The ability to search for and replace a substring of text is such a useful, and often necessary, bit of functionality that nearly every text editor on the planet has it built in. However, the tool we often use to hold our text based data, the ubiquitous relational database, typically has very poor support for doing search and replace out of the box. Its so poor in fact that I’ve actually discussed this very topic, Search & Replace for your Database, before! However, as was noted in the comments to that post, my solution hack is not 100% effective....

Events and delegates aren’t exactly a new concept in the .net world. I might even go so far as to say that they are fairly well understood by most experienced .net developers. That’s not to say the concepts behind them are easy to grok... I’m just saying that if you know developer who’s been around the .net-block a few times, he/she probably has a pretty good grasp of what a delegate is and how they’re used. Am I such a developer? Up until yesterday I thought I was. Here’s the scenario I found myself in: I...

It seems one of the biggest voids in Windows Live Writer has finally been filled - Search & Replace has arrived! Waldek Mastykarz recently left me a comment to let me know that he was tired of waiting for the WLW team to add Search & Replace, so he took it upon himself to build a Search & Replace plugin, complete with... Regular Expressions! Sometimes I just miss the Replace functionality which in my opinion is a must-have of each content editor - even the Notepad proves it. If I’m not wrong the Live Writer...

Simone Chiaretta recently posted an overview of a recent Ajaxian poll that sought to determine the state of of AJAX usage among developers in the enterprise... whatever that means. :) Not happy with the lack of detail, Simone did a little number-crunching of his own to determine the usage among developers using the .net stack. He found that among the 381 developers using .net, roughly 36% of them are using Microsoft’s ASP.NET AJAX framework/implementation. Gettin' particular Taking it even further, Simo has now created his own survey targeted directly at .net developers. He’s used the same...

Your Resolution this year should be: If you aren’t sure, make it public... and make everything virtual (or overridable, depending on your language) by default. Of course this primarily applies to those folks building frameworks for statically typed languages... <cough> Microsoft <cough>, but it also holds weight for the rest of us. After all, we all want other people to use our code - even if other people is your customers, your team, or yourself. The point is, we want our code to be (re)used. And I don’t know about you, but I’d...

My God... could I put any more acronyms in that title. Yeah, I probably could. Oh, and if you just came for the code, jump to the bottom. In his post TDD and Dependency Injection with ASP.NET MVC, Phil used a DI framework to reduce friction and increase his Test-Fu when doing the TDD thang. How do you up your Test-Fu? By pushing the monotonous, and sometimes overbearing, work of wiring up dependencies off to a tool - in this case, a Dependency Injection tool called StructureMap. Angle bracket madness Phil was good enough to...

Pretend that you’re building an application to do something like... oh I don’t know, track employee time. Applications like this exist in almost every company on the face of the earth. After all, time == money, duh! Lets also pretend one requirement of your time tracker is to keep track of the employee’s regular work hours - meaning their start/end times and the days of the week they work. Again, seems like a pretty simple and intuitive requirement for a time tracking system. So, here’s my question: how would you go about storing the days the employee works...