I decided to split my previous post in the hope that someone googling for this topic might actually get a straightforward answer (I certainly didn't). Visual Studio 2003 does not let you use Bitstream Vera Sans Mono by default. Instead it takes a bit of trickery to get it to work.

1. Open Visual Studio 2003; go to Tools->Options->Environment->Fonts and Colors. You will notice that you can select either Bitstream Vera Sans or Bitstream Vera Sans Mono Bold. Select the latter like so:
   
   
   
2. Click on OK and close Visual Studio 2003.
3. Run regedit; click through to the following key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\FontAndColors\{A27B4E24-A735-4D1D-B8E7-9716E1E3D8E0} (the GUID may be different for you - there aren't many of them, just look until you find the right value name):
   
   
   
4. Change the value of FontName to "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" (without the quotes):
   
   
   
5. Click on OK, close the registry editor, restart Visual Studio 2003. You're good to go!

 

I haven't been working with Visual Studio 2005 that much thus far; the project I've been working on for the last 8 or so months was launched before VS2005 came out (around beta 2), and given the relatively schedules between milestones (first version was to be demoed in about two months) it seemed far too risky to invest in a codebase around the yet-unproven features of .NET 2.0.

I still think that was the right decision. I've been doing some work with Visual Studio 2005 lately, primarily on PostXING and other minor projects, and have come to the conclusion that Visual Studio 2005 is practically unusable. The IDE is even heavier than Visual Studio 2003, ridiculously slow and extremely prone to stalls; it feels like working on a huge solution in VS2003 with a buggy alpha version of ReSharper. The debugger has an incredibly annoying tendency to just stall for tens of seconds at a time whenever I step in/out/over. The IDE feels more like NetBeans than Visual Studio, and is about as responsive, but while NetBeans can be forgiven as a relatively new - and partially open source at that - effort, Visual Studio 2005 is an evolutionary step on a reasonably mature IDE that itself is the 7th version of a 12 or so year-old effort.

Too bad I can't really stick with 2003, it's just not an option - but I would rather have my trusty old combination of VS2003 and R# (which in itself is not without issues) than the heap of bugs and unoptimized UI that is VS2005. At least until VS2005.1 comes along (maybe they'll launch VS2006 with .NET 2.1, like they did with 2003...)

 

I didn't really believe there were any genuinely crapy onboard sound card this day and age. Being a gamer and audio enthusiast I've always considered sound cards to be one of the most important aspects of my PC (along with the monitor, keyboard and mouse). My PC soundcard timeline goes something like:

1993	Sound Blaster Pro
1996	Sound Blaster AWE32
1998	Aureal Vortex 2-equipped Xitel Storm Platinum
2001	Sound Blaster Live! Value (after Aureal went bankrupt)
2000-2002	Gravis Ultrasound and Roland MT-32 for my retromachine (and a GUS ACE in storage for rainy days)

When I bought my latest desktop at the end of 2003 I had a newly found faith in onboard solutions; onboard network adapters were finally up to snuff and the latest SoundStorm (the onboard sound solution found in nForce2-class boards) was being heralded by the online hardware press as the next best thing. Seeing as I was serving my stint in the army at the time and was relatively low on cash I opted to save money on a dedicated sound card and went with the onboard solution. This turned out to be a mistake; the audio quality of SoundStorm was not on par with the five year-old Live! and has pretty major bugs in the hardware acceleration layer; mixing would sometimes clip - particularly when very low rumbles were mixed in the general sound, as in System Shock 2's elevator shaft - and the EAX implementation was so poor it was next to unplayable. There were also major compatibility issues, such as the sound cutoff problem prevalent in a lot of Ubisoft titles and the extreme sound stuttering with Half Life 2. This was probably the game developers' fault for not ensuring compatibility, but nVidia did not seem overly inclined to work with developers to resolve these issues; conversely I would seriously doubt Creative would stake its reputation on this sort of bug.

At work I have an Athlon 64-based machine with the ubiquitous onboard Realtek AC97 codec (Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 mainboard). I constantly listen to my music collection, streaming audio etc.; I don't game, I don't edit audio, I don't do anything that requires more than a passable audio solution. The onboard audio should have been perfectly acceptable, and so it was. Until a few days ago when I started noticing crosstalk from the I/O subsystem to the audio lines; in other words, there was a weak sort of static hiss which would change pattern and frequency depending on how hard my hard drive was churning. I probably wouldn't have noticed that with lesser headphones, but that's no excuse! Why is it that in the year 2006, 18 years after the first commercial sound card for the PC was developed, I can't even get reasonable, 2D stereo audio from onboard solutions?

The only reasonably-priced sound card in the market at the moment is the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value (around $70 in Israel - the price of a new Audigy 4 in eBay!). Guess I better start hammering at those auctions.

ReSharper EAP build 222 totally barfed on one of my source files and I was too lazy to reinstall build 219. The result? I was working on this one file for a couple of hours without any help from R# (no advanced syntax highlighting, static analysis, improved intellisense etc.)

I would like to reassert my statement that R# is the best thing that happened to C# programmers since, well, C#. Working with Visual Studio 2003 and without R# feels a little like trying to use a pen with an amputated finger.

Chris has finally released a beta version of PostXING v2.0 (an opensource blog client for Windows)! The development version is pretty stable and usable, but the more people that use it and post bugs and feature requests the more motivated the developers get

Grab it from Project Distributor (requires .NET 2.0).

I've been working with build 219 for about a week now. With Visual Studio 2003 it's perfectly stable (only one exception so far), seems considerably faster and I haven't encountered any major (and very few minor) bugs so far. I haven't worked with Visual Studio 2005 at all over the last week (sorry Chris... project schedules ) so I've nothing to report on that front.

I'll keep the ReSharper: New And Improved post up-to-date, as always.