Confessions of a Professional Developer

Its ol news but only just came across it - wish Id have moved here sooner!
Neighbours' shock as cows invade housing estate - Rugby Today - Back to Home Page: "Neighbours' shock as cows invade housing estate"

This is a brilliant little example script what absoluted HAVE TO use a cursor - my take generally on this is "If you have to use a cursor youre doing it wrong", however during some work for a client I needed to "duplicate" a hierarchy of items from different nested tables with foreign key references for a questionnaire something along the lines of
Questionnaire table links to Questions table, Questions table links to QuestionLinking table (Where a dependancy between one question and another is held) and so forth. I spent a while looking for a "clean" solution but the only option I found was to iterate through each Questionnaire, Question and Question link at a time as I needed to update the QuestionnaireId, QuestionId and QuestionLinkId from the Source Questionnaire to the Destination Questionnnaire row equivalents... if you have any patterns or approaches tot his type of thing not involving cursors I would love to hear from you!

How to use SQL Server T-SQL cursors Microsoft SQL Server Advisor

Internet Explorer 8: Videos: "Internet Explorer 8: Videos" these, whilst very"microsoft", "vision of the future", "overly gloosy with an irritatingly up-beat narrator", if you know what I mean; much like the Windows Tour video (which i always make a bee line for when a new O/S is released), is actually very informative, concise and easy to understand. It shows key new features and how they work giving a very good insight into the lovely new "community" features. Well worth 5 minutes of your time!! Note: Especially useful is the Compatibility feature which, a developer, I might just find ver handy if it does indeed invoke the previous versions' of IE' rendering engines!

Well, Im not one for blogging about general everyday stuff but after reading some of the reviews of Hitman I felt I had to my two penneth in. Firstly thes think about those other not-so-great films of computer games, Street Fighter, Tomb Raider, Mario Bros, Mortal Kombat (to a
lesser extent) were all, well, not to be unkind but quite poor. So by that benchmark given the genre anything better than quite poor is a big plus. OK, so nmow we have a general benchmark lets consider some other mitigating factors - whilst Hitman has some superb stunts, special
effects and action sequences you should not go to this film with "This is another Borne Identity/James Bond type of film", it not, firstly the main character is more reminiscent of Leon than either of the two previously mentioned, think World Cinema, Darkened Eastern
European/Russian location, think World Cinema with a bigger budget. There are also some nice "in jokes" - at one point Agent 47 crashes thru a window into a hotel room with two kids playing Hitman the game on the telly - quite amusing if you catch the reference. Now the leading lady
isn't your typical "Bond Girl" shes dark, damaged, sassy and gothic AND she appears partially naked now and again - in my book all these things make her much more intriguing and interesting and indeed more sexy than anything the Bond franchise has produced. The main character IS NOT A "GOODIE" as with Borne and Bond, this guy has been trained from birth to be an assassin and it is his sole purpose, no sleeping with anything that moves, no witty repartee just a case full of weaponry and some bad-ass hand to hand combat get this guy thru life. The gadgets whilst fanciful in places have at least the potential to exist and are generally believable and used judiciously. Personally I thought that this film was one of the best Ive seen so far this year and, even if you don't go and see it at the cinema its certainly worth a rental - especially if you have surround sound and a hi-def telly to enjoy all the gun fights and explosions! Its efinitely a lads movie but not so much your "I like guns and stuff blowing up me" type of lad film more a "Im interested in see some alternative characters play out an intercontinental game of cat and mouse with high violence and some reasonable character development". The leading man, though Ive forgotten his name, must have been able to memorise his lines in an afternoon - he remains mostly silent throughout the film, punctuated occaisionally by some direct instruction which generally either ends or saves someones life, this guy however is not devoid of character, you are left with the distinct impression that theres a world of torment and angst behind those eyes and that whilst he never expresses it in words his facial reactions say it all whilst giving away nothing!

All in all a FIVE STAR film - SEE IT NOW!

I’ve recently had to deal with some very run of the mill client side validation, namely validation a comma separated list of email addresses – I was so pleased with my cobble together of bits of code I found on the net that I thought Id post it here for the next time! Also a handy bit of script to “trim” a string in javascript and adding the trim method to the String object… NICE!

String.prototype.trim = function() { return this.replace(/^\s+\s+$/g, ''); }

function CheckEmailAddresses()
{
var recipients = document.getElementById('recipients').getAttribute('innerText').split(',');
var emailRegEx = /^(("[\w-\s]+")([\w-]+(?:\.[\w-]+)*)("[\w-\s]+")([\w-]+(?:\.[\w-]+)*))(@((?:[\w-]+\.)*\w[\w-]{0,66})\.([a-z]{2,6}(?:\.[a-z]{2})?)$)(@\[?((25[0-5]\.2[0-4][0-9]\.1[0-9]{2}\.[0-9]{1,2}\.))((25[0-5]2[0-4][0-9]1[0-9]{2}[0-9]{1,2})\.){2}(25[0-5]2[0-4][0-9]1[0-9]{2}[0-9]{1,2})\]?$)/i
for (var email in recipients)
{
if(emailRegEx.test(recipients[email].trim()))
{
alert('good');
} else {
alert('bad');
}
}
}

Thanx go to the following locations:
Trim function: http://www.nicknettleton.com/zine/javascript/trim-a-string-in-javascript
Email Regex: http://xyfer.blogspot.com/2005/01/javascript-regexp-email-validator.html

I just thought Id drop in a quick note about my new project, Brooba.com , the concept behind this site is quite simple - Why shoudl you have to pay extra fees when buying/selling/exchanging/searching for a house - this site puts users together giving them the tools necessary to end their Housing woes - do check it out and pre-register - more info to follow!

http://www,brooba.com

Please please please checkout my new creation for a friend of mine who's set up a landscape gardening business - the website I created for him can be found at www.newmanlandscapesltd.co.uk

Cheers!

Recently I have started keeping track of some industry leading developers and what they're up to via their weblogs. One very active blogger is Rick Strahl who really knows his stuff - anyway todya I noticed he'd posted a very good guide to using Enum's - far far superior to my one liner about recursing through them so I thought Id post a link here and share!

http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/6222.aspx

Ok so I was bored and thought this was erm...cool?

My japanese name is 黒田 Kuroda (black field) 海斗 Kaito (big dipper of the ocean).
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This is just a quick snippet but the other day I was trying to do a foreach thru an Enumerator, after a llittle tinkering and enquiry with our resident guru I was provided with this nasty looking bit of code that works like a charm - basically all it does is push the contents of the Enum into an Array, Array supporting the IEnumerable interface of course makes it easy to foreach thru!

Array Attributes = Enum.GetValues(typeof(Enumerator));