Scott Hanselman

Travis beat me to it and in record time. I created a small right-click menu a while back to detect Junctions. I did it mostly because it was 5 minutes work, and I didn't want to take 30 minutes to learn about how to make a File Overlay in Explorer.

I figured I'd get to it one day (yeah, right). Travis, on the other hand, couldn't handle it and took the time. He rocks.

So, Travis gives us, Junction Icon Overlay, today's Cool Util. We should thank Travis by crushing his server with overwhelming amounts of traffic.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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You know, you'd think Microsoft was really serious about this whole MSDN thing, eh?  :)

I've been really impressed with the vast (and useful) amount of content that's been produced on MSDN over the last several weeks.

There's a new Developer eLearning site on MSDN. The contest ain't too shabby, either. A 50" Plasma WEGA HDTV. Yes, please.

I liked their style as well:

"Our contest grabs your attention - Our content will keep you coming back"

They've got some slick new JavaScript-based (IE-only) courseware, like this one on Windows 64-bit. Apparently there's a number of new classes on Windows Server 2003 coming soon.

All this, and an RSS Feed? Subscribed.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I can finally tell my little secret. I'm a part of the new Coding4Fun site that was launched as a part of Beta2 today.

Coding4Fun is a new .NET 2.0-focused hobbyist site with a number of great syndicated columns including ones on creating games, web development, XML and my new column on interfacing with hardware called Some Assembly Required. (It's a triple play on words if you think for a sec)

My first article is on interfacing a CrystalFontz USB LCD Display to Windows Media Player or iTunes using .NET 2.0.

There's a lot of great code up there now, and lots more coming. I'm pretty impressed with the 'Express' SKUs for Visual Studio, and I hope they will inspire more hobbyist developers to jump in and enjoy.

Updated: Here's an RSS Feed.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Hopefully Michael Kaplan will step in here and explain some edge case or just a general comment like "that's totally wrong, Scott" - but until he does:

A fellow emailed me this question:

I want to convert a string representation of a Unicode character back into a 'char' in .NET C#.  Can you help?
 
i.e."U+0041" which is Hexidecimal for 65 which is ASCII for "A"
 
There's got to be a built in function(s) for this, and I just can't seem to find them?
 
To give you an idea, the pseudocode would be something like:
 
string s = "U+0041";
char c = new ?Unicode.Decoder.Decode?(s);
textBox1.Text = c.ToString();

Now, I have no idea why this gentleman would want to do this, but it's interesting enough. Here's what I came up with. I'm sure there's a better way.

//Just a reminder that you can use \u to escape Unicode in C#
char c = '\u0063';
Console.WriteLine(c.ToString());

//Here's how you'd go from a string to stuff like
// U+0053 U+0063 U+006f
string scott = "Scott and the letter c";
foreach(char s in scott)
{
	Console.Write("U+{0:x4} ",(int)s);
}
		
//Here's how converted a string (assuming it starts with U+)
// containing the representation of a char
// back to a char
// Is there a built in, or cleaner way? Would this work in Chinese?
string maybeC = "U+0063";
int p = int.Parse(maybeC.Substring(2), System.Globalization.NumberStyles.HexNumber);
Console.WriteLine((char)p);

Now playing: Craig Armstrong - Ray's Theme

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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We recently needed to parse this evil. 

string poop = "2005-12-14T14:35:32.1700000-07:00";
DateTime poo = DateTime.ParseExact(poop,"yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss.fffffffzzz", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

Important Notes:

• HH means 24 hour time, hh means 12 hour time.
• Don't do all your testing in the morning of a one digit month on a one digit day. 11:59pm on New Years Eve is an important test case.
• If I'd have tested with 01:01:01 then using lower case h's would have worked, but would have broken this afternoon.
• zzz means TimeZone offset like -07:00
• When doing a ParseExact and then round-tripping with a ToString using the same format string will NOT result in the same string.
• That means that:
  DateTime foo = DateTime.ParseExact(poo,"yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss.fffffffzzz", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
  foo.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss.fffffffzzz") == "2005-12-14T13:35:32.1700000-08:00"
  However, the semantics of the DateTime is the same.
• fffffff means 7 digits of fractional seconds
• T (in this context) has no specific meaning (it’s not reserved) so it is treated as a literal.
• System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture is almost always necessary when you’re working in a non-UI context.
• Don't get screwed when your application doesn't work when installed on an international version of Windows. 

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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