Scott Hanselman

It's funny, when folks see me using SlickRun, they always notice that I've bound it to Windows-R, replacing the standard Start|Run dialog.

This is one of the questions I get the most often. Unfortunately it's not very well documented in SlickRun, and if you try to set it via the options dialog, you'll get get a a message saying it can't grab the global hotkey.

You have to open SlickRun.ini in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\SlickRun and add an option under the [General] section "GrabWinR=1".  I also like to set ChaseCursor=1 so SlickRun will come up under the current mouse cursor position.

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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After reading Omar's list of recently purchased gadgets, poor man that I am, I figured I'd update my Amazon.com wishlist.

It's a kind of window shopping, I find, updating one's list. I don't make purchases of any kind frivolously, so I like to add things to my wishlist and let them sit there for a while. If they stick around for a while without me deleting them, I'll be more likely to consider getting it.

What's on your wish list this holiday season?

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'm always looking for a good monospaced programmers font. There's lots out there to choose from. Some strongly prefer bitmapped fonts with no hinting. Personally I REALLY prefer heavy antialiasing with the a smooth, almost blurry (not pixelly) feel. Here's some I've used, but I'm currently leaning away from my previous favorite, Consolas, and using Inconsolata that Tomas turned me on to.

I think (hope) we can all agree that Courier New isn't where it's at. And yes, I run at 14 or 15 point all the time.

(I realize that these are huge in width and that they will goof up my site's horizontal scroll bar for a week or so, forgive me, they looked lousy when thumbnailed.)

Inconsolata - my current monospaced font, and the most Mac-like you can get on Windows (including Monaco, IMHO)

Courier New

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono

Consolas (included with Vista and Office 2007)

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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If you were as shocked and disappointed as I was when you found, after installing Office 2007 and installing the Desktop Search 3.0 to enable "Outlook Instant Search," that the default Search behavior in Explorer had changed without asking you, you'll want to change this registry key.

In RegEdit, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Desktop Search\DS and set "ShowStartSearchBand" to 0, and you'll get the default search behavior back.

And while you're at it and poking around in the registry, you might as well go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex and set FilterFilesWithUnknownExtensions to DWORD with the value of "1" in order to enable full-text searching of files (like code!) that Explorer by default skips over.

Don't you hate it when you KNOW that there's a file in that directory with the text "foo" - you can SEE the file - but the standard explorer search doesn't even bother to look in in the file? That's because it doesn't even bother to look in files that don't have their extension registered with a known IFilter. But you don't care, just flip that bit in the registry, and you'll get full-text search of REAL FILES (not "indexed three hours ago") from your trusty Explorer search bar.

Or, go download Chris Sells' .reg file over in my Power User Windows Registry Tweaks section. Either way, take back your Explorer!

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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It'd be nice if there was some project inside (or outside) Microsoft to unify all "Best Practices" knowledge under one tool. Perhaps one of these tools is the beginning of that?

Two years ago, Microsoft released the well-thought-of SQL Server Best Practices Analzyer, in June the BizTalk Server Best Practices Analyzer, and in July one for Exchange.

Now it looks like the "Best Practices Engine" is being abstract into this project at CodePlex called the Microsoft Best Practice Analyzer (BPA) and I think it's just a fantastic idea. It appears to be a clean up of the ASP.NET Analyzer from June.

It comes with a sample plugin that analyzes ASP.NET 2.0 applications. I pointed it at one of mine and it found a few problems with solutions that were right on on the money.

This is starting to look like a list of all Microsoft's Paint programs.

• SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer
• BizTalk Best Practices Analyzer
• Exchange Best Practices Anazyer
• (the original) ASP.NET Best Practices Analzyer
• patterns & practives Guidance Explorer (kind of related)
• Microsoft Best Practice Analyzer (BPA)
• How to write a Best Practice Rule
• How to write a Plugin

I really hope that this is the beginning of an integration into an "Enterprise Application Best Practices Analyzer," perhaps headed up by the Patterns and Practices team? I'd like one tool I can point to a system and say "is this cool?"

Thinking in the vein of Brian Windheim's statement that "the number of non-software artifacts in any project should approach zero," it seems to me that there's less usefulness in creating amazing documents (but still ultimately just prose) like this one on ASP.NET Security Best Practices if, in my words, "a Word Document has no teeth." Making a great document like that into a plugin for an engine like the BPA makes the manifestation of its intent an order of magnitude more useful.

If the BPA, all derivitives, and the patterns & practives Guidance Explorer were combined, I think the resulting tool would be truly amazing.

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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