Dual Screen Setup for Visual Studio 2008

my dual screen setup

After getting totally unable to live without multiple monitors due to multiple reasons [coolness, openess, manageability, productivity] and requirements, last month I ordered a pair of 19″ Widescreen Philips 190SW LCD for my office workstation (see image). Since most of my time is spent inside Visual Studio, i found it compelling to Google dual screen setups for visual studio as a developer and designer. Though i did not get much from it, I landed on Sara ford’s post about multi-monitor support in visual studio. Though the post itself does not provide as much information, the comments are quite helpful and show how everyone has his/her own taste of setting up the new enviornment.

FIrst of, we need a good software to deal with multiple monitors. Windows XP per se does not provide much functionality for it. I downloaded the trial version of UltraMon. UltraMon basically lets you use two seperate taskbars, display different wallpaper on each monitor and so on. It even lets you maintain seperate list of opened windows in each taskbar, something the regular windows taskbar does not allow.

Filed under: general , development enviornment, dual screen, multi-monitor setup, visual studio 2008, visual studio multi monitor

Categories, Tags or the hybrid approach

Developing software is not the same as it used to be. With new paradigms, techniques and tools comming up its hard to choose the best methodology and the best tool to deliver quality products. Hence my delimma of organizing data. Would you rather categorize it (as it used to be) or tag it? There has been a lot of discussion on categories vs tags on blogs and forums lately. Had tags not been used/invented i wouldnt been writing this post or getting all confused on what to use.

So here is the scenario. You have a finances management software/tool where you write down your daily expenses etc. Just filing expenses in a software doesn’t do much good (at least not so much as to motivate me to make an exclusive custom software for it – in which case Microsoft’s Excel suffices). So, one of the major goals of this kind of tool is organization of your expenses. This is a narrow goal though. An even broader goal is planning and reporting. So we come to the part where organization is crucial. One way to organize you expenses is by making categories and n-level subcategories. Another is by tags. We discuss both, and see which one is better.

Filed under: design, software , categories, software design, tags