Scott Hanselman

Congratulations to my friend Scott Stanfield from Vertigo Software who is the new Visual Studio.NET Iron Developer!

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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Update on dual monitors. Don "luddite" Box comments about how much he likes the larger 1024 x 768 pixels on his Thinkpad x30. Hey - how many pixels do you need to run emacs and type all those angle brackets anyways? :) [IUnknown.com: John Lam's Weblog on Software Development]

Withholding any barbs against Don's choice of editor...I run 1600x1400 (120dpi) on my laptop and 1280x1024 (96dpi) on my laptop.  When people say they don't dig the ultra-high-res you get on a 120/130dpi laptop (like Tablet PCs, that require 120) I say, two words: Large Fonts.  I run large fonts and large icons.  I run my fonts in VS.NET in 14 point bold Lucida Console.   The ratio of the size of the fonts in relation to the physical dimensions of the screen higher, but what to I get with all my "extra" pixels?  Resolution, Baby.  ClearType, clarity, the feeling of staring at Paper not an LCD or CRT.  And personal preference aside, anyone who doesn't believe in ClearType (ClearType Online Tuning Wizard here) needs to think twice.

Someone still running 800x600 or 1024x768 happily because they didn't want to take the time to scale their screen elements on a higher-res screen is probably renting those "special" Full Frame DVDs because they think they are missing information covered by the black bars. ;)

Product Tip: There's another great Screen Scaling for the technologically challenged who like "big pixels" and want that 1024x768 feel on a 1280x1024 screen - LiquidView from Portrait.  (It's arguably 100% necessary as XP includes a plethora of support for sizing things, but it scales EVERYTHING) 

I also use their Pivot software RELIGIOUSLY.  (They'd sell more software if their website didn't suck egregiously) When you're editing a giant doc, it's nice to view it like paper on a portait oriented display.  Even better, Pivot is smart about multi-monitors and having a pivotable LCD next to a non-pivotable one. 

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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The Switch to Linux Campaign...awesome "TV Ad" about why you should switch to Linux, in the style of the Apple Switch Campaign.

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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Again, my buddy Sairama to the rescue.  Just when I think I've pretty much got VS.NET down solid (only being use it since Pre-Beta days, right?) I'm thrown a curve ball called incremental search.  I guess I just assumed that a feature that was so cool in so many other editors would never make it into VS.NET. Silly me.

So, lest I be the most ignorant, fire up Visual Studio.NET, get some code in there, hit Ctrl-I and start typing.  After you've found something, use F3 to Find Next.  In the words of Chris Sells - It's pure sex.

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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Living the dual monitor lifestyle.

I loved the SyncMaster 172T so much that I bought another. And once I got my motherboard problems out of the way, I'm happily running a 32MB ATI AIW RADEON and a 64MB ATI RADEON 7000 PCI dual-monitor setup.

One of the really cool features that ATI provides with their drivers is Hydravision support. It lets me run multiple hardware accelerated virtual desktops (up to 9) and I can switch between desktops using their tray icon utility (in theory I can do this using a keystroke but I can't get it to work). The switch is lightning-fast - much faster than the Virtual Desktop Manager utility found in Windows PowerToys. I find that I now use one desktop for email / news stuff, and another desktop for dev stuff (running full VS.NET full screen and debugging a GUI app on another monitor was the main reason I switched to this setup). I suspect I'll use a third desktop for blogging-related stuff.[IUnknown.com: John Lam's Weblog on Software Development]

I've been utterly hooked on Multi-Monitor for about a year now.  I have a Compaq Evo N800w at work with an ATI Chipset that supports Multi-Monitor with the external VGA and the integrated LCD pannel.  At home I picked up a single AGP GeForce MX440 with TWO VGA outs for $129 at Fry's.  I'm running a 17" monitor in a corner (because of the depth) and a 17" Viewsonic Flat Screen against the wall.  Once you've lived it, you CAN'T go back.  I'm even thinking about a third monitor at home.

There's a great searchable online database of Multi-Monitor setups if you have any questions about if Multi-Monitor is possible on your system (there are always compatiblity issues with motherboard chipsets, video chipsets, video drivers, etc as John can attest to!)

I FULLY recommend that ANYONE who is using true Multi-Monitor support in Windows (as opposed to the NVidia "giant NView Desktop Fake-out") pickup a copy of UltraMon from RealTimeSoft.  It supports things like: Multiple screensavers, an alternate secondary taskbar for the other monitors, proportional autostretching of wallpaper, roaming profiles, and many other things.  It's a multi-monitor must-have. Full Stop.

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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