I give technical presentations from time to time, and use Visual Studio frequently during these presentations. Lots of people have asked me what Theme is use because they think the black background and the font colors are nice.

Here’s what you have been looking for: I use a theme made by Roby Conery. Rob’s theme mimics the Ruby color scheme in TextMate (text editor for Mac).

I use TextMate when programming on my Mac. I typically write programs in Ruby or Python, and I must admit that TextMate has a very nice color scheme for these languages. I especially like the black background because it eases my eyes when looking at the screen.

Here are some samples of this theme:

As you can see, the performance is very good. And by the way, Windows is running inside a virtual machine (VMWare Fusion).

And no, Visual Studio is not pre-loaded into memory. The startup was initialized right after the machine was booted.

Just picked up that Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 CTP. Go and grab the bits here and enjoy!

Lars Wilhelmsen started this meme and he is curious about what addins and customizations for Visual Studio 2008 other fellow developers use in their daily work. Lars actually uses lots of useful tools that I’ve never heard of, so it was quite useful for me to read his list.

In my daily practice as a software craftsman I use a lot of tools, but very few of them integrate with Visual Studio. Therefore I would like to raise another question, and that is; what other tools beside Visual Studio 2008 do you have in your tool belt when developing applications based on the .NET platform?

Here is my list of addins and customization to Visual Studio 2008:

Addins

• TestDriven.NET – A test-runner that supports various sets of testing frameworks; NUnit, MBUnit, XUnit etc.
• AnkhSvn – Subversion Source Control into Visual Studio
• Theme: Distant Shores
• Font: Consolas 15pt

Templates and snippets

• PresentationModel snippet – A snippet I originally created for personal use. I use it when I’m developing WPF application and use the Presentation Model (Mode-View-ViewModel) design pattern. The snippet generate properties

Shortcuts

• Alt + shift + F10 – Activate smart tag. I use it to import namespaces and generate implementation of interfaces that my class implements
• Ctrl + K, K – Bookmark a line of in source file
• Ctrl + K, N – Moves to the nest bookmark in document
• Ctrl + K, P – Moves to the previous bookmark
• Ctrl + B, C – Clear all bookmarks in file
• Ctrl + J – IntelliSense
• Shift + Alt + Enter – full screen
• Ctrl + E, C – Add comment
• Ctrl + E, U – Remove comment
• Ctrl + Shift + B – Build solution

Other tools (developer tool belt)

• XUnit – Unit testing framework
• NUnit – Another unit testing framework
• Moq – Mocking framework
• RhinoMocks- Another mocking framework
• Boo – One of my new favorite languages on the .NET platform. Why? Syntax extensions with macros. You can actually extend this language with your own syntax
• Specter – Unit testing framework implemented in Boo. What’s nice about Specter is that it’s based on the BDD ideology and has a nice DSL for writing those test cases. I also use it for writing tests for code implemented in C# and other .NET languages
• SharpDevelop – Open Source IDE which I use when writing Boo code
• WiX (Windows Installer Xml) – A neat tool for building Windows Installation packages. My friend Jon Arild has some really good posts about this tool
• FinalBuilder – Use this tool for Build Automation and release management. What’s nice about this tool is that it represents the build process in a Visual manner. This certainly lowers the bus factor
• Automise – Visual Batch scripting tool. With this tool it’s really easy to automize manual procedures
• CruiseControl.NET – Continuous Integration (my favorite for years!)
• MSBuild – The main build tool for the .NET platform. Did you know, when compiling your solution in Visual Studio, you are actually starting an MSBuild script? I use MSBuild to script build tasks like compile and unit testing
• Reflector - If you need to have a look at or reverse some compiled .NET applications (MSIL), this is the tool
• Tortoise – Client for Subversion which integrate nicely into your Operating System shell
• Blend – Use Blend for creating GUI (XAML) for Silverlight and WPF
• XAMLExport – Illustrator to XAML export
• XAML Debuggers (Mole, Woodstock) – Use them for XAML debugging
• jQuery

Let me emphasize that I’m using lots of tools, and I’ve probably forgot some of them, but this is the tools that immediately came into my mind.

There is no good reason for me not to use Visual Studio IDE extensions like ReSharper or CodeRush. I’ve several times started to use ReShaper, but there has been something missing every time. For instance, the last time I took it for a test run they didn’t support LINQ, which they do now. I have actually decided to install ReSharper after I’ve published this post, and then take it out for a new test run.

I’m also interested to hear what other fellow developers use for Visual Studio 2008 and other tools they use as a software craftsman. I’m tagging the follow persons:

• Tore Vestues
• Børge Hansen
• Anders Hammervold
• Pål Fossmo
• Sondre Bjellås
• Joar Øyen
• Mark Nijhof
• Hans Olav Norheim
• Kenneth Solberg
• Alex York

This isn’t yet another post about the release of Visual Orcas 2008 Beta 2. Many of you probably know about the release. I want to point out some important installation notes posted by Scott Guthrie concerning installing VS2008 Beta 2. There are two steps you have to go through post installation.

First run a batch file that will fix the System.Web.Extensions.dll assembly version binding policy. If you don’t run this batch file your applications built with VS 2005 will have a dependency with .NET 3.5. Which means that your .NET 2.0 applications will use the System.Web.Extensions.dll for .NET 3.5.

Second step is to reset some old VS 2008 Beta 1 settings. If you don’t do this you are going to experience some IDE performance slowness in the Beta 2 version.

You can read about the new features here:

• Web designer and CSS support
• JavaScript debugging
• Code editing improvements
• Nested Master Page support
• Scott Guthrie's blog

I just installed Beta 2 on my laptop, and it went smoothly. I actually was so satisfied with VS 2008 Beta 2 that I removed VS 2005 from the computer. I know this is a drastic move, but I don’t use this computer for any production code anyway. All of my work development environment are installed and run on virtual machines.

I remember when I installed a beta of VS 2003 five/six years ago – yes, I just realize how quickly the years have gone by since then. I remember that there was no built in refactoring support, no framework for unit testing, no JavaScript debugging and intellisense and no LINQ. Back then it was the .NET framework itself that was mind blowing. The managed code model with the Garbage collector that could even turn average joe in to a decent developer. I’m glad Microsoft went for the Managed approach and I will say that they have rally succeeded in developing a platform in .NET. Their managed to built support for the .NET platform into their product line as well. Heck, you can even write your stored procedures in C# for SQL Server 2005 or C# in the browser using Silverlight. Safari (browser for Mac OS) support Silverlight, which mean that you can run .NET code on an Apple computer! And I must not forget to mention the products that have been built up on top of the .NET framework. Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, SharePoint, BizTalk and of course all the great products that have been developed by 3^rd party developers for their customers. And there are many more examples (XNA, DLR etc).

The community around the platform has grown and the ecosystem is growing larger for every day. DotNetNuke, CruiseControl.Net, Spring.NET, NHibernate, NUnit, NMock, Castle Project, NDoc, NDepend, DasBlog etc. I use many this frameworks in my daily job at Abeo and some of them are must have tools for me.

It’s a good time to be a developer and I’m having lots of fun!

I really hope everyone is enjoying their summer vacation. My girlfriend (Astrid) and I are heading for Greece in a week :)