jaredpar's WebLog : Blogging

Making code display better on your blog

Jared Parsons — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:00:42 GMT

My blogging tool is Windows Live Writer and I use the "Insert From Visual Studio" plug-in to get pretty looking code into my postings. The generated code uses the <pre> tag for formatting the elements.

Unfortunately my blog provider doesn't always render this properly and will clip text that is too long. Ideally I would like to either

Wrap code that overflows the page
Put up a localized scroll bar for the code snippet

Luckily the plug-in puts the outer most <pre> tag into it's own CSS class: code. This makes the problem easy with a CSS override.

pre.code {
overflow : auto;
}

What's the purpose of this blog?

Jared Parsons — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:00:06 GMT

I've had a couple people ask me this question about my blog. The simple answer is: to explore my adventures in code, coding, patterns and pretty much anything else related to programming.

I realize from a readers perspective my topics may appear somewhat random. After all I post in C#,VB,C++ and Powershell with varying degrees of frequency. I jump from patterns to specialized templates to threading to random gotchas to API Design. The reason for the jumping is I post topics close to the projects I'm working on and I work on a lot of projects :). At any given time I'm working on one of the following items.

My job as developer on the VB Debugger and IDE
My personal managed utility libraries (non-UI and UI) [1]
The PInvoke Interop Assistant
Several internal tools
My scripting environment
Customer reported issues in forums
This blog
Whatever happens to capture my interest at the time.

Whenever I discover anything interesting, find a bug or see yet another pattern/design I like or dislike I try to blog about it. I do this for two reasons.

My own personal sanity. I've found through years of programming that it's very unlikely you will hit an error only once. Instead you're likely to see it time and time again. Blogging about it both helps firm the issue into memory and gives me a great reference to fall back onto the next time I see that bug. It's really simple to lookup a blog post by tag and read it or point a coworker to it.
Everyone else's sanity. The more people who write about issues, the more likely someone else will find an answer when they enter a problem into a search engine.

In short, I love to write and talk about code and this is a great forum.

[1] Hopefully on it's way to http://code.msdn.com so I don't have to keep posting little snippets and making users paste snippets from various blog entries to get a simple working example.

Blogging about Code

Jared Parsons — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 02:43:00 GMT

It's somewhat frustrating to try and post code to the internet for your blog. Getting the color scheme right isn't easy if you're like me and don't use a standard color scheme for coding. I prefer a very dark coding environment (inkpot) and most people don't want to read code in that scheme.

Someone just led me onto a great website that will auto-colorize your code.

http://puzzleware.net/codehtmler/default.aspx