Visual studio 2010 introduces a new development profile and settings for maximizing text editor space.
It will hide all tool bars and other non-essential UI. Also, Design View, CSS-related Task Panes, CSS Go-To-Definition, CSS class IntelliSense, Style Builder, validation, and other non-essential baclground processes are disabled.
Now, if you want to go that extra “mile”/ inch , there’s a Visual Studio Extension from Microsoft that hides the Main menu, giving you almost full window surface for your code
This allows content editors to customize pinned sites metadata, tasks and jump lists. I’ll do a screencast and more detailed blog post on how to use it very soon. For now, please submit any feedback in the project homepage (http://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/ie9-extensions).
Previous work done by Matt Brailsford allowed pinning the Umbraco admin area and has been integrated in Umbraco 4.7 core.
Not long ago, Microsoft released WebMatrix, a new development tool that aims to make web development easy. At first, I wasn’t very convinced with it, and I was quite happy with Visual Studio 2010 for my web dev work. Did we really need another development tool for the Microsoft web stack? Visual Studio even has a free express version, so I didn’t quite get why WebMatrix was needed.
This post starts with an introduction to what is WebMatrix and I’ll share my experiences for real world projects with it in the end. And no, I didn’t stop using Visual Studio .
At one of our tech lunches (a regular event at Fullsix Portugal where we get the whole server team together, order great food – and chocolates! – and watch a tech-related video), we watched the CodeMash 2011 Keynote video where WebMatrix was launched.
It blew me away. If you haven’t taken WebMatrix for a spin, watch the video. You’ll find a lot of great demos and get to see some of the coolest features in action. Josh Holmes leads the way (a great speaker) and invites people from DotNetNuke and Joomla to show how you can leverage WebMatrix to get up and running with no time with those platforms. Wait, did I just say Joomla? Yes, it’s not ASP.NET + SQL Server only… Let’s have a closer look, shall we?
When you start WebMatrix, you’re presented with 4 options:
The most interesting, IMHO, is the “Site from Web Gallery”. This lets you choose an open-source web application as the foundation for your website. It can go from CMS systems to e-commerce, forums and more. You’ll find products based on the Microsoft stack like Umbraco, YAF.NET, Kentico and others, but you’ll also find PHP+MySQL stuff like Joomla!, WordPress and Drupal. Choose one and you’re set to go.
How I’m using WebMatrix
WebMatrix takes care of finding all the required dependencies to have your website running, so if that means installing MySQL, then you don’t have to worry about it. It’s all taken care of. There’s a lot more to WebMatrix, like features to make publishing a snap, statistics and more, but the “Site from Web Gallery” is the feature I’ve been using the most.
A lot of the times, I need to have a website up and running in no time. This can be for trying out some things or to showcase some feature at a client meeting, and I don’t have the time to go though all the hassle of creating a web application in Visual Studio, downloading the platform, database, configure everything, etc… With WebMatrix, it really takes a couple of seconds and you’re running. This is what made me a fan of WebMatrix. It’s click, click, choose some passwords for your database, and your site is running in IIS Express. You can now customize anything you want in your website, as you have the WebMatrix IDE with all the files and database tools you’ll need until your project gets big.
After prototyping, we can choose to continue the work in Visual Studio simply clicking a button (Launch Visual Studio). This is how I go when I decide to use the work I started in WebMatrix. I never use the publish feature and I migrate the database to one of our servers, so it’s integrated with our typical ALM process.
Adopting Scrum can be (and usually is) very hard in the beginning, but the end results show it’s worth the investment. More and more companies are adopting it in order to address the main problems usually associated with software project management (overbudgets, overtime, employee unsatisfaction).
This book is an essential reading both for anyone planning to adopt Scrum and for those who’ve been using it for some time.
Tenho vindo a tentar aprender como criar packages para serem usados com base no NuGet. Ontem fiz a minha submissão para a galeria de packages. O package que inseri, adiciona as dll’s do FluorineFx ao projecto, adiciona as configurações necessárias ao web.config e cria uma classe com um serviço de exemplo.
I have been trying to learn on how to create packages for NuGet. Yesterday i did my first contribution for the NuGet Package Library . The package i added is for adding FluorineFx dll’s to your project, add the necessary web.config entries and it creates a class with a service to be consumed by Flash.