My IDE is hot

I know I am a bit late to join this debate, but :

• I was new at my job at the time. After a few years spent in a few french companies, I was obviously not quite used to the internet as it had become since I left college, and I must admit I was as close as could be to miss the web 2.0 buzz. This blog was a longshot then.
• July has only 3 full days left, and I realize it looks like my last oppurtunity to post something this month...
• After I had this casual conversation with our new intern where I stated half jokingly that there was nothing wrong for a developer to keep the default Fisher-Price-like Windows XP theme (except that it looked rather unprofessional ;-), he set himself to tweak the colors, not only of his system, but also of his Visual Studio syntax coloring ! This reminded me of Jeff Atwood's old post.

So here it is :

Having been raised with a DOS Turbo Pascal environment, I got used to the theme. When I switched to Microsoft tools, I tried to create something close, but with a darker background, which I find more resting. You can download the settings here. I have also posted it on Ning (where you might want to rate it).

VS2005 SP1 is suckin' up your drive

Remember this old song about Windows 95 ? Softwares on Windows have always been demanding on hard disks, and it seems that disk capacity will never be enough. As mine is quite fixed, I am doing my best to optimize disk usage.

First thing I do is to regularly clean my temporary folders. Here are sample command-lines for this :
DEL /f /s /q %SystemRoot%\Temp DEL /f /s /q %TEMP% DEL /f /s /q %TMP%

Second thing is to use the Cleanup Tool. Either use it manually (launch %SystemRoot%\system32\cleanmgr.exe and follow the instructions) or automate it.

But all this is not enough, and I recently checked my drive for wasted space. And I happened to find that my %SystemRoot%\Installer folder was taking up more than 2.6Gb ! I tried to google this folder to find more about it, but I found that documentation is rather scarce. I could only find that what lies in there is very application dependent, and more research showed me that in fact a single application was responsible for about a 2.2Gb bloat : Visual Studio 2005. Or, to be more precise, VS2005 Service Pack 1 alone was responsible for this. So for those interested, here are two links about this matter and possible fixes by Heath Stewart : about VS2005 SP1 and about the patch cache.

IMHO, there must be something wrong in design about this cache feature...