It’s no secret that my love/hate relationship with intellisense is heavily weighted to the hate side. Well now intellisense has gone too far as it’s now crammed it’s face into actual development.

“use the reversed English syntax in naming methods, objects and properties: name,verb; eg. StatusCreate, StatusModify rather than CreateStatus, ModifyStatus.”

First off, is this an actual naming convention? I wasn’t able to find anything in searches for reversed english. Second, the only defense I can think of for this approach is because of intellisense. The idea being to force the sort order of intellisense to place all the “Status” items together. Is there another reason?

I’m not one for taking petty stands (or am I?) but this is garbage. An IDE feature, that individual developers may or may not use, should not dictate naming conventions. If this is an issue then fix the actual problem, intellisense.

Allow the option for entries to be sorted in the order they appear in the file instead of alphabetical. Or the option to sort by the postfix word based on the camelCasing so that CreateStatus and ModifyStatus will appear together.

It makes no sense that developer’s are now having to work around MS’s poorly written IDE features?

MSDN’s suggested naming conventions for parameter naming never really worked for me. My problem is that using camel case for parameters conflicts with their method level variable naming convention. That makes it difficult to easily distinguish between the two.

Which is great until you define a method level variable using the standard conventions:

Then later in the method, set it:

It’s not readily apparent that one of these is a parameter passed into the method rather than a method scoped variable. While I can’t stand the way it looks I’ve been dabbling with prefixing all parameters with “p”:

Resulting in this statement:

Now it’s quite clear what’s happening here, a method scope variable is being assigned a value that was passed in as a parameter. It works and solves this issue, however, I really really can’t stand the way the “p” prefix looks.

I’m not sure whether I’ll see any impact but I shut off a lot of the services talked about in this Guide to Useless Windows Services article. Windows certainly tries to be everything to everyone and in doing so has to have a lot of services running that the average user may never ever call. In theory, shutting those off has the potential to reduce startup time, free up some memory, and speed up your machine in general.

Chris has a great idea that’s a spinoff of the smacbook pro. I play hockey with a bunch of those RIM boys and I know at least one of them reads this site the odd time, can we inject this idea over there at the RIM borg?

This is an idea I’d actually pay for.

I’m the first to admit I really didn’t think another online whiteboard would be the least bit interesting, especially one made by GE. I stand corrected.

As seen on Lifehacker.

According to secretGeek, and my quick test, goto statements are supported in C#. Wow, scary indeed.

For really really bored geeks, test your typing speed.

77.25 wpm for little old me.

Update: Beat my record, 79.45 wpm. This is better than solitaire.

Update #2: Beat my record, 82.13 wpm.

If you, like me, are tired of the burdensome application known as the Adobe pdf reader, give Foxit a try.

“Foxit Reader is small (the download is less than 1MB), so it downloads quickly. It doesn’t need any installation, so you can start to run it as soon as you’ve downloaded it.

And It starts up immediately, so you don’t need to wait for an annoying “Welcome” screen to disappear.”

If you’ve been sleeping for the past few months, or just using your internet time productively, then you may not know that I’m a self-proclaimed vi bigot. It’s okay, not knowing puts you in the club with most other humans. There’s a really neato plug-in for Visual Studio that emulates vi for the low low price of $69.95.

So you can buy Visual Studio AND a plug-in to “fix” it instead of just using the tool that works in the first place for free, or a small donation.

Finally technology is making some sense.

I’ve been using Persony for several months and it’s great, when it works. The issue I have is it somehow conflicts with my Vonage line. I use persony primarily to collaborate remotely with other developers. Solve a problem together, get a second set of eyes on some code, review sections of code etc. The point is I’m usually on my vonage line at the same time and the calls drop frequently. Annoying as hell.

Guy mentioned another tool recently called vyew. While they’re working on a desktop sharing feature that I wasn’t able to get working, this is more of a collaboration tool so it isn’t in direct competition with persony. The twist with vyew is it’s always on approach. It’s like a boardroom meeting you run and then leave around for weeks after. People who miss the meeting can stop by whenever they like. It’s also free, currently, and requires no software install. Check it out.