Programs I use at work

Windows Settings I Like 

- Select which icons appear on the taskbar - right-click on the taskbar and choose "Taskbar settings". Scroll down and choose "Select which icons appear on the taskbar"

- Dark Mode for the Win

- How to Remove the Windows 10 Search Box from the Taskbar

Beyond Compare

Set the diff tool and merge tool by right clicking on the parent repo folder, choose TortoiseGit->Settings. For the Diff Viewer and the MergeTool setting use the following. C:\Program Files (x86)\Beyond Compare 4\BCompare.exe

Notepad++

Instructions on how to install the Obsidian Notepad++ theme.

- Open "%AppData%\Notepad++\" in windows explorer

- From \RichA\Work\CBRE\ComputerSettings\Apps\Notepad++\Themes, copy the Obsidian.xml file into the "Themes" subfolder. Create it if necessary.

- Close Notepad++, Reopen it. 

- Settings->Style Configurator, select the Obsidian style. 

Visual Studio

Since I run applications in IIS and not IIS Express, we need to run Visual Studio as an administrator.

- Right click the program

- Right click on Visual Studio in the taskbar.

- Right click on "Visual Studio 2019" and choose Properties then the Advanced button

- Check the "Run as administrator" checkbox

Screen Resolution

1920 x 1080, "Change the size of text, apps, and other items "125%

Programs

Here is a list of programs I like to use at work. Someday I may need this list to install some of my favorite apps. 
Prioritized 2021-03-12

7-Zip
Beyond Compare
Calendar 2000 CNET Link
CutePDF Writer
DS Clock - Time format "h:mm t", Arial (9 pt.), disable sound, pale green background, black text
Eye Saver - choose overlay from the mode. click on the gear icon next to the Overlay checkbox. Set Opacity to 30%. change the color to black. 

FastResolver
f.lux
FogBugz
IntelliJ IDEA (Java IDE)
Internet Download Manager
Large Text File Viewer - View very large files. 
MS Visual Studio 2013
MS SQL Management Studio
Notepad++
  Add JSToolNpp for JSON viewing support. In the Notepad++ installation folder add the NPPJSONViewer folder and its dll to the plugins folder. You can find this in the Apps folder Rich has. 

  Change Theme to Obsidian Settings > Style Configurator
  Increase font size by one, View > Zoom (Ctrl + Num +, Ctrl + Num -, Ctrl + Num + /) Num=Number pad)

pgAdmin 
PureText
SourceTree - Tools > Options > General > Theme > Dark

- Git GUI 
TightVNC
TortoiseGit

Typora for Windows (MD document editor) - Check Auto Save in File > Preferences > General 

Unlocker 1.9.2
VLC Media Player
WinDirStat

Crimson Editor 3.70 - Has column mode editing [Edit/Column Mode Alt+C ] and it is open source
Also has Convert Tab to Spaces (Document/Tabs & Spaces/...)
Cygwin
Subversion
-- TortoiseSVN
Log Parser 2.2
NeoShooter, 4.0.3b*
Regex Coach
Simple-Adblock.com (Ad Blocking for Internet Explorer)
AdFender

If your menu toolbar is not visible you get to these settings by clicking on the "Firefox orange button in the title bar and then choose AddOns.
Change the Alt+Tab behavior to the FF and Chrome default. In the "Tab Opening" tab, uncheck Location under the "Open new tabs for". This will allow the same behavior as before where Alt+enter opens in a new tab.

Adjust the appearance given to unread tabs.  Under the Appearance button, choose Tabs.  In the Tab Highlighting section, click Unread.  Uncheck enabled. I do not need to be so distracted just because one of my tabs refreshed itself.  For the "Current" Tab uncheck the color.  It is also distracting.

- Omnibar  Instead of Omnibar, customize what is shown in the navigation tool bar. Right-Click in the tool bar and choose customize.  Drag the items you do not want into the Customize toolbar dialog.  I drag everything except the address bar, the refresh button, the stop button, Ad-Block Plus and favorites.  The address bar in FF seems to behave like the omnibar in Chrome.  There is no need for the search box.

IECookiesView
Blank screen saver
- path "C:\WINDOWS\system32\scrnsave.scr"
- Shortcut key Ctrl+Shift+F
- Put the shortcut on your desktop and you can always hit the shortcut to quickly eliminate the screen and the distraction while on a phone call and then instantly return to your work.
Foxit Reader (PDF), 2.0*
Dropper - get the color of any pixel on the screen

Chocolatey - a command line download and installation utility for windows
The following commands use Chocolatey to download and install stuff
"choco install 7zip.install" "choco install 7zip.install" install 7zip and put 7zip in the path.
"choco install gow" installs Gnu On Windows, lightweight alternative to Cygwin


* Older or hard to find version. I may have to login to pages.google.com to get these through a web filter.

"8 billion existing web pages be damned"

"8 billion existing web pages be damned" is my favorite one-liner from the latest article on JoelOnSoftware.com. It is was the idealists said when they said IE8 needed to be strict when rendering web pages.

It is a good description of the chasm between idealistic engineers and compliance with the standards and pragmatists who want to make the software work with the existing customer base.

There is no solution. Each solution is terribly wrong. Eric Bangeman at ars technica writes, “The IE team has to walk a fine line between tight support for W3C standards and making sure sites coded for earlier versions of IE still display correctly.” This is incorrect. It’s not a fine line. It’s a line of negative width. There is no place to walk. They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

That’s why I can’t take sides on this issue and I’m not going to. But every working software developer should understand, at least, how standards work, how standards should work, how we got into this mess, so I want to try to explain a little bit about the problem here, and you’ll see that it’s the same reason Microsoft Vista is selling so poorly, and it’s the same issue I wrote about when I referred to the Raymond Chen camp (pragmatists) at Microsoft vs. the MSDN camp (idealists), the MSDN camp having won, and now nobody can figure out where their favorite menu commands went in Microsoft Office 2007, and nobody wants Vista, and it’s all the same debate: whether you are an Idealist (”red”) or a Pragmatist (”blue”).

_

TIOBE Programming Community Index

I looked at this several years ago. It is interesting to see the long term trends of programming languages.

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

It has a nice graph displaying the trends.

Could not load type error in VS 2005 Web Application

Occurring in an existing project

Occasionally I get an error like

Could not load type 'MOS5.MOSLinks'

when editing a web page. I have seen a lot of posts that address this error. For MOS5 it has always come down to case sensitivity.

I end up comparing the existing version to a previous one. Today I noticed that the MOSLinks.aspx.vb had this at the top of the file.

Imports MOS5.mosLinks

I edited this line in MOSLinks.aspx

Inherits="MOS5.MOSLinks" 

to this

Inherits="MOS5.mosLinks" 

After compiling, the error went away.

Occurring in a newly published project

Make sure the folder you are publishing to is a virtual directory.

Repeat a String n Times

I was looking to repeat a string n times using only T-SQL. My friend found it in this article. This reference may prove useful later.

From SQL BOL 2000:
Replicate - Repeats a character expression for a specified number of times.

Keyboard Shortcuts in Gmail

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6594

c = Compose
/ = put cursor in Search box

Maybe these will save me time

Beyond Compare File Comparison Rules

I was comparing two versions of my code. The right side of my comparison had tabs the left had spaces. Visual Studio 2005 must have put them in there. Beyond Compare (BC), highlighted the differences.

I made BC ignore leading whitespace in the "Everything Else" rule set by going to the Tools/Edit Current Rules/ menu. In the importance tab check "Leading whitespace". The right side was much more indented than the left. I fixed this my going to the General tab and choosing 4 characters = tab stops.

Now BC shows me only the important differences in my code versions.

You can pick rules by using the Tools/Pick Rules menu. I don't know why it did not pick VB when I was comparing two *.vb files.

I am using Beyond Compare version 2.4.3 (build 243).