Tools #3: Ditto clipboard manager, the ultimate tool in your pocket

Whether you admit it or not, it doesn’t change the fact that the most frequent operation on our PC is in a way or another copy/paste. I copy and paste all the time: code snippets, files, links, you name it.

The problem with copy pasting is that it is one way ticket, you can’t go back and browse all your copy and paste history, search through it and find everything you copied or pasted.

Ditto is the tool that solves all your problem and it does that in such a way that you don’t even observe that it exists on your laptop or other devices. In short, Ditto is a clipboard manager that is managing all your copies and pastes, the number of occurrences it keeps in the SQLite database is configurable. I always have there a 1000. It is relatively good handled by the DB when you do searches, and it is a big enough number for keeping your most important recent copies and pastes.

I also like that it contains files and even tables from Excel or Word, that is pretty cool.

You call that by pressing Ctrl + ~

This way when you want to copy and paste multiple snippets of code, you don’t need to switch between the editors, just copy, copy, copy and than paste, paste, paste, and when you are not sure what you should paste use the search feature.

P.S. There are some problems in Windows 8 interactions with Ditto, in short there were made fixes in beta branch and there is a download for windows 8, here you can find the corresponding thread: http://sourceforge.net/p/ditto-cp/discussion/287511/thread/2d4c8635

Thank you, and I hope you all will have this great tool in your belt, and it will save you a lot of time.

Tools I can’t imagine my dev life without #2: XSLT Debugger in Visual Studio

Hi,

While a lot of us .NET developers at some point in our life used XSLT, it was never easy. Of course our logic and XSLT syntax should help us to understand different things but that is not always the case. Probably because it’s almost always a black box abstraction.

In my last project we use a lot of XSLT for generating all kind of documents with all kind of restrictions and filtering, usually you have an XML document, you got an XSLT and a XslCompiledTransform object which you use to actually get your transformed document. But because of the thing that it is like a black box all you can do is sit back and hope you did well the XSLT thing and you’ll get needed document out of the box. At least this is what I thought until this week.

This week I needed to change one of my XSLT document templates, because I was getting a very strange error at document generation. I thought at this moment that I couldn’t do it without debugging and I was hoping that somewhere in the world existed a nice tool which could manage XSLT debugging and which would have at least a trial period. I googled “debug XSLT”, and guess what I found? This link which gave me the power I didn’t even imagined to have without having to install some third-party tools.

It is incorporated directly in Visual Studio !!! I tried it in VS 2008 and VS 2010, Visual Studio 2010 even got a profiler for XSLT, so you could measure your transformation sheets and make reports on that. Isn’t that great? Plus you got a lot of way to do debugging. And now some screenshots.

1. While stylesheet open click on XML => Debug Xslt

2. Choose input XML file

3. Debug and actually see the magic ! In parallel you can see the output.

Same things could be done in VS 2010

And you automatically get the html output. Plus you can always see the source of html.

So get ready to a new era of XSLT debugging with all the tools you are used to: Locals, Watches, Immediate Window and others as well.

Link for Download

Tools I can’t imagine my dev life without #1: Ninite.com

Hi,

Last day of March and I want to start today this new series of posts where I’ll try to share with you some of the gems already there, but I suppose the majority of developers in the world don’t really know about.

So one of these gems is site Ninite.com.

Every time when I need to install a fresh version of Windows somewhere (and as a programmer I do this more than I would like to) and there is an internet connection I use Ninite installer to install all the software that is needed. It does have almost everything there, and the list is growing.

Once you’ve chosen the programs you’d like to install, it will generate an installer for you, and you should save it on your machine and download it. Now after you’ve downloaded it, run it and you will see something like these (it depends on the programs you’ve chosen).

After that, you’ll just need to wait while all of your programs will finish to install, and that’s all!

Awesome!!! Isn’t it?

Ideas, concerns, suggestions, tips & tricks – I’m waiting for all these. Take care.