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If you get depressed after looking at the standard Visual Studio coloring theme for years, try changing it. Scott Hanselman posted a gallery of ready to use themes to any taste - http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VisualStudioProgrammerThemesGallery.aspx 

I like Jeff Atwood's (CodingHorror) scheme most - which one do you like?

CodeIt.Right is finally finished after about 3 years in the making. My 7 years long dream come true. The tool it out! Cheers! (I truly believe that code analysis coupled with automatic refactoring will change the way .NET developer teams and solo developers work!)

Read this blog post to find out about CodeIt.Right and the future plans for the product - http://submain.com/blog/CodeItRightV10Released.aspx

Through February 20th, 2008 you can leverage of the introductory pricing on CodeIt.Right.

Tell them Serge sent you ;-)

Scott Hanselman is one of the most humble .NET community leaders I have met. And althought I'm not as expressive as Mark Miller I have huge deal of respect for Scott as a person and professional.

Please join me in helping Team Hanselman to reach their goal on a great cause - Fight Diabetes !

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TeamHanselmanAndDiabetesWalk2007.aspx

This month we are having biggest giveaway ever at vbCity - 50(!) licenses of ApexSQL Code to the top forum posters in May.

For details see » forum post «

Paul Vick - architect on Visual Basic Team at Microsoft has posted what is it that he actually does. Very interesting reading!

I've been working on this for some time now but finally I'm happy to announce we have obtained exclusive distribution rights to the latest version of Steve Sartain's C#/VB .NET Coding Guidelines 100+ page ebook, and are offering free download.

More info - http://submain.com/blog/FreeCVBNETCodingGuidelinesEbookDownload.aspx

C#/VB .NET Coding Guidelines home page - http://submain.com/guidelines

Download - http://submain.com/download.aspx?product=guidelines

I have been working for over two months setting up new community site http://dev.net.ua - Ukrainian Developer Community. It went live on November 1st. You may not believe it but dev.net.ua is first Ukrainian developer community site, for Microsoft technologies anyway.

My apologies if I was not very responsive - you know I do these things in between my other jobs..

vbfeeds.com subscribers may have noticed the site was down for about 24 hours. Hopefully it wasn't much of inconvenience.

VB Feeds was running on SQL 2005 Beta 2 which expired in this month. I knew that's coming but as usual many things that required immediate attention pushed moving VB Feeds to another box with SQL 2005 RTM down the list.

It is done now - I moved the site on Monday night and it is running fine.

I apologize for the downtime.

Those of you who are subscribed to our VBFeeds have only seen one side of the coin ;-) Today the other side has become available - Steve Smith launched similar C# Feeds service:

Today CSharpFeeds officially goes live.  This is a pet project of mine and Gregg Stark’s based on Serge’s VBFeeds.com site and its source code (thanks to Serge for letting me see the source!).  VBFeeds is a great place to find just VB information from the top VB people, moderated so that it doesn’t include posts about going on vacation or other personal posts.  C# Feeds seeks to do the exact same thing, but for C# content, rather than VB.  If there’s a C# feed we should be pulling that we don’t have, let us know.  We’ll be adding a suggest a feed mechanism fairly soon, though I’m not sure what that translates into in real time.

Oh yeah, and we updated all of Serge’s admin tools to use Atlas.  Anonymous users won’t see any difference, but it totally speeds up the post moderation process.  Very cool.

via Steve Smith

And, Steve, I wouldn't mind taking a peek at the Atlas admin piece ;-) I do the majority of the VBFeeds moderation on my Pocket PC phone and the mobile layout is most important for me, but a real life Atlas example would be cool to look at.

Today's braking news - BillG announced he is stepping down from his full-time role (no, that is not two weeks notice, over two years that is :) Gates will remain the chair and will dedicate all of his time to charitable work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Robert Scoble posted just a couple of lines but we all know Bill's decision is driven by Scoble's announce last week about leaving Microsoft for Silicon Valley based video blogging and podcasting startup PodTech.net

Joel Spolsky is surprised Microsoft stock didn't go down yet. Me too. But I think the two year transiotion period has something to do with that.

I think this is great that BillG with all his wealth wants to focus full-time on helping others. I have always respected BillG (personally) for his vision, brain power, geekyness, integrity - and this move ... Bill, you da man!

I was asked if I would fill in - very serious move and while I was thinking Ray Ozzie stepped in :) Well, I'm happy at what I do anyway ;-)

More on that at MSNBC and CNET News

I've been following the Web 2.0 buzz since August 2005 and until recently from the t3echnology prospective it was primarily associated with PHP and Ruby On Rails. Since the introduction of Atlas things are changing! A very well written article:

Top 13 reasons to CONSIDER the Microsoft platform for Web 2.0 development

[via Brad Abrams]

This one has been coming back at me for some time. I've installed one of those Vista Skins for XP over 6 months ago - yes, I can blame Stuat for that :) and then replaced Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 with the RTM version when it was released early in November of last year. Since then I've been having to live with the funky looking dialog windows (some of them) in Visual Studio

It looks like VS is confusing the system font and uses that ugly Fixedsys instead :(  Ughh!

But it appears the custom XP skin it what causes the trouble, so to “fix“ the font

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Either

• uninstall your custom skin and reboot
• or just switch to a standard windows theme

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This does the trick and my VS Options dialog is back to its normal look

And I got tired of the custom Vista skin anyway ;-)

This fixes the system font issue on your Windows, not just for the Visual Studio - I've seen Opera, some setup kits, and quite a bit of other software getting confused and use the wrong system font.

vbCity is part of a contest with lots of valuable prizes! » read more «

This one is very handy and yet not very intuitive - I keep forgetting it and search every time I got to replace a field value when editing table content in Enterprise Manager. Posting it here, so I don't have to search again and also this may help you too :)

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When you manually update table data in SQL Server Enterprise Manager press Ctrl+0 to insert a NULL value.

This works with SQL 2005 Management Studio as well.

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We have released CodeIt.Once - refactoring tool for .NET developers. 

CodeIt.Once allows so save big on the time you spend writing and maintaining your source code. It also helps when you need to modify or reesign your existing .NET application - saves you hours of tedious search-and-replace-try-if-it-still-runs-or-broken-start-all-over-again... You know what I mean - we all have done that...

First version of the CodeIt.Once includes 14 “auto-magical” refactoring operations:

• Rename
• Extract Method
• Encapsulate Field
• Extract Interface
• Promote Local Variable to Parameter
• Add Parameter
• Remove Parameters
• Reorder Parameters
• Method To Property
• Property To Method
• Introduce Constant
• Inline Variable
• Decompose Conditional
• Move Class

Why “auto-magical“? Because you just shoot and forget. 

CodeIt.Once is Add-In that works with Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005, supports both VB.NET and C# - one product, one license covers all of that.

To make things even better (for you) we are offering free personal/evaluation license - you can evaluate it for as long as you feel comfortable to buy it, and it is free for personal, non-commercial use - students and hobbyists.

Interested? See CodeIt.Once page for more details and download.

If you want to stay updated, make sure to subscribe to our SubMain Blog.

Don't forget to send your feedback - good or bad - I want to know all of it. Feedback is the most important and we value it very much - any way that works for you - whether via this blog, SubMain Blog, CodeIt.Once support forum, email support@submain.com or me at my personal sergeb@vbcity.com