Making VS2012 Tolerable

At first glance, I was mortified with the new VS2012, look and feel. After spending two weeks using it, I have grown to like many of the features; however, there are a couple of key things you need to do to get past the ugly UI.

First disable the capitalization of the menu names. I've been using computers and internet services, since the early 90's, TELNETTing into various MUDS. The idea that using ALL CAPS, is like screaming at someone has been beaten into my head. Let's get out the duct tape, and silence VS. There is a registry hack documented on stackoverflow.

The second thing is to install the Visual Studio 2012 Color Theme Editor. You can get this from the Extensions and Updates option in the now quiet Tools menu. This tool makes it easy to modify the colors, and has a great theme, Dark with Light Editor in it, which I have found to be rather effective. The darkness of the other windows hides a lot of the less important details helping me focus and narrow in on the editor.


Edit

The registry hack still works for VS2013. Just change the path to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\General

UAC and SSRS

If you are trying to access a local SSRS be sure to run either SSMS or IE as an administrator. This is really poor that a major release of both OS and SQL latter they have still not fixed this.

You can reference here for more detailed steps and read the connect ticket. If your going to tout about building more robust software don't make me run your web browser as an admin!

The worst part of this is when you login with SSMS it gives you no warning, just everything is disabled. It wasn't until I browsed to the report manager and was greated with did it all click:

User 'domain\joeuser' does not have required permissions. Verify that sufficient permissions have been granted and Windows User Account Control (UAC) restrictions have been addressed. 

Baby Smash!

This app must be five years old and like his brother before him, Moshe has found he loves Baby Smash!

Notice though he is smashing the wife's computer, he's not allowed to smash on mine.

Thank you Scot Hanselman again

IE 8/9 Not Enough Space Issue

We had an interesting bug report come in today. One of our customers who is stuck using IE8, reported that the spell checker in our rich text editor was causing the browser to lock up.

We are using CKEditor with the SSL Web Spell Checker product. So first thing I did was fire up IE, and test it out. I was greeted with a Javascript error of "Not enough storage is available to complete this operation." I verify my machine has 4GB of memory, plenty of disk space, paging file etc. Everything seems fine.

So I launch into the debugger and am greeted with: this.$.createStyleSheet(h)


The lightbulb went off in my head. This page is compromised of many small user controls written in ASP.Net. Sometimes our developers will put their style blocks in the control since they are building at a component level. IE stops processing style tags after the 31st. I guess it also causes an exception to be thrown if you try and add one and your past that point.

Just one more reason, I am pushing our customers to Chrome

USPS Woes

I heard recently that the USPS is facing major cutbacks. Thinking about this led me to an idea. What if the USPS provided a pay-to send email service for every postal customer in the united states. A major problem with email today is the amount of spam, and this is in part due to the extremely low cost of sending email out.

If the USPS provided a paid email service which charged the sender, a nominal fee that is cheaper to send paper mail, and at the same time more expensive then email, I think you would find a large audience that would adopt this. Since I am neither the post master general, or a politician, I'll leave all the thousands of details alone.

Is it not time for the USPS to go green?