Scott Hanselman

This blog, my twitter, my YouTube are all part of my online presence. While my day job is ensuring that Microsoft's web developer tools work well across many cross cutting concerns, my passion remains teaching.

When I went to work for Microsoft 5 years ago I made it clear that the blog, it's content, and my online voice would remain mine. I also told them I would do 'side work' in social media. Often I blog about the things I'm working on, but I also blog about family, diabetes, gardening, culture, diversity, languages, gadgets and lots more.

One of the things I enjoy doing besides programming and teaching, is helping folks in other industries manage their personal brands and use social media effectively. I've spoken at conferences and to many different blogging special interests from interior designers to bloggers of color.

The things I've learned - largely by making many mistakes - in the last 10+ years of blogging apply not just to the technical world, but to anyone with an online presence.

• Related Link: A Social Media Brand Primer: Managing your (personal) brand with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

Last year at Blogging While Brown I presented the technical keynote along with my very close friends Luvvie Ajayi and Adria Richards. You may know Luvvie from our podcast Ratchet And The Geek. Adria works for SendGrid and you may have seen Adria on Channel 9 with me at the BUILD Conference this year.

The audience was filled with bloggers of all interests. Tech, Culture, Social Justice, Entertainment, Cupcakes (yes!), Yoga, Green Lifestyles and hundreds more. Luvvie, Adria and I have three very different online styles but each is effective in its own way. We combined what we learned into what we think is an edutaining and useful talk.

Together we discussed how to effectively present a clear Voice online, how your Medium affects your Message. We explore different ways to Reach and audience, but then how to reach them in an authentic way. Then we cover consistent Visuals and what Results look like.

The keynote was split into three segments. Luvvie starts at 2min in, Adria around 14 min, and me about 31 min, or watch the whole thing as it was intended.

I hope you enjoy it. We had a wonderful time creating and presenting it.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I use a number of text editors. The three I have pinned to my taskbar are Visual Studio, Sublime Text 2, and Notepad 2.

I have three because I like features from one and wish those features were in another.

Sublime Text (and a few other editors) has a great feature called Simultaneous Editing. It's the very definition of an advanced - but core - editor feature.

Enter the MultiEdit extension for Visual Studio. Holding down ALT while mouse-clicking in the editor will add multiple selection points, so when you type, text will be added to all the selected positions. So today, MultiEdit supports multiple carets, but not multiple selections.

Here's an animated gif of MultiEdit in action.

This wonderful MultiEdit extension was released by the Visual Studio "Core Editor" Program Manager Ala Shiban (@AlaShiban). I'd like you guys to encourage our new friend with good reviews and nice comments if you like it. If you find a good bug, offer a clear bug report.

Perhaps if this thing gets a few hundred thousand downloads, we can get some new features, updates and more importantly show Ala's boss and make it a real live built-in feature. ;)

Version 1.0 supports:

• Typing
• Backspacing / Deleting
• Moving the caret around using the keyboard
• Undo-ing

What isn't supported:

• Multiple selections
• Virtual Spaces

Go get MultiEdit now for Visual Studio 2012 and then share it with all your friends.

Even better, perhaps we'll see even more "power toys" from the Core Editor team.

What would you like to see?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I have a "whenever I get around to doing it" Newsletter of Wonderful Things. Why a newsletter? I dunno. It seems more personal somehow. Fight me.

Still, it's one more site to check and it's a hassle for some of you  Dear Readers. Therefore, I will still do the newsletter, but I'll post each newsletter to the blog some weeks later.

You can view all the previous newsletters here. You can sign up here Newsletter of Wonderful Things or just wait and get them later on the blog, which hopefully you have subscribed to.

Hi Interfriends,

Thanks again for signing up for this experiment. Here's some interesting things I've come upon this week. If you forwarded this (or if it was forwarded to you) a reminder: You can sign up or sign down at http://www.tinyletter.com/hanselman and the archive of all previous Newsletters is here.

• If you like Science Fiction as much as I do, perhaps you'll like this Creative Commons anthology of "Muslims in Sci-Fi."
• I've been collecting crazy font-related thing lately, I'm not sure why but it's fun. Do you hate Comic Sans? There's many more fonts, ahem, typefaces, to hate.
• An absolute beginner's guide to Arduino. A lovely way to get an overview of how to program tiny computers. Also fun for the kiddies.
• Pardon the swear word, but FckYeahKeming is a great site full of kerning (bad kerning? Keming) that you won't be able to un-see.
• Why does Kerning matter? Well, many reasons.
• I wrote a blog post I'm very happy with called iPad, Surface, Ultrabook: Are we there yet? that I submit for your approval.
• Great web comic that is evocative of Harry Potter. I suspect you'll lose several hours in the archives. If you do, support Gunnerkrigg Court.
• Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie. Really? Damn.
• Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know.
• Brilliant interactive guide to Blog Typography. Really well done.
• Electronic toys from holidays long past http://imgur.com/a/FCVHV via Jeff Atwood
• My presentation from GOTO Conf on ASP.NET, jQuery and Mobile is up on YouTube.
• Learning to Let Go. First, Turn Off the Phone.
• Great for site designers. Need a placeholder image?
• Practice being a better Programmer at Programming Praxis.
• Cool and inexpensive home science experiments to blow your son or daughter's mind.
• When happens with an secure HTTP request in the first few milliseconds?
• Mavis Beacon was great, but there is room for Typing Practice for Programmers.

Scott Hanselman

(BTW, since you *love* email you can subscribe to my blog via email here: http://feeds.hanselman.com/ScottHanselman DO IT!)

P.P.S. You know you can forward this to your friends, right?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Big thanks from both my wife and myself for the outpouring of support after our Cancer announcement. Last year was a long year and the Cancer part of the year was particularly long.

We were very private about the whole thing and waited to tell anyone until we knew we were mostly OK. However, to my surprise, the day of the diagnosis my wife, who has never shown much interested in podcasting announced "I want to record an audio Cancer Diary. Can you do that?"

So we did.

We honestly didn't know if we were going to publish this when we started but after a month of editing late into the night, we are.

This episode of This Developer's Life takes a half year of our lives and many, many hours of audio and turns it into a single hour show that Mo and I are happy to share it with you today.

This Developer's Life 3.0.1 - Cancer

I hope you enjoy the show and that you and yours are, and remain, healthy.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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TL;DR - Too Long Didn't Read Version

• BrowserStack Integrated into Visual Studio
• From a debug session inside Visual Studio 2012 today with ASP.NET 2012.2 RC installed. Click the dropdown next to your Debug Button, the click on "More Emulators" to go to http://asp.net/browsers and get the BrowserStack Visual Studio extension and three months free service. There's other browsers to download as well, like the Electric Plum iPhone/iPad simulator.
• SIDE NOTE: When the VS2012.2 Update is finalized, you'll need to install just it and you'll get the ASP.NET Web Tools as well.
• New Online Tools for Modern Sites
  • Head over to http://modern.ie for a bunch of tools for making cross browser sites easier, including on online site analyzer and downloadable Virtual Machines for any Virtual Platform.

I do a lot of cross-browser testing and I've been on a personal mission to make "Browse With..." and multiple browser debugging suck less in Visual Studio. This has been going on for years.

• In 2010, I used PowerShell and hacked together a browser switcher script in VS2010.
• My buddy Kzu and friends saw this script, realized it sucked and made things better on VS2012 with their Default Browser Switcher addon.
• I worked with Jorge on our team and we delivered a the browser switcher dropdown directly integrated in VS2012. This feature is also in WebMatrix.
• Later the iPhone/iPad local simulator from Electric Plum added tight integration with Visual Studio so you can test locally.

But still, it's too hard. There's been some Virtual Machines up on the Microsoft Download Center but it's tedious to dig around and get the one you need.

BrowserStack

Today the IE team announced new site at http://modern.ie to make cross-browser testing easier. Even cooler, they launched a partnership with BrowserStack.com to give us all a three month free trial to their hosted browser virtualization service.

BrowserStack has a cloud of virtual machines with every browser imaginable. You can pick your OS, browser version and screen resolution, then effectively VNC (Remote) into them with their Flash plugin. It's totally seamless and really cool to see.

Here you can see how hideous my site is in IE6 on Windows XP running within BrowserStack. Keep reading, it gets better. Well, IE6 doesn't get better, but this story does.

Integrating BrowserStack with Visual Studio 2012

Even better, I noticed that BrowserStack has nice hackable URLs like this:

http://www.browserstack.com/start#os=Windows&os_version=XP&browser=IE&browser_version=6.0&zoom_to_fit=true&url=hanselman.com&resolution=1024x768&speed=1

When I saw how clear it was, I immediately started writing a Visual Studio plugin - like within 5 minutes - then stopped after a half hour.

I said, this is too obvious. Someone has already done written this, right? I google. Yes, they beat me to it, 5 days ago.

BrowserStack already has a lovely Visual Studio Extension up and ready to go.  It adds BrowserStack as a new browser choice within your Visual Studio 2012 debug dropdown.

Start Debugging, pick my OS and Browser, in this case, Safari on a Mac running Mountain Lion.

After you sign into BrowserStack with an account, you can setup a tunnel (using Java, but you can do it from the command line if you don't want to use an applet) between your local web server and BrowserStack and even debug in the cloud. Fabulous.

After I've setup this tunnel, here I am debugging a website running local via a remote Mountain Lion Mac running Safari 6. Or whatever. You get the idea.

Here am I at a breakpoint. Ya, it's freaking me out also.

Again, if you've got VS2012, can you get this now any number of ways. You can go to http://asp.net/browsers, you can go to http://modern.ie or you can just click "More Emulators" within Visual Studio itself.

Have fun!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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