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Showing posts from 2009

Simple Keystroke Automation in .NET (Scott Hanselman's Http Button)

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-- Scott Hanselman ( http://www.hanselman.com/ ,  http://twitter.com/shanselman ) recently tweet'd, " I need a keyboard with an "http://www." button. " To which I replied, " @shanselman you still type the "http" part? I didn't think you had to anymore... "  Oooh, hahahaha, how smart and funny am I!?  ....Apparently not very... :-) shanselman responded (as well as to others with the same smart remarks), " @aaron_hoffman in tweetdeck or Twitter, you do. "  --Aaaah, I get it now, he's not in a browser! okay, he has me in Check . Now I just had to solve this problem.  Well automation/degree in laziness (with years of laziness experience) to the rescue!  At first I thought PowerShell  - but since I am on a WinXP SP2 machine, that wouldn't do.  I'll have to fall back to the console app & desktop shortcut combination of yester-system. Steps to Simple Keystroke Automation (w/ WinXP SP2 Handicap) 1. Create .N

Unique Characters

Ever notice how similar a lot of the "English" alphabet's characters look? The guy who put this together must have really phoned it in that day. He really could only come up with these: ABCDEFGHIJK_MNOPQRSTUV_XY_ and then just flipped a few around a bit to get up to 26: J L M W S Z And it isn't just those three, a lot of the original list look eerily similar to each other as well, but I guess we'll count them: B R E F H K M N O Q U V T Y Y X but then he needed to come up with 10 more numbers... well none of those are unique! 0 O 1 I 2 Z 3 E 4 P 5 S 6 G 7 L 8 B 9 P So in the end, if you are looking for unique characters that you can use, that will not be confused with any other characters, you're only left with: A well that isn't very many... -

Iowa at Michigan State

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Iowa played Michigan State last night in East Lansing, Michigan. I am not a sports writer, so I will not attempt it here, but it was one of the best games of football that I have ever watched. A total of three field goals through three quarters of play, two goal line stands from under five yards out, and a last minute drive from behind by the Hawkeyes. There were records broken on both sides. All through the game they fought. -

Norge

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I'm not sure why, but I had a sudden rush of Norwegian pride today.

Reaction Time Tester

I wrote this Silverlight app for my Cousin. The trickiest part was raising an event after a random amount of time for the "Wait..." portion of the test. I ended up using a "DispatcherTimer" and set the interval to a Random amount of seconds. Have Fun!

Monty Hall Test Simulator

Jeff Atwood ( Coding Horror , StackOverflow ) recently wrote a blog post about the Monty Hall Problem . So I thought I'd write a little app that simulates the tests. I have always thought the contestant has three options, Always Switch (66%), Always Stay (33%), AND Pick Again (50%). People who say your chance is 50/50 after one door is taken out of the equation, are Correct , IF you randomly choose the second door at that time. Check out the app below. WD = Winning Door. FC = First Choice. RD = Removed Door. SC = Second Choice.

LINQ is not just LINQ to SQL

Deconstructing a LINQ Statement (download source code: http://aaronhoffman.googlecode.com/files/AaronHoffmanLinqDemov01.zip ) LINQ is a valuable tool, but because of the way it is usually demonstrated, developers think that its only use is for querying a Microsoft SQL Server database. This is because it is usually being demonstrated along with "LINQ to SQL". LINQ is not just LINQ to SQL . I like to think of LINQ as a shorthand (or syntax shortcut) way of writing code - a way to write less lines of code (or simplify code), but still perform the same operations (kind of like what foreach is to the for loop). I would like to demonstrate LINQ in a way that does not use LINQ to SQL. I will break down a LINQ statement into lines of code that developers might be more familiar with in an attempt to show what is going on under the covers. I will start with code that hopefully everyone has seen/written before, then build up to a LINQ statement that performs the same operation.