I develop on several different pc's like the one that's provided by the customer, my laptop, ... I'm one of those people that likes their custom added keyboard shortcuts, custom color markup in the code. Loosing these settings, or having to set them all again when changing to another computer, would be cumbersome and a waste of time. Luckely for us Visual Studio 2005 provides the ability to export these settings and import them on another computer.

Exporting:

Go to Tools | Import and Export Settings... and the following screen will appear (Figure 1):

Figure 1: Import and Export Settings Wizard

Choose Next and the following screen will be displayed:

Figure 2: Select the settings to export

Check all the settings you want to export and choose Next. In the next step you can provide the location and name for the exported settings:

Figure 3: Specify a name for the exported settings and a location

Choose Finish the wizard will export all your settings. Now you just copy the generated file to your other pc and follow the Importing steps.

Importing:

Go to Tools | Import and Export Settings... The screen of Figure 1 will display. Choose Import selected environment settings and click Next. You get another possibility to first backup the current settings of the new computer. If it's your computer you can decide to not backup the current settings but if it's a pc that's also used by others its a wise precaution to backup first!

Figure 4: Possibility to backup the current settings before importing new settings. 

Then you select the settings you want. In this example I chose the exported settings:

Figure 5: Select the settings to import

Figure 6: Select settings to import

After that you choose Finish and let Visual Studio 2005 import the settings.

Grz, Kris.

I was unaware of this at first, which gave me some frowns on my face when I found out the hard way, but results in SQL Server Management studio are truncated to a certain amount of characters. Normally you won't notice this but when a certain line exceeds that amount you'll notice the truncated text. I experienced it while concatenating several columns casted as varchars.

By default the maximum amount of characters is 256 but you can easily edit this setting by going to Tools | Options. There you set a higher number of maximum displayed characters in the right lower corner of the screen when you navigate to Query results |SQL Server | Results to Text (or to Grid):

Grz, Kris.Recenet

I've been using IE7 since the betas and really liked the new version. Especially the tabbed pages and the overview that you can take of all open windows on 1 page is a great experience. I don't really use the built in RSS capabilities at the moment as I use GreatNews to read my subscribed feeds. The integrated search and the possibility to select a different search engine is something I was fond of when using FireFox. Now it's also integrated in IE.

You can download IE7 or take a tour of the features here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx.

Grz, Kris.

Just noticed on the blog of Microsoft watch that there's a a comparison made, by Microsoft, for their own Visual Studio to Dreamweaver (former Macromedia, currently Adobe).

The comparison page can be found here.

Grz, Kris.

Just saw on the Belgian MSDN site that Kurt Claeys, a member of VISUG like me, wrote an article about State machine workflows in Windows Workflow Foundation. Last week we both attended the .NET 3.0 Framework Development event.

Nice to see that he describes the state machine side of WF. Ingo Rammer did a great explanation about creating workflows on the event but didn't show state machines during his speech.

Grz, Kris.

Currently I drive an Audi A4 and am very satisfied of that car. Luckely because I drive about 1000 - 1200 km / week for my work.

Well, I just found out about this new Audi R8 thanks to Coolz0r's blog. Man does this car look hot or what? I would certainly like to testdrive this one myself.

Grz, Kris.

Hmm, I hope the marketing guys of Microsoft aren't going to keep renaming Atlas. I already found it hard enough to not speak about Atlas anymore but of Microsoft AJAX. Seems it's renamed again. Read my former post about the renaming of Atlas.

Here's the new naming for the moment:

Thanks to Microsoft Watch, I found this blogpost that shows the different flavours of the Vista UI.

Yesterday I visited the .NET Framework 3.0 Development event provided by Microsoft. It was a great introduction to the new upcoming technologies: WPF, Cardspace, WCF and WF.

The first 2 sessions were presented by Peter Himschoot, a regional director for Belgium. The last 2 were presented by Ingo Rammer, the known Austrian regional director.

My impression: WPF looks way cool. It looks quite flexibel and the 3D effects were also looking great. Peter also showed us a WPF application running sandboxed in Internet Explorer and apparently this is called an XBAP application.

CardSpace looks promising but I still need to see it in practice. If it can live up to the expectations it could have a very bright future though.

Then Ingo showed us WCF and later on WF. This was for me the first time I saw WF in action. Boy did I wish I could already use it in my current project, it would a great time saver for the workflows I need to implement.

The last session, and also the most interesting probably, was the one where WCF and WF were used together. I just checked Ingo's blog and as he promised he uploaded the slides and demo applications. You can download them here.

Grz, Kris.

I guess I'm one of those people who like to experiment with new tools. For my feedreading I used google feedreader, RSS bandit, omea reader and yesterday evening I found out about this new feedreader called Greatnews. I didn't have a lot of time to experiment with it but it looks promissing. It supports labelling, of which I'm a fan, and it also stores the downloaded content on the hard drive so you can reread it even when you're offline.

If you want to learn more about you can take a look at the feature list.

Grz, Kris.

Yesterday evening I upgraded my blog from 1.8 to 1.9.

The things I like already is the easier way to navigate to the previous or next day in the statistics (admin pages). Also the better way to navigate in the itemview to navigate to the previous or next blog article. It makes it much easier for someone to start reading a blog post and navigate to the follow up blog items. The tagcloud control is something I like a lot. It doesn't have the same advanced use like the tagcloud control of del.icio.us where you can further select "subtags".

When I downloaded the code and tested it on my laptop I quickly noticed that my IE7 RC1 didn't show the tagcloud correctly. After taking a look at the .css files of the dasBlog theme that I use, I quickly noticed that dasBlog.css contains definitions for the css classes that are used by the tagcloud but they were overridden in the base.css file. Commenting these overrides fixed it for me.

I also made the necessary adjustments to the itemtemplate in order to get my custom macros working. If you're interested in creating custom macros yourself you can check out my article about it: Creating custom macros for dasBlog.

Grz, Kris.