Visual Studio 2013 Community edition - Free, Unrestricted Version Of Visual Studio For Small Teams

Microsoft launched the Community 2013 edition of Visual Studio, which essentially replaces the very limited Visual Studio Express version the company has been offering for a few years now.

There is a huge difference between Visual Studio Express and the aptly named Visual Studio 2013 Community edition, though: The new version is extensible, so get access to the over 5,100 extensions now in the Visual Studio ecosystem. It’s basically a full version of Visual Studio with no restrictions, except that you can’t use it in an enterprise setting and for teams with more than five people (you can, however, use it for any other kind of commercial and non-commercial project).

“The simple way to think about this is that we are broadening up access to Visual Studio,” Microsoft’s corporate VP of its Developer Division S. “Soma” Somasegar told me in an interview late last month. Somasegar told me that the Community Edition will allow you to build any kind of application for the Web, mobile devices, desktop and the cloud. “It’s a full features version of Visual Studio,” he noted. “It includes the full richness of the Visual Studio extensions and ecosystem.”

more info, here: 

• http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/12/microsoft-makes-visual-studio-free-for-small-teams
• http://www.visualstudio.com/support/legal/dn877550
• http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/free-developer-offers-vs
• http://www.visualstudio.com/support/legal/dn877550

Installing Visual Studio Versions Side-by-Side:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms246609.aspx

Visual Studio 2013 Compatibility: 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh266747.aspx

How to make Visual Studio 2010 + 2012 + 2013 coexist together?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22876932/how-to-make-visual-studio-2010-2012-2013-coexist-together

Responsive Web Design - Test if your page is mobile friendly

There are several tools, you may find, to test if your page is mobile friendly but I think it's also very important to get a good ranking at Google and maybe not yet but for sure in the future mobile friendliness will also be a big criteria ....

So I recommend using Google's mobile friendliness test:

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly

Responsive Web Design - Use Legible Font Sizes

1. Configure the viewport to make sure fonts will be scaled as expected across various devices. 
2. Use a base font size of 16 CSS pixels. Adjust the size as needed based on the font used.
3. Use sizes relative to the base size to define the typographic scale.
4. Text needs vertical space between its characters and may need to be adjusted for each font. The general recommendation is to use the browser default line-height of 1.2em.
5. Restrict the number of fonts used and the typographic scale: too many fonts and font sizes lead to messy and overly complex page layouts.

read more here: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/UseLegibleFontSizes  

Responsive Web Design - Configure the Viewport

More and more people are surfing the internet by mobile phones, pads, ... and of course this devices have different (smaller) screen sizes.

There are some general basics you have to follow to render your site(s) well on this new devices, all of this techniques is often called "Responsive Web Design".

Let's start with "Configure the Viewport":

A viewport setting controls how a page is displayed on a mobile device. Without a viewport specified, mobile devices will render the page at a typical desktop screen width and scale them to fit the real screen width. The setting of "width=device-width" avoids this, the real width is used.

Some browsers will keep the page's width constant when rotating to landscape mode, and zoom rather than reflow to fill the screen. Adding the attribute "initial-scale=1" instructs browsers to establish a 1:1 relationship between CSS pixels and device independent pixels regardless of device orientation, and allows the page to take advantage of the full landscape width.

Resolution: Pages optimized to display well on mobile devices should include a meta viewport in the head of the document specifying "width=device-width" and "initial-scale=1":

<meta name=viewport content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

For more information, see: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/ConfigureViewport

Mac OS X 10.6: How to enable native NTFS read/write support

Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) has the ability to mount NTFS volumes as read/write, but it's not enabled.

Just read-only is supported, as in version 10.5. 

But there is a simple tool to enable full read/write support for NTFS drives in Snow Leopard:

http://ntfsmounter.com/  - Click here to open in new window

I installed it and it seems to work fine, but don't forget you will use it at your own risk ...

It doesn't matter if the glass is half empty or half full

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How to bring toolbars in a row using MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes)

Normally you add Toolbars like this:

header file ('MainFrm.h'):
.............
CMFCMenuBar       m_wndMenuBar;
CMFCToolBar       m_wndToolBar;
CMFCToolBar       m_wndToolBar_Views3D;
CMFCToolBar       m_wndToolBar_Export2D;
CMFCToolBar       m_wndToolBar_Export3D;

.............

source file ('MainFrm.cpp'):
............. 
m_wndMenuBar.EnableDocking(CBRS_ALIGN_ANY);
m_wndToolBar.EnableDocking(CBRS_ALIGN_ANY);
m_wndToolBar_Views3D.EnableDocking(CBRS_ALIGN_ANY);
m_wndToolBar_Export2D.EnableDocking(CBRS_ALIGN_ANY);
m_wndToolBar_Export3D.EnableDocking(CBRS_ALIGN_ANY);
EnableDocking(CBRS_ALIGN_ANY);
DockPane(&m_wndMenuBar);
DockPane(&m_wndToolBar);
DockPane(&m_wndToolBar_Views3D);
DockPane(&m_wndToolBar_Export2D);
DockPane(&m_wndToolBar_Export3D);

 .............

But this results in showing every toolbar on a new row .... :-(

It's very simple to change this to having all toolbars in one row,
just replace the code above (in 'MainFrm.cpp') with this one:

source file ('MainFrm.cpp'):
............. 
m_wndMenuBar.EnableDocking(CBRS_ALIGN_ANY);
m_wndToolBar.EnableDocking(CBRS_ALIGN_ANY);
m_wndToolBar_Views3D.EnableDocking(CBRS_ALIGN_ANY);
m_wndToolBar_Export2D.EnableDocking(CBRS_ALIGN_ANY);
m_wndToolBar_Export3D.EnableDocking(CBRS_ALIGN_ANY);
EnableDocking(CBRS_ALIGN_ANY);
DockPane(&m_wndMenuBar);
DockPane(&m_wndToolBar_Export3D);
DockPaneLeftOf(&m_wndToolBar_Export2D, &m_wndToolBar_Export3D);
DockPaneLeftOf(&m_wndToolBar_Views3D, &m_wndToolBar_Export2D);
DockPaneLeftOf(&m_wndToolBar, &m_wndToolBar_Views3D);
 .............


Now you have it in one row .... :-)