Ryan J.com

Over at Stephen Walther's ASP.NET blog he shares 11 useful tips/tricks that you can use in Visual Studio.  Several seem to be strictly VS2008, but I did manage to get some of them to work in VS2005... my favorite being automatically generating a property by typing "prop" and hitting "tab" twice.  Wow!  What a time saver!

Check it out...

I ran into a requirement working on a piece of code that needed me to search a string from beginning to end and then from end to the beginning.  This is the solution that I came up with consists of three methods.  One method to simulate the InStr function from the old vb days, one to reverse a string and another to do the actual matching:

	public bool ForwardBackwardMatch(string stringSearched,
		string searchCriteria)
	{
		bool matchFound = false;
		if (stringSearched.Trim() != string.Empty)
		{
			// search criteria in string?
			if (InStr(stringSearched, searchCriteria))
			{
				matchFound = true;
			}

			// reverse our string
			string stringSearchedReverse =
					StringReverse(stringSearched);
			// recheck against criteria
			if (InStr(stringSearchedReverse, searchCriteria))
			{
				matchFound = true;
			}
		}
		return matchFound;
	}

	public bool InStr(string stringSearched, string searchCriteria)
	{
		bool returnVal;
		if (stringSearched.IndexOf(searchCriteria.Trim()) == -1)
		{
			returnVal = false;
		}
		else
		{
			returnVal = true;
		}
		return returnVal;
	}

	public string StringReverse(string s)
	{
		char[] charArray = s.ToCharArray();
		for (int i = 0, j = charArray.Length - 1;
			i < j; i++, j--)
		{
			charArray[j] = s[i];
			charArray[i] = s[j];
		}
		return new String(charArray);
	}

DiffMerge

I've used DiffMerge for about a year now when I need to check multiple versions of code against each other. I'd say what I love most about this application is the ability to easily move code between files and also to be able to do a folder comparison, both in a very timely fashion. Best of all... it is FREE. So if you are in need of a quick text comparison tool I would highly recommend this to you.

So, after working on a piece of code at work for over a month and migrating it to QA I had an error that I couldn't quite figure out that only appeared while viewing the site in FireFox.  The error is "Sys.ArgumentOutOfRangeException" and mentions that an integer is expected but was NaN.  Okay.  That's helpful considering its a JavaScript error and IE's JS debugging is entirely junk.  Want to know the trick?  The frameset contained a value for frameborder='yes' inside of it.  Apparently the script, in IE, requires an integer value to be used instead of the yes/no value.  All I did was change it to a 0 from a 'no' and the page started working fine.

Annoying