Category: Development

  • Perl Escape Backslashes in String Substitution

    This note is for a trick to use Q and E  to escape characters for regular expression. You will find it very useful when you do string substitution and your pattern contains characters like slashes or backslashes .

  • Perl Add Directory to Path

    Say you have a directory d:bin and you want to add it to path environment at the beginning of your Perl script. Following code will do the trick. my $dir="d:\bin"; $ENV{PATH}.=";$dir"; Then $dir will be included in new $ENV{PATH}

  • Visual Studio Themes and Color Schemes

    I just came cross this site http://studiostyles.info/ which provides Visual Studio color schemes for free download. All color schemas work for both Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. Every schema has screenshots so you can see how it looks like before downloading it. You can follow following steps to import the color schema into Visual Studio.…

  • Perl Redirect Command Output

    In Perl, you can execute external commands using system() or “. However, system and “ does not redirect command output to console and this results people who runs your perl script can’t see it. This also make debug much harder. Perl does not have a build in switch that equals to batch scripts’ “@echo on”,…

  • How to Validate URL in C#

    I searched google for how to validate URL in C# and most results say using a regular expression. Eventually I found Uri.TryCreate which is a built in method in C# to check if a string is a valid URL Uri uri = null; if (!Uri.TryCreate(url, UriKind.Absolute, out uri) || null == uri) {     //Invalid…

  • SpellChecker in WPF4 TextBox

    TextBox and RichTextBox in WPF4 has the built in SpellChecker functionality. It’s currently available in following four languages #LID 1033 – English #LID 3082 – Spanish #LID 1031 – German #LID 1036 – French Enable SpellChecker functionality on TextBox or RichTextBox is as easy as just setting SpellCheck.IsEnabled to True on the controls. <TextBox SpellCheck.IsEnabled=”True”…

  • CopySourceAsHtml for Visual Studio 2010

    CopySourceAsHtml is an add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 that allows you be able to quickly get your code as HTML from Visual Studio, just like being able to save it as a HTML file from the Save As dialog. It’s very helpful if you frequently post code to blog or send code in email.…

  • Use coalescing operator to write more readable code

    Tired of code like this? public string Foo { get { return foo; } set { if (value == null) value = String.Empty; foo = value; } } public string Bar { get { return bar; } set { if (value == null) value = String.Empty; bar = value; } } Use coalescing operator to…

  • Access denied when creating a folder just deleted

    I have a batch script which remove a folder and re-create it. The command that remove a folder is rd /s/q and the command create folder is mkdir. Recently I see something weird happening, everytime when the folder is deleted and re-created, there is error message Access is denied displayed. However, if I rerun the…

  • GhostDoc Tutorial

    Earlier I have introduced this excellent comment auto generation tool – GhostDoc. Now you can follow this instructions to get GhostDoc working in just 5 minutes. Download GhostDoc and install GhostDoc is a Visual Studio plugin, so after Visual Studio is launched, you’d need to assign a hotkey for automatic comments generation, or just  click…