Windows Command Line tip – took me 15 years to find this!

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Some people love the command line, some hate it. It certainly has it uses and if you spend a bit of time learning the commands it can speed up some tasks enormously. If you dabble in Linux then the command line is a necessity for setting up and configuring the OS.

There are a bunch of shortcuts on Windows that you can use to help – one of the most useful is the paste shortcut. A bit long winded - ATL-SPACE, E, ENTER - but certainly easier than typing in a long path or filename. You can also right click and select the MARK option to copy text from the command window.

However probably the most useful (and most hidden) is using TAB / ALT TAB to cycle through a list of files in the current folder. You can type a partial filename in and it will filter the list of files using that. Saves ages typing and mistyping filenames….

Visual Studio & Subversion – working with multiple versions of the same solution file

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So your using Subversion to manage your Visual Studio projects, and each time you create a new branch you get another solution file with the same name. When you want to open more than one copy in Visual Studio how do you know which is which as they all just display the solution name at the top, and your MRU list is filled up with multiple versions of the same file???

I used a modified version of the solution on this page for a while, but recently found a much easier and more reliable way to do this. When you check out your branch use the MKLINK command to create a link to the original file. You can call it whatever you want so your MRU list is readable, and as it just silently links to the underlying file any changes you make are made to the original solution file. Once you’ve finished with your branch you can just delete the link file – simple…

The MKLINK command must be run as Administrator – fire up your command prompt as admin, and get into the correct folder, then run:

MKLINK myLinkedFile.lnk.sln myOriginalFile.sln

(obviously replacing the names with the correct ones). The link file must have a .sln extension otherwise it won’t open. You can then open the linked file in Visual Studio as normal.

Edit: If you use .lnk.sln as the extension on your link file, then you can add this to your exclude filter on Subversion so you don’t accidentally add it to the repo.

Code – by Charles Petzold

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Just finished this book recently. It’s an excellent book to introduce you to what’s going on inside your computer, or as a refresher if you’ve forgotten what goes on. With the multitude of development tools / languages / libraries available to the modern programmer you sometimes forgot what goes on under the hood when you write those few lines of code.

Follow the link to Amazon UK…

How to make a million$ in the iTunes App Store

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Bit of a misleading title as I haven’t found the answer to that question yet. If you have please post it below!

My first app (xmascracker) didn’t sell one copy, but managed a fairly reasonable thousand or so downloads once it was free. It even had a 5 star review. A few things I have learnt for next time:

  • 69p/99c might not seem like much but people expect an awful lot for that few pence these days – just read some of the reviews by people demanding their money back after they were forced to hand over their hard-earned for a piece of cr@p
  • The app store has its fair share of junk and scams. Some of the so called top apps are clearly paying for good reviews. Again just have a good look through and see how unrealistic and over the top some of the reviews are
  • The catch 22 situation – can’t get in the top 50 listings without selling lots of copies and can’t sell lots of copies without getting in the top 50 listings…
  • You probably need to market your app in some way rather than hoping people will find it
  • If it’s a paid app a free version with restricted features is going to result in more/some sales
  • Whatever unique idea you have has probably already been done, but nothing is stopping you doing it better (unless it’s patented or you would be infringing a copyright)

Using Dropbox for sharing your bookmarks between devices

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Cloud storage is useful for a number of things. This article shows how to use Dropbox to make a webpage that you can use to share your bookmarks between your devices, regardless of OS/browser. You could create the whole thing in one page and edit that as you want to add more bookmarks, but the approach used here means you just need to edit a simple text file – no html knowledge is needed once the initial setup is done.

Its a fairly simple structure – a single htm file, a css file and a text file with the links in. The links are grouped and the file is parsed to create a menu across the top. Click on the category and some jQuery script only shows the links in that category, with each link showing up as a box. The urls.txt file needs to be edited in a decent text editor (search for Notepad ++ if you don’t have one). If you try to edit it in Windows Notepad it will not wrap the lines properly. Currently the categories can’t have spaces in – that would’t be that difficult to change though.

The css can easily be changed to suit. The files are then stored in the Dropbox public folder, and all you can set your computers and devices to have their homepage as the shared Url of the main htm file. If you want to add a new bookmark, just open the urls.txt file and put it in there. Once saved its ready to go.

The attached zip file has all of the files needed. Feel free to download and modify to suit. It should work on most modern browsers. There is a dependency on jQuery but that is downloaded rather than stored locally, and the css does use some css3 stuff, but that could be easily changed.

It should go without saying that the urls should never contain any personal or secure information. This link is effectively open to the public so should only contain urls with no bits of secure query string in. To be honest if you find your using a site that has secure information in the query string you probably don’t want to use that site anymore…

Would be nice to have a image of the website instead of a static logo…. that’ll have to wait for Part 2…

Download the source

Note: The code published here is licensed under the GPL3 license. This means you are free to modify and use. For the full text of the license please follow this link.