Visual Studio 2015 keyboard shortcuts

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Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio Code

While Visual Studio 2015 is the next product version in the line, Visual Studio Code is a surprise. Fast start, MarkDown preview, syntaxt highlighting and intellisense. Seems like a great text editor. Currently in preview version and free.

Downloads

Disable annoying Tools panel in new Adobe Acrobat DC

Somebody clever at Adobe forums has found an easy way to disable the annoying Tools panel in the new Acrobat Reader. The product, btw, is now called Adobe Acrobat DC and offers some neat cloud integration so that you can see your documents across different devices. This probably means that any file you open goes to the cloud so beware when opening confidential documents.

The solution, in brief, is:

Go to the install directory, i.e." C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat Reader DC\Reader\AcroApp\ENU". Create a new subfolder (I used "Disabled"). Move 3 files from the "ENU" folder into the new "Disabled" folder: AppCenter_R.aapp & Home.aapp & Viewer.aapp. Open a PDF and no more Tool Pane!  I originally moved just the "Viewer" file but if you clicked on "Home" or "Tools" on the toolbar you couldn't go back to the "Document." Moving all 3 files takes care of that issue.

Link

On a positive note, the new Reader is very fast when opening documents and is a welcome upgrade to the previous version.
Android version, on the other hand, takes a bit longer to start.

Reduce the size of WinSxS directory

This is particularly useful on tablets with limited space on system drive.

How to Reduce the Size of the WinSxS directory and Free Up Disk Space on Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 or do we even need to? (link)

A couple of useful hints:

• There is a scheduled task in Servicing folder, that cleans up the WinSxS automatically.
• Running Disk Cleanup Wizard will run the above task, too.
• Console command for the above is "Dism.exe /online /cleanup-image /StartComponentCleanup"
• /ResetBase ("Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase") removes all the superseded versions of files, which prevents uninstalling updates but also saves quite a bit of space.
• Check space used with "Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore".

Font Icons in Android Apps

While vector graphics implementation is moving quite slowly, there is another interesting development in the similar direction. The point in question being avoiding multiple different sizes of images and using one image that scales well. This can be achieved only with vector images and, as mentioned, direct support for SVG is quite slow. The alternative is coming from the world of web applications.
Font Awesome, for example, is a great way of using a custom font that contains icons instead of letters. That way, icons can be drawn anywhere in a very simple way. They scale well, and their colour can be customized. They are monochrome, with one colour available for the icon content and, being usually transparent, another one is available as the background colour.
This is quite enough for most purposes. It is very light on resources and easy to implement.

Here are a few links to articles and the library that allows the same for Android apps.

• How to use font icons in Android
• Android FontIcon Library, introduction 
• FontIcon library on GitHub

The implementation is quite easy and this represent the easiest way to use scalable graphics in Android apps so far.

Below are some useful services that allow operations on icon fonts:

• Fontastic
• IcoMoon
• Fontello 
• We love font icons