Dev Thoughts

Now that I’ve actually been using Visual Studio for a lot of development work at home I’ve encountered some annoyances. One of these has been that sometimes when switching between windows using the Ctrl+Tab/Ctrl+Shift+Tab shortcuts it gets stuck and refuses to take any more keyboard input until I click on it with the mouse.

A quick glance at the problem reveals that it’s a focus issue with the window that pops up listing the open documents, where if you switch quickly enough it doesn’t get time to properly return focus to the main window.

Luckily there’s a handy solution out there that fixes the problem, you simply swap what the Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+F6 keyboard shortcuts are bound to (but don’t forget the Shift variants).

Excel has to be one of the most versatile tools available on a computer today. Some may think of it as just a spreadsheet application which accountants and other business people use to monkey around with boring financial numbers. While it is useful for those purposes I have found it extremely handy at a wide range of programming related tasks.

Just off the top of my head I have used Excel (in a programming capacity)

• to test and debug algorithms before implementing them in code,
• as a form for code inspections where a Ruby scripts generates and processes them,
• an analyser for comparing benchmark data,
• as a nice text viewer for viewing output from log files,
• a simple code generation tool (though I’m somewhat ashamed to admit this).

Additionally someone with far too much spare time has used it to create a 3d engine!

Its main power comes from the fact that it is a powerful programming environment wrapped up in a fairly good user friendly. But by far the most stand-out feature is that it gives instant feedback to changes made in the data or code. This makes it very useful for rapid prototyping of algorithms and formulae as you can direct the results to a graph and immediately see if something doesn’t work.

However it’s not wholly without fault, as it has some annoying habits of trying to be too helpful. Chief among these is auto formatting input to things such as dates, which is especially annoying when reading in log files or other generated data.

Regardless once you learn how to avoid its eccentricities, Excel will become one of the more useful tools in your development arsenal.

(When I say Excel I am talking about any modern programmable spreadsheet application, it just so happens that I use Microsoft’s spreadsheet program almost exclusively, hence I use that name.)