going to post my score from the previous weekend and got an error...look what i noticed:
lovely. anyone who might have sniffed my password while posting, would you mind ensuring that you post good rounds for me? :-)
last week i was getting real frustrated with some regex madness. i had a string here:
>Status Updates</b><br /><form action="home.aspx" method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="post_form_id" value="blah" />Tim is testing....
and was needing to get the value attribute out. i was using the regex pattern of:
\"post_form_id\"\svalue=\"(?<formId>(.*))\"
and it was giving me the starting point but also the rest of the string at the end. argh! i am not an advanced regex guru and was getting pretty frustrated about the solution. luckily some other people with mad skillz came to my rescue (thanks dino and zain).
taking the modified pattern to:
"\"post_form_id\"\\svalue=\"(?<formId>(?:[^\"]*))\""
gave me the specific outcome i expected and the capture into my group that i needed. so i was happy. the explanation of why the first pattern wasn't working was because my ".*" was slurping up all the good stuff including all text until the last double-quote. to my feeble brain it didn't make too much sense as when i look at the pattern it looked good, but i digress.
anyhow, in this exercise i learned that zain had a webcast series on regex. so if you want to be immersed in a series of non-readible characters with all sorts of brackets, head on over to zain's world for his webcast series all about regex.
as i've been traveling and talking about silverlight, there have been two main things people have been complaining discussing about silverlight, and one of them is the control set (or perhaps lack thereof). i've had conversations with a lot of people trying to explain that you have the full HTML control set at your disposal, and that seems to work in most situations. there may be, however, times when you want ultimate silverlight goodness. i've been saying that i personally think that 3rd parties will beat us to the market with controls...and they are starting to emerge.
take a look at the componentone lab site, featuring "Sapphire" -- their control suite for silverlight. here's a list of a few (note: few, there are a lot):
they really are worth taking a look and i'm sure whomever gets to the market first will get LOTS of attention!
about two weeks after it was mentioned at oscon, microsoft has submitted 2 licenses to the OSI for approval. you can read more about it here.
i've previously mentioned i think this is a good thing and the OSI process of license approvals is a public one, allowing for comments and seeing the process vetted in the community, not just behind closed doors. this will be interesting to follow.
there has been an updated release of the silverlight tools for visual studio beta 2. it's being pushed to the download servers now, so propogation might take some time.
this update resolves some issues people have been reporting about broken references and certain anomalies with visual studio 2008. you should uninstall the old silverlight tools release before installing to ensure you get the updates. there is no need to uninstall the silverlight alpha refresh runtime.
get the update here: updated silverlight tools for visual studio.