I remember seeing an add from Microsoft I believe for hiring programmers and the jist of it was “We give you an office with a door”.

Why you might wonder?

Well, it might take up to 20 minutes to refocus on the task at hand after you get distracted either by a phone call, by a coworker barging in or by a video someone posted on Facebook.

I will give you an example of a spiral I used to find myself in. I will be happily hacking at this new feature that we need to ship soon and an email notification shows up for an email that I was cc’ed in so I open the email read it and can’t remember what it  was about so I end up reading the whole thread just to remember. Then I switch to my browser to see if there is anything new in my RSS reader, oh wonder if someone sent me something on Facebook. Off to Facebook I go.

An hour later I am back to visual studio and completely lost the thread to what I was doing. And that’s when bad stuff happens, bugs introduced and things get forgotten.

These are a few tips I use now to keep me focused and get the most out of my work hours.

1. Close your internet browser

As hard as it might seem, learn to open your browser only if you need it to research something related to the task you are doing.

What I like to do is to dedicate a couple hours before I start  coding to research the references I need. So that when I get started it’s only coding and nothing else.

Try it for a week and see how much stuff you get done.

2. Close your mail client / instant messenger

Don’t worry, if something really urgent happens you would know about it. You don’t need to keep your mail client open at all times, and read each email as it arrives.

Think of how many emails you are CC’ed in just for the sake of it and to which you have no say in. And think of how  many hours you waste opening those emails and getting distracted by them and having to refocus on what you were doing before.

Set specific times at which you read your emails. I find just before my lunch break and at the end of the day the best time. I find emails a good way to unwind :). I also end up writing better quality emails instead of the quickly I have to get back to what I was doing mess I used to send to clients.

If you don’t want to close just turn off the notification sounds and status bar alerts.

3. Unhook your phone  (or put it in silent mode)

This follows on the no email theory. I ask all our clients that if something is really urgent to send me an SMS. They almost never do so I let the calls go to voice mail  and I can check it later.

This tip is also good for keeping your clients  happy and show your professionalism,  you wonder how? Well when they leave a voice mail your already know what they want to talk about when you call them back. Say the leave the following message:

Hey Hatim, I wanted to know what’s the status of feature N° 156 and if we are still on for the system update schedule by the end of the week.

What you can do is go find out what the status of that feature, check with your team that everything is good and ready to go for the system update.

The phone conversation will take less time as you won’t have to stall them and scramble while you open your tracking application or IM the person responsible for the feature or your team to see what’s going on.

4. Buy good noise canceling headphones

I have a pair of Bose® QuietComfort® 3 Acoustic Noise Cancelling® Headphones. These are great for listening to music and also shields you from all the distractions. Coworkers talking in the hallway, the guy talking loud on his phone, … . They also work I just put them on without anything playing.

A nice plus is that they have great sound quality!

Of course you don’t have to use noise canceling heaphones they are just nice to have, regular headphones will do too, specially with some loud music!!

5. Make small and regular breaks

When I am coding I like to have a 5 to 10 minutes break each hour and a half to 2 hours. I either go get a coffee,  talk to a coworker, check voice mail, walk in the hallway. The idea is when I get away from my  screen I can have a better spatial thinking and find new ideas or solutions more easily.

It’s also revigorating and gives you a mental boost when you are working.

Oh I can finish this new screen and have my break.

I hope this was helpful and would to would love to hear if you have any tricks and stratagems to keep your self focused.

Hatim

Hitler has been dreaming about the day that Apple’s tablet will be announced. That day has come and he is not pleased.

What’s your take on the Apple iPad? I am truly not very impressed with all the hype that preceded it’s release I was waiting for something more impressive.

Good or Bad? Leave a comment!

Hatim

This blog is going 3.0 I have created a Facebook fan page for it and I would like to invite you to join. Also if you know friends that might be interested by the content of this blog be sure to invite them.

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Hatim

We all have that idea (or ideas) that want to make happen, but don’t have the time or would get started on it as soon as we finish this current task, or that this time of the year is not the best time because all the stars are not aligned the way they should… If you have just the smallest bit of ambition you would probably know what I am talking about. (otherwise you suck!!)

Well I came upon this post by Seth Godin talking about how Tim Burton had a poster of all the failed projects that he was part of.

This is a guy that is behind some of the greatest movies of all time like Batman, Edward Scissorhands, you can check the whole list here http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0000318/ but just because he does fail sometimes he should stop. NO!!

The reasoning behind this is stop postponing whatever you wanna do and do it now and stop being afraid of failure. it’s inevitable you would fail most times than not but eventually the satisfaction and the rewards from that single win would out weight all those failures.

One key element of a successful artist: ship. Get it out the door. Make things happen.

The other: fail. Fail often. Dream big and don’t make it. Not every time, anyway.

Tim got his ideas out the door, to the people who decided what to do with them. And more often than not, they shot down his ideas. That’s okay. He shipped.

So do it and move on!

Hope this was helpful.

Hatim

This is a following to my previous post (thanks Khalil)

I love that we live in exponential times. Check it out!

this is related to my earlier post on dropping all indexes from an sql database but this one is to delete all foreign key relations from a database.

set nocount on
 declare @statements cursor
 set @statements = cursor static for
 select  'alter table ' + quotename(ctu.table_schema) + '.' + quotename(ctu.table_name) +
         ' drop constraint ' + quotename(cc.constraint_name)
 from  INFORMATION_SCHEMA.REFERENTIAL_CONSTRAINTS as cc
          join INFORMATION_SCHEMA.CONSTRAINT_TABLE_USAGE as ctu
           on cc.constraint_catalog = ctu.constraint_catalog
              and cc.constraint_schema = ctu.constraint_schema
              and cc.constraint_name = ctu.constraint_name

 open @statements
 declare @statement nvarchar(1000)
 While  (1=1)
  begin
         fetch from @statements into @statement
                if @@fetch_status <> 0
                 break
                exec (@statement)
         end

Hope this was Helpful!

Hatim

I was doing some performance tweaking of a batch job that was hanging and i was suspecting the indexes in the database to have something to do with it shocking up so I used this script to clear all indexes.

Ironically it was a missing index that caused the bottleneck. But here it is for anyone that might need it.

DECLARE @indexName VARCHAR(128)
DECLARE @tableName VARCHAR(128)

DECLARE [indexes] CURSOR FOR

    SELECT        [sysindexes].[name] AS [Index],
            [sysobjects].[name] AS [Table]

    FROM        [sysindexes]

    INNER JOIN    [sysobjects]
    ON        [sysindexes].[id] = [sysobjects].[id]

    WHERE        [sysindexes].[name] IS NOT NULL
    AND        [sysobjects].[type] = 'U'

OPEN [indexes]

FETCH NEXT FROM [indexes] INTO @indexName, @tableName

WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN
    PRINT 'DROP INDEX [' + @indexName + '] ON [' + @tableName + ']'

    FETCH NEXT FROM [indexes] INTO @indexName, @tableName
END

CLOSE        [indexes]
DEALLOCATE    [indexes]

Hope this was helpful!

Hatim

These are some of my favorite and most used shortcuts in visual studio:

1. Ctrl + - and the opposite Ctrl + Shift + -  To move the cursor back or forward to the last position without having to scroll or switch  files.
2. Shift+Alt+Enter Switches to Full Screen Mode
3. Ctrl+K, Ctrl+C Comment a block,   Ctrl+K, Ctrl+U Uncomment the block
4. Shift + Alt + F10 then Enter expands the smart tag to insert a using statement or implement an Interface
5. Ctrl+K, Ctrl+D Auto format the file (Source, xml or  html)
6. Ctrl+M, Ctrl+ O Collapses all outlining to  definition and then Ctrl+M, Ctrl+M to toggle the current block to expanded or collapsed.

What about you what are your favorites. I would like this post to become a repository for the most used Visual Studio Shortcuts. So do share

Hope This Helps!

Hatim

DebuggerDisplayAttribute

Namespace: System.Diagnostics

Usage: The DebuggerDisplayAttribute can be a sweet shortcut to avoid expanding the object to get to the value of a given property when debugging. All you have to do is mouse over the object and any property defined in the attribute will show up with it’s value.

Sample:

    [DebuggerDisplay("ProductName = {ProductName},ProductSKU= {ProductSKU}")]
    public class Product
    {
        public string ProductName { get; set; }
        public string ProductSKU { get; set; }
    }

ConditionalAttribute

Namespace: System.Diagnostics

Usage: This is a great attribute to use with code that you only want to run in debug mode. what it does is pretty much is that the body of any method that has the conditional attribute is not compiled when that condition is false.

Sample:

        [Conditional("CONDITION1")]
        public static void Method1(int x)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("CONDITION1 is defined");
        }

DebuggerStepThroughAttribute

Namespace: System.Diagnostics

Usage: This attribute is great to skip through methods or properties that only have getters and setters defined.

Sample:

        [DebuggerStepThrough()]
        public virtual int AddressId
        {
            get { return _AddressId;}
           
            set
            {
               
                _AddressId = value;
               
                OnPropertyChanged("AddressId");
               
            }
           
        }

FlagAttribute

Namespace: System

Usage: Indicates that an enumeration can be treated as a bit field; that is, a set of flags.

Sample:

[Flags] public enum MyColors : short
    {
        Black = 0,
        Red = 1,
        Green = 2,
        Blue = 4
    }

XmlIgnoreAttribute

Namespace: System.Xml.Serialization

Usage: Tells the the xml serializer to ignore a certain field.

Sample:

public class Group
{
   // The XmlSerializer ignores this field.
   [XmlIgnore]
   public string Comment;

   // The XmlSerializer serializes this field.
   public string GroupName;
}

Hope this helps.

Haitm