TheWayOfCoding.com

I’ve been working on a program that needs to parse a html file for form data.  So when I was deciding what method to use, a few popped right into my mind. The first being a character by character search through the string.  Parsing through the data and flagging sections that fit the signature of what was being searched for. The second would be automating that by using the built-in string functions to split up the string and drill down until the needed data was extracted. The third, and one I chose to use, was with regular expressions.  This in my mind is the most “poetic” method of the three, which would allow me to make the a robust and reliable function. While I’ve used regular expressions a lot throughout the years. I never seem to remember enough to construct a decent statement. I had recently bought a pocket reference (link below), so I used that to get a statement constructed. It had a total of about 6 pages for C#, but I pretty much got what I needed from it. An...

Edit: I’m having some issues with a second tutorial, so at this point I don’t think this process below is correct.  2nd Edit:  This code should work fine, the issue was when I started using COM objects from Esprit.  There are a few gotchas that need to be taken care of.  I think the primary reason I had issues was due to writing the macro in C# instead of VB (the language the Esprit tutorials have).  I may be writing about it in the future.  If you are interested right now, send a message, or post in the forums. This post will be a little more special interest them most of my posts. I recently started learning how to create macros for a program called Esprit (D.P. Technology). It’s a “CAD/CAM” program. They still use COM/VBA as their plug-in interface, so to write a plug-in in .NET there are a few things that need to be taken care of. Their tutorial that comes with the program goes over setting everything up, but It misses a few steps. Well more likely...

I’ve been working with server side scripts that rely on xml files to define the structure of the site.  It seems quite fast compared to using a database and also makes direct changes to the structure easy.  My post here is about how to use the DOM in VBSCRIPT/ASP.  Some aspects of how the DOM works are a bit “wiggy” in my opinion, but I’ve figured out a lot of it so far. Here is a quick example on how to parse a file (VBSCRIPT/ASP): function parseXmlFile(filename, byRef emptyVarToFillWithXmlObj)     dim completeFilePath, functionSuccess, filePointer          completeFilePath = getFullPath() & filename          ' Convert the xml file into an xmldoc object     ' First check to see that the file exists     set filePointer = server.createObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")     if filePointer.fileExists(completeFilePath) then         ' Initialize the xml object ...

Here is a screen shot of the old site.  It served me well for the two years or so that I had it running on blogger.com.  The great thing about blogging is that I can save bits of important information in one place that I can later come back and utilize. The secondary benefit is that other people can also gain something from my writings as well. Now that I’ve taken the plunge to into the world of incorporation, I have had a strong desire to improve my web presence.  My first project being this website revamp. Here is a list of the steps necessary to get from blogger to a custom wordpress blog: – Install wordpress on my computer’s local server ( WAMP ).  This is quite easy if you have messed around with developing websites before.  The major steps to that are 1. create a database (wamp has phpMyAdmin preinstalled, so doing SQL stuff is easy) 2. create a new SQL user that has permissions on the new database.  Once the database is setup, extract the wordpress ...

I was at a monthly .NET usergroup meeting yesterday. Larry Clarkin ( http://larryclarkin.com/ ) was there, and he was kind enough to give out quite a few copies of Visual Studio 2008. I was one of the ones who needed a copy. Never had the justification to buy it personally. Actually I am using 2005 at work too, but anyways… He talked about Silverlight 2. It has quite a few unique features that make it interesting enough to start “playing” around with. The most interesting aspect to me is the subset of the .NET framework embedded into the Silverlight runtime, which in turn means you can write Silverlight programs in C#/VB.NET (as well as a few other languages). Another plus is that it has built-in form controls. Put those two together and it could be interesting to make some rich web applications with not much difficulty. All this time I though it was just a Flash clone. Check out silverlight.net for more of the specifics.

I mentioned about wanting to start a business in my previous post. Well it looks like I might have my chance. While it isn’t exactly what I was thinking of in my previous post, I foresee many opportunities to flex my programming muscle in this endeavor. Plus, I will be starting up with a good friend, so there is a good chance our motivation will actually produce some results. A piece of software I am starting to research/design/create will be an internal application we will use to automatically extract some government provided public data. The current issue is time. With the amount of data and the requirement of using their web interface, it is not worth the time needed to do it by hand. The only other option would be to buy the data from the government, but that’s just an unnecessary cost seeing as there is a free option available. So I will be writing a program in C# to automatically access a few websites and download the needed data in chunks. I have never delt with .NET’s we...

A common practice with search forms is to have them submit when the enter key is pressed, instead of requiring the user to use their mouse to press the submit button (or using tab key to tab to the submit button). Update: I attempted to find a solution for working in Firefox, but the code I added has not been tested personally. Here is a simple way to do that in JavaScript: First, define a input box: <input name="txtsearchentries" id="txtsearchentries" type="text" size="13" value="" /> Second, create a function to be placed in the head area of the webpage: // see if the user pressed the enter key  // while using a specific control  function submitSearchOnEnter(variable) {     if (window.event) {         // keyCode = window.event.keyCode;         // this doesn't seem to work in Firefox,          // so try the code below...          keyCode = event.keyCode ? event.keyCode :...

Javascript does not use a standard class model. It uses objects that are like associative array structures of data, or so I have read. Regardless of how it works, you can make a class-ish type construct in Javascript. I’ll try to go over the basics here to help anyone who is interested. Objects are defined by creating a new function. Inside the function you can define variables and methods that are attached to the primary function. The primary function is really like the constructor for the object as well. For example: function ObjectExample(constructorParameter1, constructorParameter2) {  //define a variable and assign a constructor value to it  this.variable1 = constructorParameter1;  //you can also define variables with var, but they act differently  this.variable2 = constructorParameter2;            //assigns an instance pointer to a "constructor" variable  var variable3 = this;  //defines a funct...

I’ve been working on something recently where I decided to have most of the program run in a client’s browser. It’s basically a blog system that works with that asp-xml-to-access-db class. The clients browser sends/requests information in XML to the server script and everything turned out peachy. I’m overall extremely happy with it. Now that I’m done writing the script. I learned quite a bit more about Javascript that I didn’t know in the past. The initial few days of working with it were tragic. I’m not too fond of Javascript’s (pseudo) object model and lack of a standard class model. While Javascript works and provides a good deal of functionality, it feels dirty. Maybe my fellow “old school” programmers can understand. Besides the object model, the DOM in general is a pain to work with, and hard to find information about (that works in multiple browsers). Inconsistencies, things that logically should work don’t,...

I want to deploy one of my .NET apps as a ClickOnce application. The issue is that I am connecting to Oracle (see previous posts here and here ). Connecting to Oracle requires at least, 4 DLL files that generally have to be in the same directory as the EXE file. The issue is that when the program is published, the DLLs are not referenced in any way, so the program won’t work. Then I read about adding the files to the project, so that ClickOnce and the Publish processor will figure out that the DLLs are required and add them to the manifest. Here is the process in Visual Studio 2005: Put the 4 DLL files in their own directory in your solution directory (for ease of use mostly). Add all four files to your project by going to “Project->Add Existing Item…” Click on each DLL file in the solution explorer and then change their property: “Copy To Output Directory” to “Copy Always”. That’s it! Now when I publish or even run the application I don’t have to worry about if the DLL files...