.NET

Solution-sudoku opens !

Nidhogg — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 08:31:00 GMT

I've been working on http://www.solution-sudoku.com in the past few days. The site is now functionnal and active. Its sole purpose is to give hints about or solve sudoku puzzles. Give it a try and tell me what you think about it

I also created software for solving sudoku puzzles for MS smartphones and PocketPC, the Windows version should be online soon. They are available on the site for free.

MCT now

Nidhogg — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 08:27:00 GMT

Since my last post about a century ago, I moved into a new flat my wife and I bought. Then there was a 1 month Internet black-out until my ISP restored my connection to the world.

In other news, I passed the MCT exam so I will be teaching .NET and related technologies from time to time, starting at the end of this month.

MCSD.NET

Nidhogg — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 16:37:00 GMT

I passed the 70-340 certification on .NET security a while ago which makes me a MCSD.NET. It took me some time but it is done, on to the MCT now.

Gauge, a CounterStrike : Source monitor application

Nidhogg — Sat, 09 Jul 2005 14:19:00 GMT

As promised here is the first alpha version of Gauge, an application that monitors your computer, waits until you play CounterStrike: Source and when you do, publishes the server information (server ip, port, map name) to MSN 7, using the "What I'm listening to" feature.

This is a test only version, so don't expect much.

I'm open to suggestions, feel free to send feedback using the comments or email me at the address specified in the readme.txt file.

Download

PS: it connects to a webservice on stup.org, don't worry its just that Valve releases a new version of CSS every now and then, and I need to update certain variables to keep it working.

EDIT: it looks like the method I use to get the server from the memory is not reliable as the address is dependant on the machine on which the software runs. I'll try to look into it when I have some free time ... The download is now inactive.

70-300. Done.

Nidhogg — Fri, 06 May 2005 17:51:00 GMT

I just passed the 70-300 .NET Architecture exam. Another one down, only one left (70-340 on .NET security) and I'll be a MCSD.NET. After that I plan to go for the Microsoft Certified Trainer certification. This will enable me to teach official Microsoft courses on .NET. I really look forward to it, it should be a lot of fun.

And I still get married next week :)

Strongly Typed Config Generator v1.2

Nidhogg — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 13:51:00 GMT

I updated the Strongly Typed Config Generator tool to fix a bug reported on this blog. I also fixed some project file problems (I apparently had a modelling addin installed that included some .tgs files in my project). Please note that some of the references still need to be manually changed to reflect the installation folders on your machine for both VS.NET and CodeSmith.

Here are the files :

Binaries

Sources

I tested it for about 5 minutes so if something is broken post a comment... I'll try to fix it.

RangeValidator quirks

Nidhogg — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 18:38:00 GMT

I've been busy for weeks, hence the lack of post on this weblog. Here's a little one on strange things I noticed about RangeValidator and Double.

A few days ago I was trying to find the cause of an exception in an ASP.NET web application. It happened when I set a RangeValidator's Type to ValidationDataType.Double, then set the MaximumValue to Double.MaxValue.ToString(). I found two things :

Apparently, the real maximum value of a Double is 1.7976931348623157E+308. However, Double.MaxValue.ToString() produces 1.79769313486232E+308 which is not parsable with Double.Parse() because it is too big. The cause is that the default formatting for the Double type is 15 digits + exponent whereas the value itself has 17 fractional digits + exponent. When ToString() is called, it rounds the value and the result is a bigger number than the real value. Same goes for Double.Minimum value.

Therefore, when you want to transform a Double to a string so that String.Parse works, use ToString("r"). This formatting ensures that a roundtrip Double->String->Double always works.
The RangeValidator uses a regular expression to validate the user input. You can see this with Reflector in the BaseCompareValidator.Convert method. The expression is : @"^\s*([-\+])?(\d+)?(\" + decimalSeparator + @"(\d+))?\s*$"; As you can see, it does not handle numbers formatted in scientific notation. Therefore, Double.MaxValue produces the exception I was getting : "The value '1.7976931348623157E+308' of the MaximumValue property of 'RangeValidator1' cannot be converted to type 'Double'."

So the only Double values that can be used in a RangeValidator are the ones that can be written in string format without the scientific notation. I didn't check but I doubt you can write all Double numbers that way, there must be a limit to the number of digits in the string representation of a Double.

Font for programmers (and users of text editors)

Nidhogg — Wed, 13 Oct 2004 19:04:00 GMT

If you're a programmer or if you use text editors on a regular basis you might want to check out this font. It's a fixed-size font called Proggy and it's the best I've found. I've tried quite a few other fixed size font but none was as good as this one. There are multiple versions, choose the one you like best. I use the Proggy Clean version.

this.Job = new Job();

Nidhogg — Wed, 13 Oct 2004 17:41:00 GMT

It's been in preparation for months. I now work for a company that specializes in Microsoft technologies, mostly .NET. Among some of my new coworkers I now can count a handful of MVPs, a MSDN Regional Director, a lot of MCSD.NET and more broadly speaking some very interesting and knowledgeable people (Disclaimer: I'm not saying there weren't any in my previous job, it's just refreshing to talk to new ones). I've been at it for a week and so far it's been great. It looks like the projects I'll be working on will be a little more on the "up-to-date" side than before (think Agile methodologies, latest products from Microsoft, stuff like that).

Identify AppSight for .NET

Nidhogg — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 17:39:00 GMT

I found this nice piece of software via the .NETDJ newsletter the other day. Basically it records everything that happens during your application's runtime and can replay it afterwards, exactly as it occured. It has other interesting features but this one is IMHO the most important.

There are a lot of situations where that would be the ideal solution to track hard-to-find bugs