As a HS CS teacher, one of the ways that I can promote the subject is by seeing that students are recognized for their skills. One such way is to participate, (and maybe do well) in programming contests for high school students. This year there are 3 contest in Florida that we will send teams to: at Stetson University (held in November already), the University of Florida (April), and the University of Central Florida (May). These contests give our students the opportunity to see other students with...

I came across an O'Reilly Book by James Avery called "Visual Studio Hacks." (The word "Hacks" in the title is misleading.) It has over 400 pages of ideas on ways to improve your usage of VS. I like the book and even picked up a few things new to me. Here's one of them. There are times when you want to copy a portion of several lines of code, but NOT the whole of ANY line(s) of code. In the early days of computers, some programs allowed Block selection of characters, which is like superimposing a...