Picture this: You’re a developer who frequently writes console applications. Each day after work you go home and head to bed, you close your eyes and burnt into the darkness is the ever so familiar output of command prompt jargon.
Does the above sound like you? Sick of screen-burn in your eyes?
Well Microsoft have answered your call to give your eyes a rest 
Introducing the “Consolas” font Microsoft developed specifically for developers!!
“When we began work on a project to create a new set of fonts which would take maximum advantage of ClearType, we decided to develop a fixed-pitch font for developers - because no one ever thought of their needs, and we realized a highly-readable fixed-width font would make their lives a lot easier…
…The Windows International fonts team is also working on another version that’ll support Vietnamese, and also the line draw characters that we made to support the console window.”
See for yourself-This image (as shown on IE blog is of the standard 8 x 12Px Raster font used by default in CMD.exe
Compare this to the Consolas type fonts:
You can defiantly see how much more cleaner and easy to read the new font looks compared to the old Raster font (you can’t fit as much on the screen - it’s a trade off for the best in my opinion)
Now, this font comes bundled with Microsoft Office 2007 but if you don’t happen to have Office installed or available to you Microsoft have provided a download for the font from here.
To install the font simply do the following in CMD.exe
reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont" /v 00 /d Consolas
logoff
Note: In Windows Vista, you need to run the reg command from an elevated command prompt… When you log back in, Consolas will be an option in the “Command Prompt” Properties.
That should make the reading of Command Prompt output a whole lot more easier… Still, personally this font reminds me of the font used within Konsole/Terminal in Linux.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=22e69ae4-7e40-4807-8a86-b3d36fab68d3&displaylang=en
Written by Patrick S on April 23rd, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on 1429 and 1673 and 169 and 2065 and 2157 and 401 and Computing and Contributors and Visual Studio.
I love Windows as much as the next guy however there are certain features on Linux that I really wish were in Windows. E.g. The Power of Bash or Multiple (Virtual) Desktops.
Thanks to Microsoft’s Code Plex program I stumbled across a program that allows users to run multiple desktops within Windows XP & Vista. Its a completely open-source program (yay) and even supports Vista’s DWM based aero interface (They seem to have found a way around the slowness of the SDK however).
This virtual desktop program takes advantage of this new API and uses some tricks of its own to provide a powerful virtual desktop manager with a full screen thumbnail based preview. You can have as many desktops as you want and can seamlessly switch between them.
Some of the programs key features include:
- Multiple-monitor support
- Per-desktop backgrounds
- Sticky windows to exclude windows from the virtual desktop manager
- Live Vista thumbnails of all of your windows (Will only work in Vista-XP does not support WDM)
- An infinite number of desktops only limited by the amount of memory in your computer
Download and toy around Virtual Desktop Manager here http://www.codeplex.com/vdm
Pretty cool huh?
Written by Patrick S on January 4th, 2008 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Computing and Reviews and Windows Vista and Windows XP.
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Today, Microsoft Live Labs is announcing the Volta technology preview, a developer toolset for building multi-tier web applications using existing and familiar tools, techniques and patterns. Volta’s declarative tier-splitting enables developers to postpone architectural decisions about distribution until the last possible responsible moment. Also, thanks to a shared programming model across multiple-tiers, Volta enables new end-to-end profiling and testing for higher levels of application performance, robustness, and reliability. Using the declarative tier-splitting, developers can refine architectural decisions based on this profiling data. This saves time and costs associated with manual refactoring. In effect, Volta extends the .NET platform to further enable the development of software+services applications, using existing and familiar tools and techniques.
You architect and build your application as a .NET client application, assigning the portions of the application that run on the server tier and client tier late in the development process. You can target either web browsers or the CLR as clients and Volta handles the complexities of tier-splitting. The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and all communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together. In effect, Volta offers a best-effort experience in multiple environments without requiring tailoring of the application.
Written by kenlin@HK [MVP] on December 6th, 2007 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Beta News and Computing and Daily Life and Windows Live and microsoft.