touch and go at times)
One of my machines seems to run faster than R# and the other not so much (there are different things turned on/off on these machines right now)
RP provides more refactorings than any other product I have seen!! They even have refactorings for ASP.NET .ASPX files (the html part!!!)

So the "one keystroke to rule them all" for CR/RP is CTL + ~ . Oh yeah, you also need to install the community DXCore addin called -- Refactor_Resolve (which was written by Koen HanHoefkens and you can get from here.. but I would recommend that you get it out of the zip file found here. BTW, thank you Rory Becker for this info). Once you have installed that and get it turned on then Refactor! will give you an option to add usings/imports for your unresolved references.

Oh yeah that community project has a number of nice things you may want to install... like the highlighted line focus.

As I mentioned before you also need to turn on Code Analysis and cut down the size of the little bar at the bottom of the code files, by setting it to 1 file and 0 pixels (it will still show up, but it won’t be as intrusive... your scroll bar will work again). One more thing I believe this feature is a new one (and maybe even a beta one)... it’s not as good as R#'s but from what I understand with their plans it is going to get a lot better (they are going to add over 100 items it can check for and find...)

Additional things I did was I turned off the Smart Brackets and Smart Parentheses and the some of the Smart Paste features features (the auto create properties ones are what I killed... I may kill a few more of the Smart Paste features to get things tweaked out a little better for me).

Summary
All in all things are getting better... Today was a breakthrough day for me (Thank you Rory Becker and Mark Miller)! I think I turned the corner on my experience. I’m think I’m as productive with CR/RP now as I was with R#. I’m only missing 2 things... both of which are livable right now: Find Usages (which I can use the Find References mechanism), and R# File Templates (but CR’s templates are WAY better... so I need to learn a few more of those... I have a number committed to memory already). Just 23 more days to go... but I suspect I'm going to be very comfy before that happens.

Core Addin Challenge : Hello CodeRush/Refactor Pro

Jay Kimble — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:09:57 GMT

[Disclaimer: Before I start this series I want you all to know that I love Resharper! It has made me a better developer, and if you pay attention you will see why I think that. At the same time I love Dev Express. As a company they are constantly giving back to the community. While I’m not a fan of Mark Miller’s humor, their addin framework is about the best you will find IMO... and Scott Hanselman (ScottHa from here on) loves CodeRush/Refactor. I love ScottHa; he has shown me all kinds of cools utility that I couldn’t live without... he is angelic... I went looking for a halo for his picture... nahh been done <grin />. Anyway, this article series I hope will do a good job of comparing and contrasting the 2 VS2008 IDE adds in their current forms (which CR is at 3.0.8 and R# is at 4.0)... and this is really from my personal perspective on what I use]

I’ve been using R# for quite awhile and honestly I have felt that it made me a better developer. I know I’m not a TDD guy, but there are so many goodies in it that I just simply loved it. BUT, my license ran out. I was in a debate about what I was going to do.

As it turns out (late) last year, I was given a license to CodeRush/Refactor Pro. I had been intrigued by their lengthy list of Refactoring and how they were doing ASP.NET refactorings. Well, about that time the betas of R# started happpening and personally I was going through the collapse of my business (and the amount of development I was doing dwindled, so honestly I did the bad thing and forgot to blog about it.

Like I said my R# ran out, but I remembered that I had CR/RFP, so I decided to re-install it and look around (and really look around), so for the next 30 days I will be exclusively using CR/RFP and will be looking to see how it compares to the features of R# that I actually use (you might use other things), and will of course be blogging about it.

The number 1 feature of R# that I use is it’s code analysis I love being able to look at my C# code and at a glance am able to tell if there are issues with the code at a glance. I have actually learned things from the suggestions it gives me... so I can’t live without that.

Guess what, I remembered reading a veiled reference to CR’s Code Analysis on Dave Hayden’s blog. It’s off by default, so if you are playing with CR... here’s how to turn it on. Bring up the DevExpress menu’s options, turn on Expert mode (I think you need that), and type "Code Issues" in the Search Text box. Check the enabled check box when the Code Issues options appears and Viola! You now have analysis on your code.

My initial knee jerk reaction is that the Code Analysis is almost as good as R# (almost), but then sometimes R# recommends things that I’m not really interested in doing (I know you can tweak it’s suggestions).

On the other hand, CR doesn’t seem to bog down the environment for me!

So take your pick... CR has come a long way from when I last used it. It used to have some annoying "features" that seemed to have been tuned. (their auto-complete used to annoy me/get in my way... I would say that it neither gets in my way nor annoys me)

Necessary Evil??

Jay Kimble — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:30:01 GMT

I want to write today about the 300lb Gorilla that none of us really wants to talk about. I'm talking about the people we use to find new jobs. As you may be aware I closed down IntraDynamics, LLC (well, I have greatly curtailed my company's offerings),and got a new job (at Answers Systems, Inc.)

I was "exchanging notes" with my new boss regarding the process and discovered some things (none of this is surprising, but you may want to think about it next time you are pursuing a new job).

I had two recruiters that were aware of my interview process with Answers. One was the company who placed me and the other was a company I trusted (in the past) who appeared to be working hard to place me somewhere else (even asking about where I was in the process with Answers). In fact I was actually told that Answers (who offered me a job in less than a week) was slow in their hiring process. All this makes sense (the other recruiting company was trying to get the fees for me and wanted to do the placement with Answers, so they needed me out of the way). They inappropriately asked Answers about me.

There's that side of things. The other is that it took a long time to get my deal finalized (almost another week). Why? Recruiter placement fees. Now mind you there was a slight change in things with me (I went from "contract to hire" to just "hire"). The company wanted as much as 35% of my yearly salary for placing me (now mind you it wasn't because they did a great job finding me, etc.. they were in the right place at the right time).

To be honest all Answers needed was someone else to pre-screen candidate's technical abilities. All that the placement firm did was monitor Monster.com and send out an email. There were a few additional things they did (like call me everyday regardless of whether there was new info or not).

I don't mean to be trashing on someone (that's why I left the company names out), but I was in shock of the fees they wanted to collect. My boss, Perry, and I started talking about what would be better.

Eric Wise' idea of having a computer programmers trade association seems like a good idea. We would pay dues, but the organization would allow us to take tests and "prove" our abilities (or at least allow it to be easier to pre-screen applicants). Maybe there would also be a mechanism for referring.

I've been thinking about this. We could do it now you know. We could set up a site to create the organization. There would need to be a set of testing sub sites (maybe you would only be allowed to test every 6 months or every year). When the companies we work for are looking for people we could simply look in the organizations site to see who is currently available and match up test thresholds to what we are looking for. We could then refer these folks to our companies avoiding the whole recruiting industry.

Maybe I'm just dreaming...