A series of posts on system fonts:

I’ve been wanting to do a follow-up to the popular system fonts posts for some time and recent HackerNews and ArsTechnica traffic reminded me that I’m not the only one nostalgic for chunky pixel fonts of old.

There are so many useful debugging features built into Visual Studio that aren’t well-known. Here are a few of my favourites, including some recent finds in VS 2013.

Clicking the left gutter to set breakpoints, you could easily believe breakpoints happen at line-level.

There is a fair amount of info on making and publishing NuGet packages but I couldn’t find a simplified guide for the simple case. Here it is and start by downloading nuget.exe and putting it in your path.

Supporting multiple platforms gives you a choice to make:

I did it. Earlier this year I caved and purchased a MacBook Pro 15″ Retina after being Mac-less for a few months despite some reservations about the lack of upgrade options.

Finally I had a lovely unibody machine. Now I needed something to prevent the beating my 17″ acquired over the years – something with a bit of padding to prevent the occasional bump as my backpacks tend to be very thin.

C# 6.0 is now available and the final list of features is well explained by Sunny Ahuwanya so go there and try it with his interactive samples page.

Adam Ralph has a list of the probable C# 6.0 features Mads Torgersen from the C# design team covered at new Developers Conference() NDC 2013 in London.

Many full-size Windows keyboards come with extra buttons some of which are of questionable value but the volume and music controls are useful especially if you’re a programmer that likes to listen to music all day.

Unfortunately my two keyboards of choice (DAS Ultimate and Topre Realforce) do not come with such controls. Neither does my MacBook Pro but Apple do the elegant thing and re-purpose some of the function keys.

My eagerly-awaited Chromecast arrived a couple of weeks ago. Despite the reports that Google had run out of Netflix codes my 3-month streaming code arrived a few days before by email – a great deal given that it is also valid for current Netflix customers too.

The requirements for using a Chromecast are:

Ahmet Alp Balkan on the Microsoft Azure team reflected on his experiences at Microsoft. His experiences do not exactly match mine (initially on LINQ to SQL, then Entity Framework and finally xbox.com) but I recognize some of his points.

Here is some further discussion along with some other thoughts that have come up over the years. A lot of these don’t apply just to Microsoft and some are useful for people new to the industry to think about.

One of the great things about working for Microsoft was the sheer breadth of the company means there are lots of cool and interesting things going on that you can peek into even if it’s not your area.

With a few exceptions your Microsoft badge gets you into the whole campus (some of the Xbox studios and the executive floor are exceptions).

Given my new focus on Windows 8 apps and the loss of my MacBook Pro I was in the market for a Windows 8 laptop.

My requirements were that it had a touchscreen display with at least 1080p resolution, fast (i5 or better with an SSD) and very slim. You’d be surprised at how such simple requirements leave you with such a small selection right now.