Devang Gandhi

While putting together a Visio diagram, I have always felt a need to align my blocks/shapes in a straight line either horizontally or vertically. I was doing it manually and it was quite tedious. Then I discovered this neat little trick to auto align the shapes in the diagram. All you need to do is select the shapes that need to align, then go to the menu Shape -> Align Shapes. A pop up will appear and it will let you select between horizontal and vertical alignment.

I found this really handy trick here. This can be very helpful in doing development using Visual Studio as your IDE.

The web toolbar of Microsoft Word 2003 was very useful to navigate through a large document. I realized that it is not available in Word 2007. However, there is a way to add the Back and the Forward buttons to the quick access toolbar. Follow these steps.

1. Click the Microsoft office button in the top left corner of your Word window.
2. Click on “Word Options” at the bottom of the menu.
3. Click on “Customize” from the left pane.
4. In “Choose commands from” drop-down menu, select “All Commands”.
5. From the list of commands find “Back” and click “Add”
6. Similarly, find “Forward” and click “Add”

If you are using one of the public/lab machines and want to find out information about the users logged on to that machine, just open the command prompt (Start->Run, type “cmd”) and type

For each user, it returns information like username, sessionname, id, state, idle time and logon time. If the state is “active”, that means the user is currently logged on. If the sessionname is something like “rdp-tcp#0″, that means the user is connected to the machine over a remote desktop session.

To insert a hyperlink that refers to a particular section with your Word document, you first need to create a bookmark for that section. Then you can link to that bookmark anywhere in the document. Detailed instructions here.

Check out the wikipedia Subprime crisis impact timeline. The year 2008 looks quite bad.

If you use Visual Studio for programming on a daily basis, your life can get much easier if you use these Visual Studio shortcuts. Take a look. I would like to add one more:

• CTRL + “-”  This shortcut takes the cursor to its previous position

I came across a really nice article on C# constructors. The article describes very useful concepts using simple and easy to understand code samples.

I think it is not difficult to write code but to write code that is elegant and efficient is an art. Proficiency in this art is acquired only over time.