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Useful VS2010 plug-ins
VS2010’s built in extensions manager is a really nice addition. There are already a lot of very good plug-ins available on it. Here are some of the ones I have installed that I find useful, you might too. Normal caveats apply about me not being responsible if one of these plug-ins causes your computer to catch fire and runs off with your wife/husband etc. *updated* with new plug-ins.
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Setting up Mercurial Under IIS 6
I was just looking at setting up Mercurial on my Windows Home Server and found some good blog articles. My first one was on Jeremy Skinner’s blog here which shows how to configure it under CGI on IIS 7. I’d like to run it as an ISAPI extension though since that would be much faster, I then found this blog article from Matt Hawley which shows how to configure Mercurial as an ISAPI extension under IIS 7. The final blog article was from another Matt here that shows how to install it under IIS 6. Now I’d already figured...
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Performance Profiling .NET Applications Using the Visual Studio Profiler
When I consult with development teams, at some point performance always rears its ugly head. When I code review something I often find it overly complex with lots of caching, “clever” code etc. and when I ask why the code is this complex the answer is usually for performance, E.g. “we need to cache the results as that’s an expensive operation”.
At this point I usually ask if they have any evidence to show how expensive the operation is, all too often the answer is “no”. Once again another developer is the victim of premature optimisation.
Now don’t get me wrong, optimising...
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Activating AHCI mode after installing Windows on IDE mode
I recently just rebuilt my home PC and installed Winodws 7 on it. It was a nice fast, smooth install and generally went without a hitch.
That is, without a hitch until I discovered I'd installed Windows whilst the motherboard's SATA controller was in IDE mode and not AHCI mode. Why is this important? Well without AHCI you don't get nice things like power saving, native command queuing etc and that impacts the power consumption, speed and noise of your drives.
Of course that does rely on having a drive that supports those features, since like most newish drives mine do, I...