Rob Herbst

Being the keyboard kind of guy that I am, I’ve totally gotten back into the Vim editor. I had used it years ago, and discovered it again recently when I was looking for a text editor for some Ruby code I was writing.

It’s one of those power tools that most people, myself included, really didn’t like very much the first time you use it. But then you achieve a certain level of proficiency and you can slice and dice any text you have to edit so quickly that you become very spoiled.

I also have switched to using a black background. I found a great dark color scheme for Vim called Moria, that I would highly recommend. It’s a very readable, easy on the eyes scheme, that just seems right to me. I’ve posted an image of my setup using the abbrev.rb file from Ruby 1.8.5.

If you like using keyboard shortcuts, you owe it to yourself to try the Vim text editor. It does take some time to get used to a modal editor, but if you are going to be editing lots of text, it’s time well spent.

I still really like the text editor built into Visual Studio and will continue to post any tips and keyboard shortcuts that I find useful there too.

If you have never used WinDBG or the SOS extensions before, read the following blog posts by Mike Taulty:

• A word for WinDBG – Part 1
• A word for WinDBG – Part 2

Mike walks you through a sample debugging session with WinDBG. Then in the second part, he focuses on the SOS extensions for .NET debugging. With the SOS extension you can do some seriously cool stuff:

• View thread/threadpool info
• View the finalizequeue
• See what’s allocated on the managed heap
• Determine what is keeping your managed object from being finalized by viewing it’s “roots”

If you have Visual C++ installed you can actually use SOS calls from the Visual Studio debugger! Read Mike’s post, that walks you through the setup and use of SOS from inside Visual Studio. As Mike points out, make sure you go to the project properties, choose Debug, and then check “Enabled unmanaged code debugging”. Be prepared the very first time you do this, it might be slow because the symbols have to be downloaded/loaded.

If you write code, you have to check out Krugle! It’s a search engine for code. Let’s take it for a test drive.

1. Go to http://www.krugle.com/
2. In the Search box enter Activator.CreateInstance
3. Select C# as the language
4. Click the search button.

Pretty cool. But wait, there’s more!

1. Click on the ActivatorFactory.cs from the Apache ibatis project. This came up as the first result when I searched.
2. You’ll see a tab open, that contains the source file, and a tree view of all the files in the project on the right. It would be even better if the code was syntax highlighted.
3. From there you can save the file locally, or browse the project in the tree view.

Fiddler is my favorite HTTP debugging tool. It shows you performance statistics, multiple views of the HTTP request and responses, and even an HTTP request builder.

This MSDN article will help you get started.

Lutz Roeder’s Reflector for .NET is a tool that I think every .NET developer should have in their toolbox.

Reflector also support an Add-In model. There are a bunch of Add-In’s available - everything from code metrics, to code coverage to dependency graphs.

I originally found the link to SmartFTP on Scott Hanselman’s blog post listing what tools he installs on a freshly paved machine — thanks Scott!

This is the best FTP client I’ve used and it’s free!