UPDATE: New version on FastSharp that includes a Windows 7 Gadget! Learn more here. Last year I wrote this program which I named FastSharp. It is a text editor which lets you compile and run C# code that would normally exist inside a method. The...

Well, maybe not best friend but its a nice function.  When working with bound collections in WPF you often end up dealing with a CollectionView .  This is the MSDN documentation description of a CollectionView : You can think of a collection...

Have you ever had the desire to convert some RTF text into HTML? Probably not. But if you do, then you are in luck! I recently had the need to do this conversion and after some searching found out a way to do it by enhancing a sample distributed in the...

Using LINQ to SQL with SQL CE 3.5 can be a bit of a challenge. First off, the LINQ to SQL Visual Studio designer doesn't support SQL CE so you need to run sqlmetal from the command line to create the object model (or write it by hand). Once you get past...

After some investigation I feel I have a decent understanding on how LINQ to SQL concurrency works. LINQ to SQL uses optimistic concurrency which means that it never takes an exclusive lock on a table.  It caches the information you are working with and...

Last year my girlfriend Mallory Emerson drew my attention to a web comic called Dinosaur Comics . It is really funny and inspired me to try to make my own. So while I was in class one day (not the most interesting Information Retrieval lecture) I drew...

I often browse through directories using the command line interface. It is sometimes times faster and provides more information than using the GUI. However, many times there are operations that are easier in the GUI. This is why I always loved CMD.exe...

Silverlight 2 is currently in Beta 1 but even in this early stage it has many amazing features. One of these features which I was toying around with today was its ability to integrate with its host page's DOM . What this means is that from Silverlight...

I just wrote this simple plugin for JQuery which lets you synchronize the scroll bars of any collection of elements.  This lets you move the scrollbar of one div it have the scrollbars’ of the rest of the divs move the same exact amount. Here is...

With the addition of anonymous delegates in C# 2.0 and with lambda expressions in C# 3.0 you might have been hearing a lot about variable capturing. This is the mechanism in which the delegate/lambda which was defined inline is able to hold on to any...

Quick code snippet time! The following are generic methods for inserting and updating a detached entity into a database using LINQ to SQL. 1: /// <summary> 2: /// Updates the database with item. 3: /// </summary> 4: /// <typeparam...

It is an age old question: How do you teach your girlfriend hex? I encountered this problem when I was a web developer in college for a late night student activities program aptly named  Late Nite Binghamton.  My co-worker and girlfriend Mallory was a...

Some History The Snippet Designer was started as an intern project of mine during the Summer of 2006. The idea was to make snippet files (which were introduced to Visual Studio in 2005) a first class entity. Following this idea I created a Visual Studio...

One of the most interesting aspects of the Haskell language is the fact that features lazy evaluation. My interest in lazy evaluation led me to a post on Wes Dyers blog about lazy lists in C#. In his blog post he talks describes how to create a lazy list...

I have been working a lot with WPF and I found the following two FREE tools to be extremely helpful. The first is: XamlPadX - ( http://blogs.msdn.com/llobo/archive/2007/12/19/xamlpadx-v3-0.aspx ) This is an enhanced version of XamlPad which comes...

As my interest in functional languages has grown, I have become increasingly interested in using them to implement algorithms which I can already write with imperative languages. For example, I was taught to implement (and I assume most other people as...

I just released a new version of my FastSharp program. Download it   or  View the source code This release contains some notable enhancements: Support for multiple languages C# Visual Basic F# Persistence of your current code language and snippet...

The DiffPlex ( http://diffplex.codeplex.com ) project is now available on Codeplex ! The DiffPlex project is a combination of a .NET Diffing Library with a Silverlight and HTML diff viewer. It is released open source under the MS-PL license. ...

I randomly yesterday started thinking about the unfoldr function in Haskell while working out at the gym (how nerdy is that, I am lifting iron but thinking of functional programming). Unfoldr take a single and an unfolding function and turns it into a...

In my last post I talked about a Stream class for creating efficient lazy lists in C#. In addition, I showed several classic functional methods I ported to C# to be used on the lazy lists. As I mentioned in that post, I will now talk about an example...

I love C# and I would never want to do anything to make it seem any less amazing but I have to give credit where credit is due ... to Visual Basic .NET. Yes, I said it. Both languages have been adding features inspired by the functional and dynamic programing...

A while back I posted Converting RTF to HTML which showed how to convert RTF text into HTML markup using the WPF RichTextBox control.  Since then I have noticed many posts on forums asking for a free and easy way … Continue reading →

In a previous post I mentioned how Visual Basic .NET's lambda expressions are more fun and easy to use than C#'s. My inspiration for this statement was the fact that in VB .NET you are able to implicitly define a lambda expression in this way: Dim f ...

The third module in the simple regular expression parser is called: NFAtoDFA.  Which as you might have guessed, takes the NFA that resulted from the first module and converts it into a DFA.  The structure that the DFA uses is the same that the NFA uses...

Note: This post may be subject to gross use of hyperbole. By far the best game in the history of man is: Fuel Pipe on Skype Skype has a bunch of built in games which you can play with the person to whom you are talking. These games are good since they...