3 Things I Never Knew I Needed
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It’s been a busy old week. I’ve been applying for my Authorize.net
gateway and merchant account, e-Junkie, arguing with PayPal, writing
the C2X website, and many other wonderful things. Over the last month,
I’ve discovered 3 things I didn’t know I couldn’t live without.
DreamHost
I have thus far
been very happy with DreamHost, to the point where I have moved all my
hosting (with the exception of this blog) to them. The support is
quick, the one-click installers work a treat. I particularly like the WordPress and Subversion
installers. Now, I host each project’s Subversion repository under its
own domain at DreamHost. It’s fantastic. The full shell access is also particularly useful, and uncommon for a shared host.
Top marks guys.
VisualSVN
I’ve been a happy AnkhSVN user for years. AnkhSVN, for those who don’t know, is the Open Source Subversion plugin for Visual Studio.
The writers seem, for whatever reason to be struggling with VS2008
support. I persisted with it as long as I could, but it trashed my
working copy too many times, so I had to ditch it. My colleague Rob
introduced me to VisualSVN, a very reasonably priced plugin for visual
studio that integrates the TortoiseSVN
shell extensions into Visual Studio. Works like a dream. The folks
behind it seem pretty switched on too. Their company is registered in
the BVI, which tells me they’re not afraid to think differently, and
their customer service is good. I emailed them and said I wanted to buy
it, but didn’t want to pay through Digital River for fear of being scammed, so they emailed me a link to pay through Plimus. Nice work guys.
ReSharper
I’ve
been developing commercial .Net applications since 2001. That’s 7 years
of working without ReSharper that I can’t get back. People have been
telling me for years to use it, but for some reason, I didn’t. Thanks
to Rob again for convincing me. It is truly awesome. Awesome in a way
that would make you a fool for ignoring it for 7 days, let alone 7
years. If you don’t have it, get it. Really. No, REALLY.
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Did you try the new AnkhSVN 2.0 before you made the switch to VisualSVN?
(We used the last 6 months for a near rewrite of the old AnkhSVN to build a real SCC provider for VS 2005 and 2008)
Bert
Heh, two mentions in the article, and not a single link!, You’re
Cheeky i’ll give you that Mr H. And just for that I’m going to withhold
all the other useful tools I’ve been hoarding for years! You’re luck
you found unlocker by yourself!
Sheesh
Your buddy,
Rob
I tried VisualSVN on the above recommendation, but I wasn’t keen. It
didn’t seem to add any real value to TortoiseSVN. Also, I found it
really annoying that it added stuff to SVN without asking. I have to
keep removing the .vcproj files Qt creates as intermediates. Grrrrr.
Is there an equivalent of resharper for C++. VisualAssist has some
useful refactoring, but it isn’t a dedicated refactoring tool.
@Bert – yes, I was updating my install weekly with the dev snapshots
to try and get a build that worked. There may have been other
contributing factors, but VisualSVN doesn’t trash my working copy, and
it costs pennies. As much as I like to use OSS where possible, if it
starts to cost me time I’ll drop it like a hot potato.
@Rob – Typepad is strictly no-follow, so don’t expect any Google juice. :¬)
@Andy, all VisualSVN seems to offer is VS integration for Tortoise.
That alone is worth the tiny cost for me. I know it adds things to
source control, but for me, but that has so far been desirable. I
haven’t used VisualSVN with C++ or QT, so I’m not sure why you’re
hitting problems. I know with Tortoise, you can add individual files to
the Ignore list, does that not work?
I don’t really like the idea that it is adding stuff to SVN behind
my back. Also I spend a lot of time in VS inside the VisualAssist,
which it doesn’t integrate with. I was worth a try, but didn’t do it
for me. I can see how some people might like it though.
@Andy – I’m guessing you’re using Subversion + VS but without any integrated provider.
I don’t know this for sure, but I think all VS source control tools
implement a component interface and register themselves as providers,
so it’s likely that it is Visual Studio that is telling the provider to
add it to source control.
I guess you also need to remember that if you’re developing in C++,
you’re being punished for something you did in a past life, so don’t
expect an easy ride :¬)
I can only second what you said about ReSharper. Particularly, for
people that code alone, this tool is God sent. It feels like I have a
partner continuously checking on my code. At this point, for me, VS
without ReSharper is simply a different tool altogether. I wish
IntelliJ IDEA would feel this good!