I’m constantly seeing references to PowerShell in Visual Studio 2010 related tutorials, today I came across this thing… PowerShell and HTML5, and would love to get your feedback on a proof-of-concept.

This prototype uses the System.Net.WebClient class to “bootstrap” itself, and from there, awesomenes ensues.

From a PowerShell prompt, run the following command:

iex (New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadString(“http://bit.ly/e0Mw9w”)

 

Currently I use Console2 for my command prompt… might just have to change that now :)

After using Dreamweaver CS3 to CS5 for a longgggg time I had a go at knocking up an android app with a demo copy of Dreamweaver CS5.5 today and I was very disappointed indeed at the interaction between DW and the SDK… a supposed “Easy install”, just does not work.. and even after updating dreamweaver (from the copy I downloaded to demo 10 mins prior) it still did not work like the tutorial outlines… simply bums out on an error that flashes past so fast you have to print screen like bruce lee to catch it…

Turns out after a few bruce lee moves today that the Android emulator does not start up fast enough for dreamweaver… I have a nice looking app in DW that just can’t install to a virtual machine fast enough, although my work laptop is more than powerful enough to do this…

And why is it that I need to have a mac in order to develop iOS5 versions?… massive limitation…. probably self explanatory but needless to say if someone bought the upgrade to do this sort of thing – missing out on the iOS platform would be a massive downer.

Back to Visual Studio 2010, far more sturdy IDE, dreamweaver can be super fast but it can be super flakey at the same time. Year after year since I fixed this bug in CS3 way back in 2007 people came back to my netevolution blog complaining about it happening to them too…

Here are a couple of tips and tweaks that should make your visual studio 2010 experience less of a dragggggg..

Set your visual experience general environment options as follows, I have not noticed any real difference in the prettiness of the IDE but then I mainly develop console and asp.net applications

1) Uncheck Enable rich client visual experience

2) Check Use hardware graphics acceleration if available

Set your startup to an empty environment so the beast starts quicker without having to lookup a bunch of RSS feeds and have a think about what has been done recently so you can just get on with what you want to do.

If you have an active anti virus product on the computer find the advanced setting that enables you to exclude certain files/folders from runtime scanning in my case I exclude the following from my avast scanner.

Sure there are many other software options that can help but these are some easy ones that should make a big difference to your development experience.

This is a little test to see if my iPad will successfully post to my blog!.

Today creatively started with me building a solution in visual studio 2010 that had projects for…

• Downloading an affiliate window product feed
• Unzipping the file to the local file system
• Scraping content from the merchant site using the deeplinks in the feed to have a more comprehensive end result to this whole concept
• Using the parsed content via an agile xpath project reference to build a SQL compact DB
• Building an MVC3 c# site from the database and a theme based on an existing competitor that I know is doing well
• Automating all the above on a daily schedule…. I can see that my more appropriate, memorable domain name would do better, and the site has several obvious improvements that could be made.. Even things as basic as sorting the drop down list items..

However the usual daily drag got in the way and my after was wasted doing…

• Emails through a messy ticketing system clarifying what someone wanted until I got him to admit he didn’t even want the report in the first place…
• Working out why an access 97 DB is misbehaving… Yes.. Access 97 by a wannabe developer
• Being asked to fix something I fixed in the morning..but didn’t get told it was fixed and they had infact started talking about someone completely separate which they did not test when asked to do so a month ago….

There’s a big gap between what I want to do with my days and what I end up having to do…. Very frustrating…. If you read this.. And are based in London doing the kinds of things that are mentioned in the first half… PLEASE hire me!!!!!!!

P.s. iPad2 seems surprisingly fast to type on!

What challenges will tomorrow bring….