TOOLS
VI in all grace but sometimes we need a little bit more firepower and a few more things in our toolbelt if we want to reach our goal faster. Tools, sometimes easy to use, sometimes with a higher learning curve, can help us speed up our day to day tasks a lot.
A lot of people far more clever than me have their own lists, for example I would recommend you in particular to take a look at Scott Hanselmans great list of tools.
In any case, here is my own collections of things I would recommend to have a look at.
How to download a list of URLs using bash
Shell (or Bash as it is sometimes called), is the command line prompt of Unix-based systems such as Ubuntu or MacOS and, as we will see today, it can be a huge friend of yours. I have had the pleasure to work with some kings of bash and I was truly amazed bu what they...
Speed up translation by automating google translate
Today I will show how I went about automating google translate to speed up the translation of a large set of terms I needed for one of my apps, TravelRates. The actual translation is very simple, however, since it is based on the paid version of...
Bulk change photo timestamps on mac
I'm currently out travelling and found that I had different time zone settings on my three cameras (phone, GoPro and digital). Easy to fix for next time but all the photos taken this far? Fortunately, *nix comes with command line tools such as touch and in GNU...
Trying out NDepend
What is this? I got the chance to try out NDepend, although with everything else, it took me quite some time until I finally got around to picking it up. Now NDepend is a tool, both command line, stand alone and as an addin to Visual Studio which allows you to do...
Jenkins with Visual Studio Online
On my current project we're using Jenkins as a CI platform and Visual Studio Online with TFS for source control. I've been wanting to setup the builds on our intranet again to run the integration tests relying on intranet access each check-in. I had an issue with...
Alias for windows command line
When working with git and node js you end up using the command line quite a lot. As a Windows grown developer this is kind of a strange sensation really, you quickly start to appreciate why those Linux guys constantly advocated the bash and you also understand...
My path registered EXE where art thou?
There's always that time when you set up a new environment and want to get to that file registered in %PATH%, like msbuild in the developers console or something. You Google or dir /s and eventually find that files but always wonder, is there not...
Keeping it clean
I got around to some cleaning today removing all our project warnings, yes you know which I mean, those nasty yellow things in the bottom of your Visual Studio screen every time you build. The ones we shrug at and say "well, they're just warnings" 🙂 I got most of...
VMWare problems with keyboard and mouse capture
We're using a nice vSphere ESXi 5.1 host for a lot of our VMs at work and today I found myself unable to get proper mouse and keyboard capture in the VMs. It just acted really strange, sometimes I could get mouse capture when I was outside the VM and as soon as I...
Free coverage control in Visual Studio
Code coverage is a good tool to force you to keep maintaining and adding unit and integration tests to your solution. It also increases your confidence in making changes if you can see that the code your changing is actually covered by tests both...