C#.Nick

Visual Studio 2008: Tabify Selected Lines

Nick Aceves — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:11:16 GMT

I’m always looking for ways to simplify mundane, repetitive coding tasks, such as replacing our intern’s leading spaces with tabs. For a while, I used Visual Studio’s Edit.ConvertSpacesToTabs command.

In general, this worked pretty well. It has one small caveat, however. Take a look at the following code:

This code is the incarnation of pure evil. It has spaces in front of it. You may not see them, but they’re there. They’re silent killers (akin to trailing whitespace), waiting to sneak up on you when you come in to do an emergency 3AM bug fix (ok, maybe spaces aren’t that bad, but I prefer tabs). Let’s squash them by running Edit.ConvertSpacesToTabs on them:

w00t! The spaces have been converted to tabs! Now life is just peachy-keen, right? Wait a second… not so fast…

I made the image above using one of my other favorite commands, Edit.ViewWhiteSpace (which by default is mapped to Ctrl+R, Ctrl+W, try it sometime). Look closely at the string being passed to Console.WriteLine. Do you notice any problems? Some of the spaces in the string have been changed to tabs! The code looks the same, but the semantics have changed. Running Edit.ConvertSpacesToTabs can actually subtly change the way your code behaves if you’re not careful.

For the longest time I was content with this command, even with its problems. I would just be careful to inspect the whitespace after running it. I had taken a very manual process and turned it into an automated process followed by a manual inspection of the results. Not ideal, but still an improvement. I was satisfied.

After a while, though, it started to annoy me again. I found myself thinking “Why didn’t they create a command that just converts leading spaces to tabs, instead of all spaces?” I actually even thought about creating such a command myself. Then, when looking for a command that does something totally unrelated (which I still haven’t found and may need a macro for), I stumbled across Edit.TabifySelectedLines. I quickly mapped it to Ctrl+Q and took it for a spin. Here’s the results when run on the example above:

The tickets are now diamonds… er… the leading spaces are now tabs, and our code has the same semantics. I’ve mapped this command to Ctrl+Q for quick and painless intern’s-leading-spaces conversion.

Users: Never Surprising

Nick Aceves — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:38:32 GMT

We recently deployed an "alternate email" system, which requires users to follow a verification link sent to their email address. This is a pretty standard way of doing things, and the whole point is to verify their control of the address.

Somehow, people just don't get it, or don't read. We recently got the following reply to one of our verification emails:

yes this is my email address thanks!!

Somehow, this isn't surprising.

Visual Studio: Find in Specific File Types

Nick Aceves — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:23:33 GMT

My boss was just telling me about a small feature that he wished Visual Studio had. I misunderstood him, and thought he was talking about being able to find text in files of specific type, a feature that I have wanted before. I then realized that I had never really searched for such a feature; I had just assumed Visual Studio didn’t have it.

After a few seconds of looking through dialogs, I had found the option to filter a textual search based on file type:

There are a few preset file type filters, but you can also enter your own. I have a feeling that this feature just became one of my best friends.

API Tip: Don't create your own IDisposable

Nick Aceves — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:57:36 GMT

I'm in the middle of refactoring some ugly code that synchronizes a couple of our systems. One of our systems forces us to use an API; we're not allowed to modify the database directly or we void our service contract. You'd hope, then, that they provide a decent API for interacting with the system.

Well, first things first, the "API" is really just a bunch of horrible .Net wrappers around COM components.

Next, we come to the fact that they have their own "IDisposable" interface, called "IBBDisposable". It doesn't have a "Dispose" method, instead it has a "CloseDown" method. So basically, if you want to use it inside of a using block, you have to make your own wrapper for it. To make matters worse, the semantics of CloseDown aren't well defined like they are with IDisposable.Dispose.

As if that's all not bad enough, the classes that implement IBBDisposable also implement their own interface (ala DoSomethingClass : IDoSomethingClass), and these base interfaces don't implement IBBDisposable. This means that you have to do some casting to get to the CloseDown method, and that if you're using the interfaces it's not obvious that CloseDown even needs to be called.

Please, if you're designing an API, don't do this to the consumers.

First post from Live Writer

Nick Aceves — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 09:29:30 GMT

Let’s see how well SubText works with the MetaWeblog API.

Well, pictures don’t work. That’s a shame. I was hoping for some seamless, frictionless integration. Something that just works.

Not today. I can’t even put a FAIL picture up to show how much of a fail that is from a user perspective.

SubText Friction

Nick Aceves — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 09:20:05 GMT

I'm only a few minutes into setting up my new blog, and SubText is already giving me grief. This reminds me of why I decided to run off and build my own blog engine.

Lets see what issues I've run into so-far:

Couldn't get SubText to run under IIS7's Integraded mode; had to switch to Classic.
Had permissions issues on my App_Data folder.
Ran into several errors while changing some options that seem to have "fixed" themselves when I refreshed the page.
Getting a NullReferenceException when I try to save my Akismet API key. (But changing other settings on the same page works fine).
Right now, even as I'm editing this post, I can't update the categories. It tells me: "Category Update failed.There was a baseline problem updating the post categories."
Oh, almost forgot: It won't let me put my Google Analytics tracking code where Google recommends putting it (in the <head> tag).

I recenly joined the SubText google group with the intent of helping to reduce the level of friction this software gives its users, but now I'm leaning back toward writing my own.

First Post

Nick Aceves — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 09:08:48 GMT

Just finished setting up SubText... time for the obligatory "first post" post.

So yeah, this is the first post. Enjoy the ride :)