Simon Hughes - Software Architect, Tutor, Developer

When giving presentations, you should really turn off PowerPoints AutoCorrect feature of it changing a hyperlink into an underlined link. Unless you actually are going to click on the link during the presentation, then turn it off. It's much easer to read without it being in a different font and underlined. To turn it off in PowerPoint, goto Tools -> Options -> Proofing -> AutoCorrect options. Untick the box highlighted below.

There is sometimes a problem of wanting to remove data (email addresses in this example) from within a string which are delimited. For example, if you want to remove all non bybox email addresses from "some.name@bybox.com; simon@hicrest.net; fred.bloggs@bybox.com" and do this for every table, without having to create functions to break apart the string first, how are you going to do it? Here's how: Our example table looks like this CREATE TABLE data_export ( data_export_id INT NOT NULL IDENTITY(1, 1) PRIMARY KEY, email_address VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL -- ... Other fields left out for brevity ) Insert some test data INSERT INTO data_export (email_address) VALUES ('some.name@bybox.com; simon@hicrest.net; fred.bloggs@bybox.com'), ('neo@matrix.com; me@bybox.com'), ('fred@b.com; xxx@bybox.com'), ('fred@bbc.com'), ('an.other@bybox.com') Next is the recursive CTE SQL is in several sections: spli...

With C# 5, you can put a special attribute on an optional parameter and the compiler will fill in the value not with a constant but with information about the calling method. This means we can implement the Logger.Trace to automagically pick up where it’s being called from: public static void Trace(string message, [CallerFilePath] string sourceFile = "", [CallerMemberName] string memberName = "") { string msg = String.Format("{0}: {1}.{2}: {3}", DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM:ss"), Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(sourceFile), memberName, message); LoggingInfrastructure.Log(msg); } Now, if the caller calls Log.Trace("some message") the compiler will fill in the missing arguments not with the empty string, but with the file and member where the call happens: // In file called Fred.cs public void SomeFunc() { Log.Trace("Hello"); // Compi...

I've created yet another WordPress CMS system for a friend of my wifes this time. Home page is a blog, the others are static pages. www.stilettos-sos.com

Some said it was the Y2K bug we had to worry about, but it's actually Tue Jan 19 2038 03:14:07 you've really to worry about. There are many, many systems built with time saved as a 32bit long integer value. The max value of a signed long integer is 2147483647. This value is the number of seconds elapsed since midnight (00:00:00), January 1, 1970, coordinated universal time (UTC) Here is an example C program, built with Visual Studio 2010. __time32_t t; t = 0; printf( "The min is %s\n", _ctime32( &t ) ); t = 2147483647; printf( "The max is %s\n", _ctime32( &t) ); t = 2147483648; printf( "The date is %s\n", _ctime32( &t) ); Output: The min is Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 The max is Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038 The date is (null) So after Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038, the date goes to null which will cause a crash. Let's just hope all the critical (including embedded) systems get fixed before then.