Lately, I’ve been reading several blog articles about regular expressions. I’d like to throw in my vote for the most important sentence in Jeff Atwood’s article Regex use vs. Regex abuse:

All developers should learn to use basic regular expressions, because they’ll produce better, more flexible, more maintainable code with them.

Differing from what Jeff further states in his My Buddy, Regex article (which also features a very useful tool, RegexBuddy) , I actually do subscribe to the UNIX re …

This is obviously not new, but I didn’t know it yet: ILIDE#

I was just writing a utility assembly for the startup handling of my applications. That thing is called ...Startup.dll, which kind of made sense to me and resides within a folder called Startup in my source code hierarchy. No problem that far. Things started to behave weirdly when I created a small test app, a separate project in a subfolder of the Startup folder. Suddenly I got an error from Visual Studio: CS0016, … can’t write to file ...\test.startup.exe: access denied.

Usually …

Bruce Schneier tells us that SHA-1 has been broken. Apparently this is judged to be a believable claim, although the paper explaining details of the attack is not yet generally available. Read Bruce’s blog entry here.

In David Cumps’ blog there’s a nice article on boxing/unboxing. Nothing really new about that topic, but it’s well explained, so read it if you don’t know what he’s talking about. Another thing worth mentionable is that using Generics for collections is of course the easiest way to work around boxing problems, assuming .NET 2.0 is an option to you. See the C# Language specification 2.0 here for more information on that. …

I don’t know about other people, but for a calculator I still swear by my old HP48SX or my newer HP49G. Using RPN, of course… never seen anybody give up using that once he really digs it. On the PC, I’ve been experimenting with all kinds or replacements, but they all had drawbacks. I’ve been trying to use HP emulators, which were difficult to use because of the funny keyboard mappings, plus you needed ROM images for them and that didn’t always seem to work either. There are of course RPN calc …

I just came across this very useful tool: ColorPicker.NET. It’s a color picker, nothing else. But I guess I’m hardly the only one who’s thought about writing something similar himself… it certainly does the job nicely.

I’ve recently started using Wintellect PowerCollections for my .NET 2.0 work. In case you don’t know it yet, that’s a very nice generic implementation of collection classes, similar in purpose to what the C++ standard template library has to offer. Peter Golde is the lead developer on this project and there’s the PowerCollections blog for those who want to follow development closely. In a recent blog post, Peter outlined where the project was going, with steps that will be done and also two ste …