MP Blog

I’ve been doing allot of heavy programming lately & to keep me awake I have been listening to Hard FM.

Thanks Hard.FM

The other day I discovered an amazing product called Enso From Humanized & its good!

(good meaning how have I survived for this long without it & what am I going to do when I go to use a PC that doesn’t have it)

I have been using a similar featured tool for a few weeks before but when I found Enso it blew that other one away, I immediately un-installed that & installed Enso & have never looked back.

The crew at Humanized have done an amazing job, being a programming its annoying to navigate your computer with a mouse; you are setup nice & positioned for alot of typing then remember you need to do an email so you have to reach for the mouse, but no longer.

If you are a cubical dweller or just use computers alot in your line of work I highly recomend you wander over to Humanized & check out thier excellent demos & tour (so you can “view” before you download).

Just wanted to write about a few interesting things I’ve learnt before I forget them.

• Dynamic Sql is NOT slower than stored procedures

• Subversion (svn) is MUCH better than Visual Source Safe (VSS), better interface, usability & can have multi users working on same project & files at same time (no more waiting for someone to finish with a file first). If you want proof, wander over to Unfuddle and sign up for a free hosted account then grab TortoiseSVN and possibly ankhsvn for Visual Studio Integration & get going (see tutorials/docs at Unfuddle for more How To stuff).
• (adjustment to above statement) Your never to old to learn new tricks, while I still “Like” SVN more than VSS, today after discussion with a few coworkers it appears VSS & SVN are much closer than I thought & all those “cool” features that made me start using subversion (branches, tagging, works over http) are actually already present in VSS but just not apparent or well documented. VSS does get a hammering for being a Microsoft product but actually I personally (nor anyone I know) have never had an issue with it so its really a personal choice for you to make.

• When using windows command (Start -> Run -> cmd) you can press the <Tab> key to complete, i.e. “cd progr <tab>” will get you “cd Program Files”, just like in the explorer address bar.

• There is no 1 solution fits all when it comes to multi user multi developer software development (as soon as I find it I will let you know, if you have found it please let me know).

• Using a Virtual Machine as your development environment is probably a good idea, this way you can separate your games & personal files/programs & work in a “Clean” environment & if you PC dies just grab the Virtual Machine file & start it on another PC.

• PostgreSql could be a “possible” replacement for Sql Server (in some scenarios), its fairly light weight & gaining popularity.

• I cant live without Portable apps on my USB drive, those guys have done a great job!