This post is the first post of a little series. Overall, I will publish three articles within this series. They will focus the unbelievable, great and stunning product named “Microsoft OneNote”. You don’t know it? You should! This smart tool is part of the Microsoft Office suite – since Microsoft Office 2007. Within Office 2010, OneNote also got this great new menu called “Ribbon” – now it has the real new Office-style, too.

So, what to do with OneNote? For me, OneNote is a tool for every situation in which I have to concept, calculate, brainstorm, memorize, create, write, list, consolidate and simply note (yes, the name “OneNote” wasn’t chosen randomly) every kind of stuff. You can arrange notes in a structured and consistent manner, you can connect OneNote to Outlook – for meetings, contacts, tasks and email purposes. OneNote is the knowlegde base for your daily knowlegde. It can save all these ugly details you have to remember the whole day long. It can also be helpful when specifying great solutions for even bigger problems.

This first articel – named the “Hymn for OneNote” – is based on my two year real-life experience with that great tool. But, listen: I think, that OneNote is not helpful in every case and for every user. I think you have to learn that “OneNote-way” of organisation, that way of arranging your notes in structured and efficient manner.

Let me explain my personal way of usage a bit. The first (and biggest) entity in OneNote is a notebook. A notebook can contain a lot of content. One possibility is to create one notebook for each project. For my purposes, this is a little bit overblown. I have one notebook for all projects, one notebook for global stuff about the work, one archive-notebook for old notes that I don’t want to delete and one notebook for private issues. So, my OneNote hosts four notebooks. The archive-notebook is closed and will only be openend if I am cleaning up. The other notebooks are used frequently.

A notebook contains several sections. Sections are the second important entity in OneNote. A section is a container for the concrete information (for the concrete notes). In my project-notebook, I have one section for each project. For me, that is the best way to isolate the information of different projects.

A section can contain one or more pages. There are two kinds of pages: Parent pages (formally known as “pages”) and subpages. A subpage always belongs to a page and a page can contain zero, one or more subpages. With these pages and subpages, you can start to write down all your notes. Simply create a page for a new topic. On creating a page, OneNote will automatically add a timestamp to the top of the page. At first, you have to choose the page-title – this title will also be used to identify the page insde the section. After setting the title, you call fill the note with content. For that, all typical and popular objects are available – for example: plain text, formatted text, images, tables, links (to files), lists (ordered and unordered). You can use almost all objects you know from other Office products like Microsoft Word.

The different objects can be arranged nearly free-style. There is no page- (like Word) or table-design (like Excel), this is just a imaginary peace of paper. Write down what you want, paint images and paste all stuff you’ve copied into your clipboard. There are additional, hot functions for the work with OneNote-pages: For example, OneNote is able to automatically extract text infromation from pasted images. Furthermore features are focussed in the following articles of this series.

Overall: Folks, believe me: Try it! Just educate yourself in loving OneNote – this works!

In the next post of the OneNote-saga, I will explain something about the combination and integration from OneNote with other great tools like Outlook, Word, Excel or Windows Live Sync.

The Clean-Code-Developer-initiative stands for clean sourcecode. Everyone can be a Clean-Code-Developer. The process to become a “clean coder” consists of serveral steps which are represented as different colors. Every color (every level) contains a few principles that should be followed. If all principles of one color are follwed one month (without any exceptions!), the next level is reached – with additional principles to follow. Examples for (typical and elementary) principles are DRY (“Don’t repeat yourself”) and KISS (“Keep it simple, stupid”).

The Clean-Code-Developer-intitiative was founded by Ralf Westphal and Stefan Lieser. If you’re interested, just go to http://www.clean-code-developer.de/ and try it! Additionally, there is a related group in XING.

I AM A CLEAN-CODE-DEVELOPER!

And you?

You should have heared about the new “dynamic”-keyword which ships as new language-feature of C#. With this keyword, you can declare variables without ANY knowledge of their type. The concrete type will be determined (and can be changed) at runtime. Isn’t that dangerous? Isn’t that crazy? I think, this is boon and bane. In several scenarios, you may use reflection to dynamically assign variables and call methods – so, you do not know the type at development. This is cool for generic applications like code-generators, but this is ugly for productive applications with claim on good support. I think that “dynamic” makes the code less readably and raises the probability of bugs.

C# was born as a type-safe and easy-to-handle-language. Many new features in .NET 2.0 and 3.5 (like Generics or anonymous types with the keyword “var”) provided the ability to create smarter code – without loosing the type-safe taste. With “dynamic”, the good old path of secure-code-developing is left a bit. Your code can be smarter, your code can be shorter, but your code will be less readable.

What do you think about that?

A very nice and useful function in Visual Studio 2008 is the auto formatting. This magical function can be accessed by pressing CTRL-K,CRTL-D.
Just use this combination and your code will be formatted automatically.

Great.

Click on File -> Open -> Import. After that, you will see the good old Outlook-dialog for import and export.

After a long long time, I decided to start a technical oriented blog. I will use this blog to describe typical happenings in the daily work. The focus will be set on Microsoft technologies and products, such as SharePoint Server, SQL Server and .NET.

Enjoy!