Those who have worked with me for any length of time will know that I’m always looking for ways to improve my ability as a programmer. It may be in researching the latest available tool libraries (my current new favourite is StoryQ, which is great for developing BDD-style tests, and NSubstitute, which is as easy to use as Moq, but without those annoying calls to .Object), or how to write better, more reliable, build scripts. Either way, learning new skills and refining existing skills is an essential part of any craft (I’m deliberately steering clear of the ongoing “software development isn’t a craft”/“oh yes it is” argument – this still applies to trades and scientific disciplines).
This week I have been focusing on knowing my tools, and being a developer who works with Microsoft technologies, those tools inevitably centre around Visual Studio. One way to increase your productivity is to reduce the time you spend doing pointless activities, or rather, when faced with two ways of achieving something, to choose the quicker way. The most obvious form for a programmer is to learn to let go of the mouse; a little strange maybe, especially in an operating system that defines itself around the use of the mouse, but it really does act as a great big brake on your productivity. When I first started playing guitar, it would take me several seconds to visualise the necessary finger patterns in my head, and then position my fingers on the fret board. Now after much practising, I can see an F# minor chord written down and play it without having to even think about it.
The first step was to get rid of all the toolbars and icons. If there are no icons on screen, there’s not much point using the mouse to click them! The commands are still all there, and they can be accessed via the menu bar if I get really stuck. As a bonus, suddenly I have much more viewable area to concentrate on what really matters – the code.
So my first shortcut to learn was how to stop a debug session. I knew F5 to launch the debugger, but I always clicked on the Stop icon to stop it; well, it turns out that Shift-F5 was my new best friend. So far, so easy, and not too much time saved.
The next useful one was the Surround-with snippet; this is part of the excellent Resharper which really takes the heavy lifting out of Windows programming). I was working with code which was throwing exceptions, and there was no exception handler. Before, I would have used the mouse to click just above the offending line of code, then typed in the standard try/catch blocks, then selected the offending line of code and cut’n’paste it into the try {} block, then clicked into the catch {} and add the exception handling. That’s a lot of pointless mouse and keyboard work. Now, using the keyboard, I would select the line of text (Shift-End to select to the end of the line), then Ctrl-K,S to bring up the Surround-with snippets, then type try and press Enter to surround my code with a try/catch block and automatically position the cursor in the catch {} block ready to select my exception type. Intellisense camel-case matching helped, so I only had to type in CE to match the ConstraintException I was trying to catch, hit Enter, and job done.
There are only so many hours in the day - reclaim yours by learning how to use the tools you have to get more done in less time.
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