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Visual Studio IDE Tip

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Every so often you come across something so useful, so fundamental, that you find it hard to believe you did not know about it! Yesterday was one of those days. I have access to an A3 colour printer where I’m working, so I printed out the Visual Studio 2005 Cheat Sheet that I mentioned recently. I’m making an effort to increase my productivity using the IDE, so in a moment’s reflection I thought I’d have a look to see if there was anything useful that I was not using regularly.

If you paste text using CTRL + SHFT + V, you can cycle through all the entries on the clipboard ring! It means you can do multiple copies of different text then move to another location and have access to them all without jumping to and fro.

I’m assuming I’m probably the last to know about this, but just in case I’m not…

Computer Science Classic Texts Online

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I was searching for a copy of Claude Shannon’s seminal paper on information theory, when I stumbled across this collection of links to Classic Texts in Computer Science.

It includes classics such as Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years by Peter Norvig, Frederic P. Brooks’s No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering, the ‘Google’ paper that founded an empire!: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page and Computer Programming as an Art by Donald E. Knuth, to name just a few. Well worth a few hours browsing.

A Pound For Your Thoughts…

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Over at Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project, Wednesday is Tip Day. In this set of tips, a few words (“The days are long, but the years are short”) caught my eye and reminded me of one of my favourite, short pieces of poetry:

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass
– Ezra Pound

.NET SMTP Email

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On several occasions, when working with SMTP email in .NET, I’ve wasted a few hours for a variety of reasons relating to firewalls, virus scanners, relay only from domain addresses and plain stupidity (pointing at the wrong server for instance), to name just a few.

Recently, a colleague fell victim to one such annoying problem. We both went through the list of usual suspects, trying everything we could think of, until we reached the ‘this is crazy!” point.

The Solution: If you’re running a later version of Mcaffee virus protection, you might want to turn off the default behaviour of blocking any outbound traffic port 25!

I’m tempted to mention the maxim of Sherlock Holmes:

“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” – The Sign of The Four, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

There is a useful FAQ for the 2.0 .NET Framework’s System.Net.Mail namespace at System.Net.Mail covering a range of common and advanced scenarios (and a corresponding one for 1.1 here).