Friday, April 24, 2009

VS 2008 Shortcut Key

There are many useful shortcut keys in VS 2008. In this post, I'll write some most useful key which are always used by myself.
Shift&Alt&Enter: Switch to Full-Screen mode;
Ctrl&Tab: Similar with Alt-Tab in Windows OS, it can switch windows that have been open currently in VS;
Ctrl&-: To navigate backward to previous place. For example, if you want to explore some class's definition, you will select "go to definition" item from context menu to navigate the definition detail. After you view it, in the most case, you want to back the previous place, so you can press this shortcut key. That's great and convenient for the developer. It seems like "Undo" feature;
Ctrl&Shift&-: To navigate forward to next place.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Design is an island

Recently, Kent Beck wrote a post which raise an opinion about software disign. It's a nice metaphore for disign. That is: design is an island.

Kent wrote: Designing, then, is like walking an island. As long as you don't get your feet wet, your design is okay. It means that we should try to design enough to meet the current set of requirement, otherwise you might fall into the water.

The "water line" is always changed because the tides always change the sea level. It means the change of requirement. That is inevitable. So we must beware not to let your feet wet. Kent said:"Design that are acceptable at other time of the year break down in the 10% of the year when you do 50% of your business." So you should keep your design fresh. It's the feature of the excellent architecture.

"Climbing higher on irland requires effort, just as improving designs require effort." That's right. You should spend your money and time to improve your disign.

Kent recoginzed the distributed application such as SOA and REST as the archipelago. It's interesting. The analogy is perfect. It's the extension of metaphore of island.

Kent alos raise his opinions, for example earthquake and island sank. More details visit the kent beck's blog here. Enjoy it!