A Developer E-pistle

Today we had a problem while working on Darden’s project.

We were using the SessionID as a unique key to store some information about the behavior of the user surfing the site.

The SessionID was getting changed with every page request.

The trivial solution was adding a global.asax file to the project.

for my future references, below is a regular expression for validating U.S and Canadian zip codes.

^\d{5}(?:-\d{4})?$|^[a-zA-Z]\d[a-zA-Z]\s?\d[a-zA-Z]\d$

more details on the format of Canadian zip codes

1. Press and hold down the Alt key.
2. Press the + (plus) key on the numeric keypad.
3. Type the hexadecimal Unicode value.
4. Release the Alt key.

Note that this method will only work if you have the following registry key set to the correct value..
under HKEY_Current_User/Control Panel/Input Method, set EnableHexNumpad to 1

Use the Character Map to find the hexadecimal Unicode values for different characters.

Also, it’s worth noting that if you are using MS Word you can simply type in the Unicode hex value first and then press Alt+x. The hex number will be replaced by it’s equivalent Unicode character automagically.

The suffixes in the table below are useful because they tell the compiler what type a numeric literal is and how it should be treated. The default type of a numeric literal is integer (int) of course, but if you want to specify decimal or long, how would you do that? (please don’t cast it, it’s ugly)

Consider having an overloaded method, one overload takes a parameter of type long, another of type int, now if you want to pass in the number ‘15′ for example, these suffixes will help you choose which overload to actually invoke by appending a letter (or two) to the numeric literal.

Note that the suffixes are case-insensitive.

I don’t know why I haven’t spent the time to create something handy like this!

If you are a .net developer (specially an asp.net one) you certainly will see the benefit of this cheat sheet. Personally I have wasted my time before trying to format an integer to print in a certain way and of course i didn’t have the correct format-specifier right off the top of my head so i had to hunt down the information on Microsoft’s slow-and-poorly-searchable msdn which is certainly something i try to avoid!

reference: Scott Gutherie’s blog

I stumbled upon this font called Consolas which is recommended and created by Microsoft to use with Visual Studio 2005 (I’m not sure why just 2005), It’s a very good font for writing scripts, code, HTML, etc..

• It’s monospaced (i.e. fixed width)
• The characters ‘0′ and ‘o’ are very distinguishable (which helps avoid a common mistake)
• It’s compact, compared to Courier New
• It looks very pleasant

Make sure you have the ClearType effect turned on (Control Panel->Display->Appearance->Effects)

I’m glad I found this font, and that’s why I’m sharing it, It’s way better than Courier New which used to be my favorite actually.