Code — mostly .NET, C#, and SQL — plus the tools around it.
26 posts
· Programming · Comments
At work, I was tasked with creating a class to strip RTF tags from RTF formatted text, leaving only the plain text. Microsoft’s RichTextBox can do this with its Text property, but it was unavailable in the context in which I’m working. RTF formatting uses control characters escaped with backslashes along with nested curly braces.…
· Programming · Comments
Yesterday I noticed a strange anomaly in the logs of an application I wrote and manage at work while investigating another issue. It manifested as us sending duplicate messages from a queue to a third party over and over. I looked into the code and since threading was involved, I figured there was some thread…
· Programming · Comments
TLDR: The title is pretty much the entire post. We receive data from a third-party vendor on a nightly basis and we are migrating to a new version of the data. Once the data (a zip file) is downloaded, it must be extracted and we are using #ziplib to walk the zip file looking for…
Continue reading System.IO.File.OpenWrite Doesn't Overwrite an Existing File →
· Programming · Comments
Dilbert.com Hates Its Users Update 2: Dilbert support has been removed due to current events relating to its author. Update 1: Yahoo Pipes is shutting down. As a result, I started a new software project to replace it. The feeds are updated below. Bad RSS Feed with No Pictures Dilbert.com recently messed up their web…
· Programming · Comments
Site My last post was in April 2012, so it’s probably time for an update. I successfully imported my blog into a static HTML generating tool called PieCrust. It creates the files serving this site now. As part of the move, I totally redid the site’s design and functionality at the same time. I had…
· Programming · Comments
Right now .Net 4.5 is still in beta, but I noticed something that will make developers who must interact with zip files happy: .Net 4.5 will have native support for dealing with zip files. Up until now, the System.IO.Compression namespace only had support for GZipStream and DeflateStream. This post explores how working with SharpZipLib now compares to working with what is upcoming in the .Net 4.5 framework.
Continue reading Zip File Classes Finally Available in .Net 4.5 →
· Programming · Comments
TLDR: If you put your computer to sleep, the Windows Phone emulator might have the wrong time when you resume. Restart the emulator to get it to have the current time in its clock. I was working on my fork of an OAuth library for Windows Phone this weekend, and I ran across a really…
Continue reading Windows Phone Emulator Time Skew When Computer Sleeps →
· Programming · Comments
The Problem I’ve been doing a bit of WPF/ Windows Phone development. Usually INotifyPropertyChanged declarations for properties are really ugly. The big problem is that the INotifyPropertyChanged interface relies on strings, which don’t refactor well. I’m also using the fantastic MVVM Light Toolkit, which makes life a lot easier when doing Windows Phone development. MVVM…
Continue reading Pretty IPropertyNotifyChanged Declarations for Windows Phone →
· Programming · Comments
On January 11, 2011 I spoke at the Dallas PHP User Group on the topic of the Kohana v3 MVC Framework and Facebook integration. The introductory slides are below. To download the sample code yourself, head on over to the GitHub project page. Scroll to the bottom of the GitHub page to see the instructions…
· Programming · Comments
I’ve been using Windows Workflow Foundation for a small personal project to learn more about it and see what it can do. It’s pretty powerful and I’m looking forward to delving more into it. For my purposes though, I’m hosting the workflow in a console program. If you look around the internet, you’ll see lots…
Continue reading Hosting Windows Workflow Foundation in a Console Application without Ugly Code →
· Programming · Comments
redgate has released their SQL Search 1.0 for free, and my coworker Stephen sent our team an email letting us know about it. It is a fantastic product that integrates with SSMS and now it’s free. It keeps an index of all the text in every sproc, all the columns in every table, etc, and…
· Personal , Programming · Comments
Louisiana Tech just sent me a “reminder” email with my full username and password in there. That information is everything necessary to logon to the school student portal and get the rest of my personal information, full school transcript, etc. Not only do I not like them emailing my password, I don’t like that they…
Continue reading A Lesson in How Not to Conduct Website Security →
· Programming · Comments
I’m sure everyone who reads this blog has noticed, at some point, the result of another developer’s mistake in dealing with Unicode or other character encodings. I’ve had a few issues myself. To the left, you can see how my Napster displayed a Beyoncé song as Beyonc□. You may have seen a black diamond symbol…
· Programming · Comments
On our main product, in a branch on which I’m working on a Point of Sale product, something happened in the process of checking files into source control. In our case, we’re using Team Foundation Server. My guess is that the corruption happened on my hard drive for who knows what reason, but this is…
· Programming · Comments
A coworker of mine had a problem and came to me for help. She had a windows form with a control on it that she wanted to edit or delete, but couldn’t see the control. It was listed in the properties box in the list of controls on the form, but when she selected it…
Continue reading Accessing a Control Without Being Able to See It on a Windows Form →
· Work , Programming · Comments
Update: Added code to show “null” when a property is null, like Visual Studio does. If you’ve ever used Visual Studio in any iteration in any language, you have most likely used the immediate window. It’s insanely useful and lets you just type an instance of an object and if the object doesn’t have an…
Continue reading Using Reflection to Dynamically Generate ToString() Output →
· Work , Programming · Comments
Because I program in the 1970’s, part of what I do is programming against modems and serial ports. Specifically, we send medical claims over modem to adjudicators, in the event of unavailable internet access. As a customer, you’ll appreciate having your pharmacy delay you for 20 seconds rather than saying “Sorry; you can’t have your…
Continue reading Strong Name an Assembly Without Source Code →
· Work , Programming · Comments
Update: Added section at the bottom detailing what not to do. As part of the updater process that I wrote for a current project, a “boot strapper” program queries the database for available versions, and if there is a newer version available, it deletes the current program folder, replaces those files with the new files…
· Work , Programming · Comments
I know this is a bit late to the game, but this morning, as I’m refactoring a bunch of old code to be shared with a new project, I’m cleaning up the C# 2.0 property declarations we all know and love: public class SaleResponse: Response { protected bool _addressVerificationSuccess; public virtual bool AddressVerificationSuccess { [DebuggerStepThrough]…
Continue reading A Day Late and a Property Declaration Short →
· Work , Programming · Comments
Update: We figured out how to make it work with the help of our DBA and Jonathan Kehayias (see comments). We increased SQL Server’s MEM_TO_LEAVE property, by adjusting the –g command line switch for the service, to 448MB. This increase of the shared memory pool gave SQL Server enough breathing room for its worker threads…
Continue reading Out of Memory Exception While Attempting to Do SQL CLR →
· Programming , School · Comments
I am writing this post because of Jen. She pointed out that I haven’t blogged in forever. I thought it was worth posting though, if for nothing else than to show up Chris’ blog ging abilities. I passed the Microsoft 70-536 and 70-528 tests. That means I’m MCTS certified on Web, Windows, and SQL Server…
· Programming · Comments
My solution has now been included in a published book about ASP.NET for SQL Server This post is about programming and ASP.NET / Microsoft SQL Server 2005, so any of my friends who aren’t programmers won’t find this interesting. With that said… If you’re reading this post, it’s more than likely that you’ve encountered the…
Continue reading Enabling SQL Cache Dependency With Schema Solution →
· Programming , School · Comments
Yesterday, I took the Microsoft 70-526 certification exam and passed it with a 940. That certification is for Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 – Windows-Based Client Development. After I take the 70-536 (Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0—Application Development Foundation) on 1/31/2007, I’ll be MCTS: .NET Framework 2.0 Windows Applications. I’m already MCTS: SQL Server 2005. Doing these…
· Programming , School , Media · Comments
Update 1: Added Krystal Meyers picture and GH2 news. Update 2: Fixed “lost”/”lot” typo, thanks to John McCain. Before I begin on the title’s topics, I’d like to begin with another: Christian Music. Normally, I dislike it because it’s completely boring, and of course the content is verbal diarrhea. However, recently, I prepaid for two…
Continue reading The Prestige, PlayStation 2, and Programming →
· Programming · Comments
I’ve added my Amazon Wishlist to my blog. It lets people see what I want and link to it to buy it from the Amazon site. This was made possible because of a great plugin that Ryan Prins made. After downloading it, I noticed a few issues that made the XHTML not validate and a…
· Programming · Comments
Here’s a catchup for some people. WordPress is the software that runs this blog. Kubrick is the default theme that comes with it. You’ve probably seen it on a million blogs and on this one. However, I wanted to customize mine with darker colors, like some of my previous designs. I also wanted to have…
Continue reading Customizing the Kubrick (Default) theme for WordPress →