Skype & IIS Clash.

As I am working completely remotely these days I have found my use of Skype increase. This is mainly for chatting to my co-dev throughout the day. Not being a massive Skype fan I actually have it configured for use through Trillian which is quite a good multi-protocol IM client.

Today while mid call with my co-dev I found my Firefox instance hanging and so did an iisreset on my local dev box. Killed Firefox and attempted to start debugging again. Only Visual Studio didn't want to play ball. It showed an error dialog with the following message :

Unable to start debugging on the web server. The server committed a protocol violation. Section=ResponseStatusLine.

OK, that was a new one to me! I started to dig about and found that the caused of the problem was Skype. It appears that Skype will try and use ports 80 and 443 as optional ports to connect on. This meant that IIS was not able to listen to either of these ports.

I killed Trillian (which in turned killed Skype) and all was resolved and I could debug again.

It appears you can disable the option to listen to these ports in Skype. You need to go to :

Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Connection

On this option page you need to uncheck "Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections". Restart Skype and you should find you have no more issues.

Column Editing Mode For Visual Studio & (G)Vim.

I have been a heavy Visual Studio user for 10 + years. I was re-factoring some code today when I found that it has Column Editing capabilities. This was caused by me getting a keyboard short cut wrong and not noticing as I typed. From a quick Google this appears to be something that has been available for sometime. Usually when I need to do Column Editing in bulk I switch to (G)Vim and have often wished it was available in Visual Studio.

To edit columns in Visual Studio you simple have to hold SHIFT+ALT after selecting the start point with your mouse and then drag to select the columns you wish to edit. Start typing and your columns will all receive the edit.

As a side note Column Editing in (G)Vim is very easy. Simply hit CTRL+V to put you into column editing mode and then select the columns to edit. Once selected hit SHIFT+i to put you into insert mode and start making your edits. Once done hit ESC to exit column editing mode.