Sunday, May 20, 2012

Unquote 2.2.0 release

Unquote 2.2.0 has been released. This release includes several enhancements around operator decompilation.

Visual Studio Build Output on first build in a newly opened instance

In both VS 2010 SP2 and VS 11 Beta, the first time you build a solution in a newly opened instance of Visual Studio, it will focus on the Output window, but fail to switch the output channel to Output like it usually does (i.e. “Show output from” drop  down list).

This has always bugged me, and has effected me often since usually the last action I would have performed since the last time I used Visual Studio would be the run all my automated tests, so the Output window channel is persisted to Test in newly opened instances.

The solution is simply to toggle the “Show output from” option manually while the build is executing. Sounds too obvious to be worth mention, but the fact is, I never even noticed that drop down list because I am so used to it setting itself automatically in most cases.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Remapping Lenova Keys

At work, I have a new Lenova T420 laptop which has a different keyboard layout than my wonderful Dell XPS 15z and it’s been driving me nuts. Specifically two issues

  1. The Ctrl and Fn keys are flipped
  2. The Fn+<arrow key> map to media buttons instead of Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End.

Apparently Lenova’s are infamous for #1, so much so that they added a special BIOS setting to go ahead and flip them (apparently Fn is a very special key which isn’t recognized by the OS and needs to be done at this low level)! So just go ahead and restart your computer, and press F12 at the opportunity, and hunt it down in the BIOS settings.

#2 was easily done using using KeyTweak. Note that while you can’t technically remap or create new Fn+<other key> combinations, you can remapped the media keys, which is effectively the same here.

Now I am happy, and I think I fixed the issue early enough that my wires aren’t too crossed.