R.I.P. J.G. Ballard
Another great writer has passed away, my thought and sentiments are with his family. A short obituary from the BBC can be found here.
Output DataTable to CSV
A quick function to output a datatable to a CSV file in VB .NET 2.
Pay to Pray
Are these guys serious?
Playing around with VS2008 to split a large file
I’ve been meaning to spend some more time with VS2008 but just never really had the chance. Day-to-day I’m still using 2003 at work and 2005 at home but I have been meaning to take advantage of the trial for a while. I’m particularly interested in the new web development enhancements but I started off by writing a very simple application just to see how the IDE compares.
The application just simply splits any large text based file into a defined number of parts. These kind of programs are handy when you’re processing data files with a few millions plus records in. Sometimes splitting up the file can really help with processing. The source code is defined below, as well as a link to published program and VS2008 project file.
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IE8 and Chrome
It’s wonderfully timed that, when Microsoft launch IE8, Google comes along with Chrome Experiments. Essentially the experiments are just showcases for JavaScript development and how well your browser can handle JavaScript. Which is handy when you want to see how the latest IE stacks up against the other major two. And well, oh dear…
Replacing Values in a Text File
Replacing values in a text file is made easy by the Regex Replace function. There’s a very efficient way to do this in versions 2+ of .NET by using the dictionary class and match evaluator. However I had to use the function below as the project was in VB .NET 1.1.
Convert OS E/N to Lat/Long Cooordiantes
A general wrapper class that’s primarily for converting UK OS Easting/Northing to Lat/Long Coordinates. It was a quick kludge from open source formulas.
Tidy Initials
A quick function to clean the initials part of a name string. It simply uppercases then spaces each character.
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Safely Create Directory
I can’t remember where I found this but it’s a very simple yet handy function to safely create a directory a directory if it doesn’t exist.
Convert Fractional Odds to Decimal
Simple function to convert fractional odds to decimal.
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