Visual Studio 2005 Settings

Visual Studio 2005 is definitely one of the richest development environments I've ever experienced. This can be a good or bad thing. If you are new to programming a language within Visual Studio 2005 it can be helpful for learning. However if you are an experienced programmer you probably liken it to being babysat. Below are my Visual Studio 2005 Advanced Programmers settings.

TV: Treeview

1. Within Visual Studio 2005 open Options
1. If I have to tell you where this is then you probably don't need these settings
2. Stop showing Start Page at IDE startup
   
1. TV: Environment -> Startup -> change At startup to Show empty environment
3. Show line numbers
   
1. TV: Text Editor -> All Languages -> check Line numbers
4. Change indenting to use Tabs
1. TV: Text Editor -> All Languages -> Tabs -> click Keep tabs
5. Turn off paranoid autocomplete
1. Text Editor -> C# -> IntelliSense -> uncheck Show completion list after a character is typed

Archiving & Compression Utilities

We’ve all been using archiving & compression utilities forever, whether our first one was tar & bz or PKZip. As compression algorithms have evolved newer archiving utilities have come out that promise new functionality and better compression. Two of them are Rar (WinRar) and 7z. A few months ago I switched from WinRAR to 7z.

7z promises better compression and is free/open source. Upon first using it I encountered little difference from other archiving/compression utilities and it supports all the right-click actions you would expect. Up until now I haven’t had a chance to compare RAR compression to 7z since I haven’t compressed anything large and assorted with it.

I needed to zip up BizTalk 2006 Developers edition CD, which is 450MB. This is my first test.

Results:
RAR (Best) compression – 123MB
7z (Ultra) compression – 92MB

Conclusion
7z offers better compression with best compression than RAR and is FREE. Worried about switching to 7z? It can compress 7z & ZIP files as well as extract RAR archives.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/

See also: http://www.maximumcompression.com/