One of the things that used to do that to me where finding something in the code quickly. I would be coding something up and need to find a method in a class (not a method I can see now or else I would use F12). I would then go to the source explorer in Visual Studio and start looking for that source file. Then I would hit F3 to search for that class/method I was thinking about. I thought to myself, this is stupid, there has to be a better way. That’s when I set my work aside and started searching the web and came to find this little gem called DPack (http://www.usysware.com/dpack/).

DPack is an addon for Visual Studio 2008/2010 that is awesome. Basically, it add two very useful shortcuts: Alt+U and Alt+M. Alt+U pops up a dialog box that lets you quickly search through your source files by partial string matching. You type, it starts listing files that match so far. Alt+M is a method lookup mode that searches the current source file for any method you want.

The reason I love using this addon is that it doesn’t make me pause and get out of the flow to find something in the code. The project I am working on at the moment is large enough that it takes a few seconds to locate what you want via the source explorer. Using this addon, I jump to where I need to go as fast as my brain is going. I watch other people I work with using the Solution Explorer/F3 method and it kills me. We would be talking about some part of the code and need to jump to another area and the whole conversation is paused until the guy find the part we need.

So the morale of the story here is this: Computers are very good at repeating tasks and finding stuff. So you really should never be wasting time doing that manually. If you ever find yourself doing something over and over, find a way to not have to do that! Don’t just make it a habit of yours and live with it. Shaving a few seconds here and there really does help with your bottom line as far as productivity is concerned! We all want to be done with work early and have enough time to play games after all

If you have used any browser that has tabs in it for instance (or any application that has tabs), then you’ll love this thing. One of the things I really enjoy when using my Linux machine (yeah…I use Linux too…even have some literature about it) is using Konsole in KDE and having multiple shells in the same window with tabs. Love it! So when I came to fall in love with Powershell, I wanted the same thing. Using something like WinTabber, I can do that now!

With WinTabber, you get an initial window, then you can have it put any application on your desktop in a tab in that window. Here’s a shot of me using it with Putty and FileZilla hosted in it:

I love it :)

Note: This is a shot from my wife’s laptop… I am not using Pink as my border color. Just saying…

You can read about it and get it from here. This is what it looks like:

I am using this one now:

Enjoy!