Visual Studio .NET Intellisense

So today I needed to go work on a .NET project in Visual Studio 2003 and found that my intellisense was not working.  I tried typing even the simplest 'string.Format' and when I hit '.' no help popped up.  Figuring that it was ReSharper, I uninstalled it.  However, that did not solve the problem.  So I repaired VS 2003.  Nope.  So I continued to uninstall, repair, run CCleaner, etc.  Nothing seemed to fix it.  Then it occurred to me that it might be something in my profile.  Sure enough, I logged in as a different user and that user had intellisense.

I proceeded to clean out my %UserProfile%\Application Data, %UserProfile%\Local Settings\Application Data and %UserProfile%\Local Settings\Temp directories for anything related to VS but that still didn't fix it.  Finally I came to terms with the fact that it was in the registry.  I deleted the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1 key (which unfortunately holds all of my VS 2003 settings) and went back in.  Sure enough it was fixed.

I'm not sure what specific key or value shut off the intellisense though.  One of these days I may try to narrow it down.

Tags: Microsoft, .NET, Visual Studio

Rank Trending

Did you ever wonder how each post you make to your blog affects your Google Rank?  Maybe you want to keep an eye on your Google search rank for a specific phrase because you want to make sure your site stays known for that topic.  Or maybe you have some other statistics from say a service like awstats that you want to overlay with your Google Adsense to see just how they relate.

Then RankTrend is for you.

Datasources
RankTrend tracks a number of datasources for you such as search engine rank (what position your website shows up in a search result list), Google PageRank, how many people link to you in Del.icio.us, how many Diggs a post of yours gets and many more including a generic datasource so that you can upload your own custom data.  Here's the beauty: RankTrend keeps track of these over time so you can see how each change from day to day, week to week, etc.

Events
RankTrend also allows you to enter events that you can overlay on top of your data.  For example, when you pay for an ad for your website in a magazine, you can add an event so that you can see at what point in the data that you got that ad.  It helps you visualize what kind of change that ad brought for your website.  Here's the cool part: you can give RankTrend RSS feeds too so that it automatically adds in an event for each new item in the RSS feed.  So if you have a blog, give RankTrend your RSS feed and watch how each post affects each of your datasources.

Charts
So you have all this data, now what?  The heart of RankTrend isn't in the collecting of this data, it's in helping you visualize it and compare it.  RankTrend offers a charting system that allows you to plot your various datasources together and overlay whatever events you'd like.  The charts are powerful and the RankTrend team is working on even more trending options that will take it to the next level.  Below is an example of a chart that I made in which I imported some of my daily awstats into a generic datasource and charted it.  Now I know awstats gives you a basic chart to visualize this data, but RankTrend offers this kind of charting on any of their datasources.  Plus you can't plot your events over top of your stats on the awstats site.

Reports
RankTrend also offers the ability to build your own reports that can be emailed to you daily, weekly or monthly.  So say I built 7 charts and wanted those and a site summary emailed to me weekly so I can keep an eye on things, I can do that.

RankTrend is in Beta
As I mentioned before, RankTrend is in beta.  You'll need a special code for now in order to sign up.  This code is posted on certain forums, so if you can find it, you can take part in the beta testing.  Hopefully it will be out of beta soon.  The RankTrend team is committed to offering more and better ways to track and trend the data about your website that is important to you.

I highly recommend you check it out and subscribe to their RSS feed to be notified when RankTrend comes out of beta.

Tags: RankTrend.com