Very good Regular Expressions (RegEx) tutorial

The best I found on the web so far for learning or refreshing RegEx knowledge:

http://regexone.com/

And a very good site for writing and testing RegExes on the fly:

http://www.regexr.com/

Troubleshooting startup performance issues for Visual Studio.

This is a very good blog post about troubleshooting startup performance issues for Visual Studio:

http://startbigthinksmall.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/activity-log-profiler-find-out-which-extension-is-slowing-down-your-visual-studio/

In summary, start VS with the /log flag:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /log

(11.0 is for VS 2012, will need to be different for other versions of course).

Also download this xsl file:

https://github.com/lcorneliussen/ActivityLogProfiler/raw/master/ActivityLogProfiler.xsl 

and place it into folder:

%AppData%\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\xx.x (version number) 

Then delete the original xsl file ActivityLog.xsl, and make a copy of the downloaded xsl file, then rename that copy as the original (ActivityLog.xsl). We want to keep a copy of the downloaded one, because each VS startup overwrites the .xsl....

Then open the ActivityLog.xml file with internet explorer and examine the startup information.

code snippets online

http://codesnippet.research.microsoft.com/

duplicate code detection

This seems like a stable project in working condition, it is worth a test. http://sourceforge.net/projects/pmd/

Another one that produces fancy graphs, but probably requires more reading of the documentation in order to actually understand what the output means http://www.ccfinder.net/ccfinderxos.html

Also interesting tool to try is the successor to Microsoft Labs PEX, Microsoft CodeDigger

Microsoft CHESS tool for concurrency testing

Scotts list of utilities - awesome

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2014UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolListForWindows.aspx

performance comparison ramdisk vs ssd

ok being the performance freak that I am, I wanted to know how much faster is a ramdisk vs an SSD (if it is at all of course). So I compared my ramdisk running on BondDisk, vs my Samsung 840 Pro (which runs at almost half speed thanks to my laptop having only SATA 2 :/)

The results leave no room for doubt... ramdisk all the way, for performance critical applications... almost 10 times faster... now if only BondDisk could create a bigger ramdisk...

Ramdisk (BondDisk)

Samsung 840 Pro on SATA2

svn 1.8 upgrade working copy

So I have decided to update my tortoise svn from 1.7.x to 1.8.1 today, and I couldn't use the working copies as the new client is not backwards compatible. Turns out that I just had to restart my computer to complete the installation (duh) and after that there was a new option available when right clicking on the old format working copy:

Selecting the first option, shows the following window:

All we have to do is to choose the first option, and our old working copy is upgraded to the new 1.8.x format.

Please note that this is a one way operation, so once you upgrade you can't go back to 1.7.x

Happy coding