George Schizas Blog

Finally, after two months of having Windows Vista Ultimate RTM, I succeeded in finding the time to install them. I had to buy a new 500 GB hard disk first (because I managed to fill the 300GB one I bought previously!), but I have finally installed them. It took me about 20 minutes to actually install them, and about half an hour of researching what name I would give my computer. I finally ended up with the same name (Typhoeus), but I found out about a lot more ancient monsters 🙂

Anyhow, I’ve installed the bare minimum applications (Office 2007, 4NT, TextPad, Beyond Compare, uTorrent). I’m going to install the rest as it goes…

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I’m installing right now the expansion to World of Warcraft. Through a weird sequence of events, I have it in my hands, almost 4 hours before it is officially released to the world! 🙂

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A common task in making “integration” projects is usually the part where the programmer needs to open an external file, which is in a (very) legacy format and parse this file. This obviously results in large and boring glue code, which bloats the project and makes it scary.Enter FileHelpers, which really simplifies the whole procedure. All you need to do is make a class of your data (actually what one line is) and add one or two attributes. For example:

<FileHelpers.DelimitedRecord(vbTab), FileHelpers.IgnoreFirst()> _
Public Class BicFile
    Public Name As String
    Public Description As String
    Public Amount As Decimal
    <FileHelpers.FieldConverter(FileHelpers.ConverterKind.Date, "yyMMdd")> _
    Public OpenDate As Date
End Class

Obviously this simplifies everything and saves a lot of boring code. The program is open sourced, and it is also available in library format (so that you just add a .dll reference to your project). I wish I found that earlier!

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