All we’re fond of conditional break points if we need to execute the program until some specific condition exists. We usually give numerical expressions to give conditional break points. If you don’t know about conditional break points, just have a look at MSDN documentation. or this one.

Now the C/C++ programmers are blessed with break with string conditions.

Just put a breakpoint in your source code and right click on that choose “Condition” to see the following window appear. You can give string comparison routines to set the break point.

Once you start debugging, you can see the break point hit on the condition you’ve given

Visual Studio Beta 2 currently supports the following functions (Taken from Habib Heydarian’s blog)

strlen, wcslen, _tcslen, strnlen, wcsnlen, _tcsnlen, strcmp, wcscmp, _tcscmp, stricmp, wcsicmp, _tcsicmp, strncmp, wcsncmp, _tcsncmp,strnicmp, wcsnicmp,_tcsnicmp,_stricmp, _wcsicmp, _strnicmp, _wcsnicmp

This may be changed or updated in the final release. Anyway enjoy your breakpoints!

Visual Studio 2010 provides a new feature to calculate various the code metrics. Sadly this options are only available for Managed projects. Sorry native developers!

It allows to calculate the follow matrices of your project

• Maintainability index
• Cyclomatic Complexity
• Depth of Inheritance
• Class Coupling
• Lines of code

MSDN has described each items given above in detail.

Most of us mainly interested lines of code (LOC) as various other calculations in the project life cycle calculated based on this.

To calculate Code matrix, Right click on the Solution and choose “Calculate Code Metrics”

As you’re seeing above, you can see the information for the entire project and also for the individual items.

It’s possible to filter the results based on given criteria as you’re seeing below.

The coolest things is that, you can export these result to an excel sheet without any pain. Just right click on the item and “Open Selection in Microsoft Excel” as you’re seeing below

You can get it opened in the excel. See, the filters are automatically applied for header items!

To know more check MSDN website.

Firefox has released the Firefox 3.6 beta 1 for developer preview. It Visually doesn’t feature any changes from version 3.5. But it features integration with Windows 7 Taskbar and also Windows 7 Style switching of tabs using Ctrl + Tab. Yes it’s able to display the tabs preview.

Download it here.

(Click on this, if you need a Direct link to Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 English for Windows)

Windows 7 Like Tab Preview

Firefox 3.6 ca now display tab previews like Windows 7(the very same way of Alt+Tab in Windows 7).

This feature is disabled by default in the beta version.

type about:config in your address bar and on the appearing page, search for browser.ctrlTabPreviews. Set this as true.

OK now you’re done. Start Exploring

You can select the required tabs using mouse as well by holiding down the Ctrl+Tab key.

What if you’ve too may tabs? Ctrl + Shift + Tab will show up all tabs in the firefox window. Alternatively you can do this by holding down Ctrl + Tab and Click on “Show All Tabs” displayed in the very same windows

This preview window display features a search box where you can quickly search for the required tab if too many tabs are open. As this Shift key assigned with Ctrl+Tab to show up whole tabs, I’m sadly missing shortcut I previously used to traverse back in order.

You can also close the tabs if necessary in this view.

Windows 7 Taskbar Integration

On hovering the taskbar icon of firefox, you can see the preview of tabs in the aero peek window. To enjoy this feature you will have to enable aero theme in you Windows 7.

On hovering the mouse over the windows displayed in the peek view, surely you can peek to see the window. It’s the real Windows 7 peek feature. You can also close the tabs if necessary in this view.

If you’ve too many tabs open, then it will be displayed as stacked list as your seeing above.

Cool eh! This is a quick post on my first look, if you find something really cool, please do share with me in twitter, facebook, or as a comment in this blog.

It will be very nice if we can temporarily removing the update from the friends. So that I can check each and every updates in ease, on removing seen entries, the next entry should come up. Tweetdeck has a feature like clear seen tweets. This something similar to that. Without deleting the facebook entry, temporarily removing the entries. Something like below, it’d be nice if we put a close button like this per entry to hide the facebook updates. I believe something like this would make the facebook less noisy! What do you think?

When people thinks about photo and image editing, only one name first comes to mind (at least for me), It’s Adobe Photoshop. But it’s heavy, pricey commercial product. What if you can get major of it’s functionality at free of cost under Windows? Cool eh? Here’s the solution Paint .NET written completely in Microsoft .NET

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, andplugins.

It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple image and photo editor tool. It has been compared to other digital photo editing software packages such as Adobe^® Photoshop^®, Corel^®Paint Shop Pro^®, Microsoft Photo Editor, and The GIMP.

It boasts these major features

• Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface
• Layers
• Active Online Community
• Frequently Updated (updates every 4-8 weeks)
• Special Effects
• Powerful Tools – Splines, Curves, Bezier, magic wand, clone stamp, gradient etc…
• Unlimited History
• Free!

Download It Here!

Other variant you can try for free is The GIMP. It’s also an excellent photo editing tool.

Fed up with with the normal notepad of Windows? Or are you want some good flexible and powerful text editor? Here it’s Notepad++. The features are truly amazing @ free of cost.

Besides the excellent editing features( just check it’s menu, you will get amazed) Notepad++ features are

Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding

WYSIWYG

If you have a colour printer, print your source code (or whatever you want) in colour.
User Defined Syntax Highlighting

It allows user to define his own language : not only the syntax highlighting keywords, but also the syntax folding keywords, comment keywords and the operators.
Auto-completion

For most supported languages, user can make his/her own API list (or download the api files from dowload section). Once the api file is ready, type Ctrl+Space to launch this action (see screenshot).
Multi-Document
Multi-View
Regular Expression Search/Replace supported

Full Drag ‘N’ Drop supported

You can open a document by drag & drop. You can also move your document from a position (or even a view) to another by drag & drop.
Dynamic position of Views

The user can set the position of the views dynamically (only in 2 views mode : the splitter can be set in horizontal or in vertical)

File Status Auto-detection

Zoom in and zoom out

Multi-Language environment supported

Bookmark

Brace and Indent guideline Highlighting

When the caret stay beside of one of those symbol { } [ ] ( ) , the symbol beside of caret and its symmetric opposite symbol will be highlighted, as well as the indent guideline (if any) in order to locate the block more easily.

Macro recording and playback

You can save several macros and edit their keyboard shorcuts for the next use.

Another hidden gem in this editor is the build in (Okay, a built in extension) command window. Which is replica of window cmd.exe. This was one of the most helpful one for me when I was working with clearcase server. I was encountering with make files and C++ source code all there was no Visual Studio project file to build. either I’ve to create a dummy project and add these files to Visual Studio and create build commands as the “External tools” option in Visual Studio. But I was truly comfortable with the folder view (I could not see it in the latest version) to manage my files as solution explorer and use the command line to build the project. It was simply awesome and comfortable. Also I don’t need to pay too much memory for Visual Studio as I can do same things here with a lightweight tool. Also it’s integrated with Context menu to easily open the required documents.

It supports plugins and some handy plugins like compare , FTP synchronize etc.

Have a try – Download it here

Some other powerful text editors you can try but I feel this is really comfortable.

• Crimson Editor (Before I am moving to notepad++, I was a hard fan of this one)
• Notepad2
• TextPad

Friendfeed is a cool aggregation service which took aggregates many social media websites. They’ve introduced the service with a cool new feature called “Like this”. You can press the like button to mark your emotions towards the shared content. Finally the number of people liked the story and comments give every author a good satisfaction and inspiration to share more! Of course believe me.

Facebook also introduced the “Like” option to the shared contents inspired from friendfeed. but recently I’ve noticed that, lot of good, bad news are happening around but without having any common sense or understanding people are “Liking Stories” (even myself accidently liked a sad story, which I never supposed to").

This came to my attention when Barack Obama’s page posted the Passing Away for Senator Kennedy. You can see 38,847 people like this story so far.

It surely doesn’t make any sense. It’s a great loss for a nation. People may clicking the like button for showing the interest to the stories or may be just because the news was shared by a “The President” who’s a celebrity on the same platform. It’s method to convey your feeling towards what’s he shared.

Another story is shared by the Indian Army. It’s again the feelings of a nation, a sad news shared by the protectors of great India. But still lot of people liked this story (I accidently clicked by misunderstanding the trooper with trespasser. Anyway I unlike it quickly) .

I think facebook (or any other service providing this feature) should provide an option to control this by the author itself. Because social networks are not simply automated robots. Ultimately it aims people and Sharing their thoughts and information. The services should be flexible and apt to make good sense and value to their users stories and emotions.

Here’s the another one in the tools series. Suppose if you’re preparing for a hands-on demo on your product, or want to prepare some cool tutorials like this guy because you just luv2help.  What’s the easiest and cost effective way to capture high resolution vide of your desktop? Camstudio is a free screen recording (capturing) Software. Don’t think about paying some bucks to get the license, it’s absolutely free and Open Source software.

CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)

CamStudio can also add high-quality, anti-aliased (no jagged edges) screen captions to your recordings in seconds and with the unique Video Annotation feature you can even personalise your videos by including a webcam movie of yourself "picture-in-picture" over your desktop.

And if all that wasn’t enough, CamStudio also comes with its own Lossless Codec that produces crystal clear results with a much smaller filesize compared with other more popular codecs, like Microsoft Video 1.

You have total control over the output of your video: you can choose to use custom cursors, to record the whole screen or just a section of it and can reduce or increase the quality of the recording depending on if you want smaller videos (for emailing to people, for instance) or you can have "best quality" ones for burning onto CD/DVD.

Enjoy the cool tools

Windows provides only limited Window arrangement facilities by default. The usual Tile Vertically, horizontally, cascade windows are the usual options available in Windows. But it was never flexible to use, especially with multiple monitors.

In Windows 7, as part of the Desktop Enhancement new Window Organizing features are more flexible than ever.  Like maximizing, horizontal, vertical resizing, side by side view etc.. The best thing is it’s integrated with keyboard shortcuts and also with some cool mouse gestures. e.g by dragging to the top edge, you can maximize the window, to the right or left edge. you can make it 50% size vertically to make a side-by-side comparison. also you can do these with Keyboard shortcuts as well.

But, Windows 7 is yet to be released. Also not everyone opting Windows 7. This kind of simple features are really handy especially when you’re using a high resolution display and multi-monitor setup.

WinSplit Revolution is a free solution for excellent window management for high resolution and multiple monitors. It permits you to "divide" your screen into several parts: halves, thirds, fourths, etc… For instance, a window can be resized and moved to the left half, the right half, the top, a corner… of the screen. Also it helps you to move a Window to another screen when you’re using multiple monitors.

[Image taken from http://www.winsplit-revolution.com/]

The utility provides some cool features as (don’t confused with the name, take the help page and try each features you will find it very easy). Also Video Demo will help you for an introduction

• Automated window handling (resize, move, reorganize, close tasks)
• Shape – process association
• Global hotkeys and clickable virtual numpad
• Automatic startup
• Automatic update
• Moving a window with mouse (drag’n'go)
• Hotkey configure
• Layout configure
• Fusion between 2 windows
• Minimize/Restore by hotkey
• Mosaic mode

Enjoy this cool utility with your own desktop for painless arrangement of Windows @ free of cost.

In my case, usually use this for dealing windows with multiple monitors and side by side view (for updating review comments ). Also resizing my Google reader windows to 50% horizontal for painless reading and lot more.

Download it here

Google is truly envious about bookmarking. To a great challenge to delicious and Xmarks book mark service, Google widen it’s wings by integrating it with Google Chrome latest release (4.x) See the PPT on how to activate sync in your Google Chrome.

Via – Chromium Blog