Sampling

Whenever you test it is vital that you pick correct test data. Suppose you need to verify that you implemented an Add method correctly and you test it by passing 2 and 2 to be added. There are many implementations that would respond with 4. Here are a couple:

return num1 + num2;

return 4;

return num1 + num1;

return num1 * num2;

return Math.Pow(num1, num2);

return Math.Pow(num1, 2);

These might be obvious but most methods we implement aren’t that easy to grasp in the blink of an eye.

Now have a look at this:

Does it look familiar? When spending a lot of time coding in Visual Studio the font you use is more important than you might think. There are a lot of coding fonts and it is worth it to put some time in selecting your favorite. So how do you select a coding font? Well, the obvious thing to do is to test them. But what is a valid test?

The easiest way is to switch to the font and start coding and see if the font works for you. Less work is to examine the font a bit better before switching so that is why Visual Studio has a tiny sample in the dialog above:

Unfortunately most font-aware coders don’t care about A, a, B, b, X, x, Y, y, Z and z. Most care about 1, i, I, L, o, O, 0, B, 8, : and ; spotting the difference between 1 and i is getting more and more important due to the dynamic languages. (Remember “Option Explicit”?)

Microsoft felt our pain and changed the sample in the dialog in Visual Studio 2010 (Beta 1):

I have been working with Visual Studio 2010 (I am writing a C# 4.0 + Parallel Programming training) for a while now and I like what they did to the editor and I can’t wait to get my hands on the final release.

In my search for fonts for coders I stumbled on this very cool tool called FontStruct. So if you are feeling creative, create your own font!

What is your favorite coding font?