In Valid Logic

With the release of Visual Studio 2008, I went and installed it on my laptop and have been starting to play around with .NET 3.5, LINQ, and also doing some IIS7 managed modules.  The recent upgrade and prompted me to re-evaluate some of the tools I use with Visual Studio.

In the past, I've been an avid ReSharper user.  I've been using ReSharper for about 3 years now.  Currently, I'm still on their 2.5 release, since 3.0 wasn't really a compelling upgrade to pay for.  And right now, I'm not really sure if I will continue to use ReSharper.  They currently don't support the new extensions in C# 3.0, and have posted they will have support in January with their Early Access Program.  This is kind of disappointing.  Sure, January isn't far, but would have to use an EAP release?  Most of their EAPs are pretty good, though I've always avoided the ones early on in a new version.  Also, it would be a v4.0, and not yet known if I pay for 3.0 now, would I get 4.0 for free.

On the flip side, I've been starting to look at Devexpress's CodeRush some more.  I had played with it before, though not used it that much.  At times, the templating can get in the way, but just a matter of tweaking the type of code the templates enter and what templates you have enabled to your particular coding style.  Visually, CodeRush is awesome.  I love its color coded identation indicators, its options for things like code analysis, and warming up to the templating.

However, there are a few things I still find holes in.  Namely:

• ReSharper's on-the-fly syntax checking was awesome.  I fat finger things a lot, and it covers my back so it doesn't halt me at compile time.
• Automatically adding namespaces.  I hate typing something up, then not getting intellisense since I realized I need to go to the top and add the System.Xml namespace or something
• Its code generation is at times better than templating.  IE, to create a bunch of properties for private variables, ReSharper rocks.  Alt+Ins, Read+Write Property, and it adds them all at once.
• Close All?  Hello, I don't know why Visual Studio doesn't have this by default.  Right click on a document tab and can Close All… all VS has by default is Close All But This.
• "Find Usages" and "Find Usages Advanced" absolutely rock in ReSharper, beats Visual Studio's Find All References.
• "Find by type" and "Find by filename".  Community Server is a big ass project, so like heck do I know which folder a particular class is in.  I just hit Ctrl+N, start typing User, hit enter, and boom, it loads the User class.

These are the things I haven't been able to find a replacement for.  Some things I could get used to… the code generation could get used to, the Find All References I probably could, but some of the others like error checking, namespacing, and type finding, that would be hard to go with out.

So looking at two options:

1. Switch to CodeRush, get TestDriven.NET (for unit test runner), find some add-ins for the can't-live-without from above.
2. Upgrade to ReSharper 3.0, find some add-ins to add similar indent highlighting.

So my question to those of you out there… anyone know of any add-ins for Visual Studio that cover any of the above?

In the past, we've always gone to this nice musical Christmas light show up in Sacramento.  We had been looking forward to going this year and taking Nick, and also wanted to get Trish's sister and our nephews to go with us.  Their website hadn't been updated yet with this year's schedule, so we were curious when they were going to be up.

This morning, I finally got an email from their newletter with an update, and unfortunately, they were not going to be doing it this year.  A couple of their neighbors didn't like the traffic congestion it caused, and there was a good amount when we went there, and had threatened them with a lawsuit.

Overall, find things like this very disappointing.  I mean, it is Christmas, where is the Christmas spirit?  Second, it is cool!  It is an amazing thing to see.  And they do it to raise money for Food for Families, a local charity.  Last year, they raised $15,000.

This happened to this house in San Jose that used to do a large light arrangement.  Their neighbors petitioned the city to force them to stop.  As a result, the next year, they put up a giant Grinch pointing over at their neighbors.

The update for the place in Sacramento says they might be looking for commercial space next year to do it at, though it just wouldn't be the same.  Such a shame.

In the spirit of Dave Burke's normal "Bits" posts, figured I'd have my first "Nick Bits" to give quick updates on the happenings in his eventful life.

As a given, this post is going to be littered with links to pictures.  Can't really help it.

• Seven weeks!  Where has the time gone?
• No longer in newborn diapers!  His newborn diapers no longer fit!  We finally had to move it up to size 1 diapers… so much bigger than the newborn diapers, though I know he will continue to grow even more.
• Hanging out on his own.  He has gotten to the point now where we can set him down in his little papasan chair by himself and he'd be ok.  He likes to grunt and kick a lot, but is content hanging out on his own for  awhile.  We usually stick around and talk to him and all, though sometimes he just wants to be held and will raise a little fuss.
• Starting to smile!  Ohh yes, he is starting to show his smile.  He has a pretty cute one too.
• Nice walk.  Took some time off yesterday and today, so yesterday we went for a walk to a park nearby.  He was looking pretty good (extra word).
• In his crib!  Today we had a little experiment to see how he was in his own crib.  Not going to have him sleep over night in it, but want to get him used to being in it.  So start putting him in there some while he is awake, then put him in there for some naps, and get him used to being in it before putting him in it overnight.

As it has been previously establish, I handle a couple of servers and a small network in a Sacramento datacenter.  I had set up all kinds of internal monitoring on bandwidth, server health, etc.  But one thing I never did before was to setup external monitoring.  Site monitoring can be invaluable to help manage your site and the services you use.

The reality, things do go down from time to time.  Most of the time it is for maintenance purposes (or at least, it should be).  However sometimes, things do go wrong.  Having quality site monitoring gives you instant notification (if it is something you can handle), history of information on outages, and can even help you keep a provider tied to their Service Level Agreement.

I recently signed up for monitoring with Pingdom, which offers attractive pricing for multi-site monitoring (since one location is never enough), and also monitoring with checks at 1 minute.  These are two important points.

First, most others will offer ever 5 minutes standard, or you can pay extra for 2 minutes.  1 minute resolution gives you the absolute fastest notification, and can pickup the smallest outages.  With 5 minutes, you could almost reboot a server in that time.  That is a definite outage, but it could completely miss it.

The second important thing is multi-site monitoring.  This is a necessity.  Over the weekend, my server had its first actual network issue.  It was outside of my control, but basically, I get access from two providers: Qwest and Verizon Business.  Verizon was having some network issues in the Sacramento area that was causing traffic coming in through them to be dropped, but traffic from Qwest was fine.  This caused a sort of brown out.  Server was accessible depending on which route traffic was coming in from.  With site monitoring that only checked from a single location, it could show the site as operating just fine.  However Pingdom offers like 7 worldwide locations they check from.  This allows for high certainty of its accuracy.

On top of that, you can purchase additional service checks for only $0.50/month, so I have all my main services monitored, and even several of my upstream provider's services monitored, so in the event this happens again, I'll clearly know if it is within my network, upstream, and narrow it down right away.

May sound like a commercial, though Pingdom really is quite cool.  They even give response times on all checks for some basic historical performance data.

The other night, was watching TV with Trish when one of the dozens of prescription drug commercials came on.  Normally just ignore them, but one part of caught my ear.

It was a commercial for Miraplex, which treats restless leg syndrome.  The side effect was that users "may experience increased urges for gambling".  Gambling?

I think that one is easily explained.  Someone in their trials went out to Vegas, Atlantic City, or somewhere like that, lost a bunch of money, and then came home and said the drug made him do it in order to get out of the dog house with his wife.

They have two other interesting side effects: compulsive eating and increased sex drive.  Interesting.  Is one of those really bad?  I mean for some people, Miraplex could take the place of Viagra.

Ohh yeah, one of the main things I love about this time of the year is Starbuck's holiday drinks, including their eggnog and gingerbread lattes.

In store, I was told they weren't going to have them until November 8th, but I think that was when they're officially offering them, with signage and all.  Luckily, my sister works at a Starbucks down in Fullerton (by LA) and she had told me that her store was supposed to have all the stuff for them on November 2nd.

So this morning I figured it'd be worth a shot, so I went in and asked if they had them yet, and sure enough the barista said they do!  Now I am enjoying my first taste of the holiday season with my venti no whip extra hot eggnog latte.