How fast are we today? More and more web applications are using JavaScript to improve the UX (User eXperience) Almost all websites use frameworks like jQuery and mooTools, extJs etc. for this. So it is important that our browsers are fast with JavaScript! Browsers are updated more often because they are more important every day. Since I have several extensions for Chrome and Firefox, it’s not fair to compare RAM usage. So I only looked at JavaScript performance. A way to compare it, is to run SunSpider http://www.webkit.org/perf/sunspider/sunspider.html So I run all my installed browsers with my Centrino 2 cpu, win7sp1x64 and here are my results, run with my hardware. Internet Explorer 9.0.8112.16421 220ms Internet Explorer 10 platform preview 2.10.1008.16421) 234ms Firefox 11 beta 250ms Opera 11.61 (build 1250) 255ms Safari 5.1 (7534.50) 257ms Chrome 17.0.963.46 beta-m 277ms As you can see, the results are very similar these days. So if you have an up-to-date browser, your fine. Also check out this blog from 2 years ago: http://lifehacker.com/5457242/browser-speed-tests-firefox-36-chrome-4-opera-105-and-extensions And if someone is still using IE6 or 7, please upgrade a.s.a.p. check out the kill bill’s browser website if you are not convinced. Enjoy your browser!

Today I have installed NDepend for the first time! I was really convinced because of this short video and the 7 minute version. Too bad that it isn’t really a human voice, but the feature set of NDepend will make up for that. I followed these instructions for the installation and installed the Visual Studio Add-In. All I had to do was select NDepend –> attach new NDepend project to current VS Solution. NDepend immediately showed that two critical rules are violated! Method too complex (well some programmers might see this one as a compliment, but this does affect maintainability and scalability of your code) Methods with two many parameters so just two issues, I am flattered! When you click on the ‘Show CQL Explorer’ You will see the Code Query Language which is required to select the critical rules. So you can simply navigate to the issues. FXCop vs. NDepend As you all know, you can also choose to use FxCop to check your source code against a coding standard. Here is a link where you can see how you can check your code for the use of the object ‘Arraylist’ instead of the generic ‘List<obj>’ http://www.binarycoder.net/fxcop/html/ex_usegenericlist.html With NDepend this can be done with CQL like this: SELECT TYPES WHERE IsDirectlyUsing "System.Collections.ArrayList" More...

So we have all used FxCop before haven’t we? Well I found out, that my version was 9.x and it prompted with an available update! So Microsoft’s download page opened. http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=6544  It only displays a small 1 kb file! a “readme.txt” file. That’s strange. So I checked again for an available download link, but ended up with the same readme file. This is the content of the text file: FxCop Installation Instructions 1. Download the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4 version 7.1. 2. Run %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Bin\FXCop\FxCopSetup.exe to install FxCop.   More...

Since I am a C# web developer, I use my browser daily euhhh hourly! I use Firefox because of various add-ons. I’ve upgraded recently to Firefox 3.6.6 and Flash and it became unstable. I submitted several bug reports through the special Mozilla feedback window that pops up after a crash. After a few days there was still no update available so I had the feeling that I was on my own with this bug… I decided to talk to some of the developers of Firefox on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) off course with ChatZilla as IRC client (another amazing Firefox add-on) the address to visit the Firefox IRC Channel is: irc://irc.mozilla.org/firefox (found it on http://irc.mozilla.org/ ) More...