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As I am reading Refactoring with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 I visited the Packt Publishing site to get some background information. On the Packt site I noticed that you can now nominate your favorite Open Source CMS and get them some prices. Nominations are however closing on September 17 so you can’t wait too long if you’d like to give them your support and nomination!

“The Open Source Awards is an annual online event held by Packt Publishing to distinguish excellence among Open Source projects”

Here you can read all about it and click on the link to vote:
http://www.packtpub.com/open-source-awards-home

Nomination categories:

  • Hall of Fame CMS
  • Most Promising Open Source Project
  • Open Source E-Commerce Applications
  • Open Source JavaScript Libraries
  • Open Source Graphics Software

Previous year winners:
http://www.packtpub.com/article/open-source-cms-award-previous-winners

Where are we now, the dates:

  • Nominations Open – August 9, 2010
  • Nominations Close – September 17, 2010
  • Voting Begins – September 27, 2010
  • Voting Ends – November 5, 2010
  • Winners Announced – November 15, 2010

A great initiative and there are prices to win for the open source projects so if you are a fan of one or more nominated projects to support them with your vote!

 

Many things have changed over time. This is also the case for Office applications such as Word, Excel, Outlook and what else is there (The Office System as we know it today is a huge suite of applications and the number of applications available is depending on the SKU – home, professional, business).

One of the things changed is that the toolbars and menus have changed into the Fluent UI also known as “The Ribbon”. Some applications (Word, Excel) moved to The Ribbon with version 2007, others (Outlook - partially, SharePoint tools) with version 2010.

The purpose of The Ribbon was to make it easier for the user of the application to find, but most of all to use all features available in the specific application. Research showed that the end user was not aware that certain features they requested were already implemented and available in their existing toolset.

There are however some features that in previous were easier to find and now a bit harder to discover. One of the items, I think, is the location of the AutoCorrect Dialog.

With Word 2010 you can reach the AutoCorrect Dialog like this:

 

First you click the File menu tab, Select Options, Select Proofing, Click the AutoCorrect Options and there it is … The AutoCorrect Dialog.

The Office team with the introduction of The Ribbon promised us however that they would keep the shortcut key combinations that we all learned and loved before The Ribbon entered our lives. So when you think of that it is easy to think of a quicker option to show you the AutoCorrect Dialog. And the Magic Trick is:

Alt-T-A (Alt for Menu’s, T for Tools, and A for AutoCorrect)

Word doesn’t have a highlighter for the Alt-T combo but it will show you a little box:

Now with only these few buttons you are able to bring up your AutoCorrect Dialog in no time (Remember if your application is in a different locale the key combi might be a bit different depending on the words used in the menus before version 2007)!

 

Right now I am reading the book “Refactoring with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010” by Peter Ritchie published by Packt Publishing.

The book appears to cover a wide range of refactoring techniques added with a lot of pointers to patterns and practices to support the provided technologies.

If you are interested in already getting an impression of the book you can read this sample chapter that Packt provided as “try before you buy” option:

Sample Chapter title
Improving Class Quality <- Click to open (PDF)

Of the book
Refactoring with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

The book is available at several book providers such as Amazon or directly from the Packt Publishing site.

Amazon:
Refactoring with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Packt site (Packt is also offering some combi deals that you can check out):
Refactoring with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Now available is the Visual Studio LightSwitch Training Kit and it contains demos and labs to help you learn to use and extend LightSwitch. It contains walkthroughs and hand-on labs where you'll build a book library.

Also it contains more advanced materials showing you how to extend LightSwitch again with hands-on labs to help you build and package an extension to be reused by the LightSwitch end user.

Download it here

 

Last week I took some time to write a blogitem to announce to you the availability of the new developer toolset Visual Studio Lightswitch Beta 1 to MSDN subscribers. In the same post I added some pointers to resources that Microsoft provided that you might need to accomplish your first Visual Lightswitch tasks and to get started.

Today is another Visual Studio Lightswitch Beta One day, but this time for the rest of the world. Right now the Visual Studio Lightswitch Beta One bits are available for public.

You can go to http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/lightswitch to download the bits and watch some Lightswitch videos while you are at it :-)

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