2015 Tool Kit

I was listening recently to a sort of rant by Erik Meijer and amongst the other amusing gripes he said something that set me thinking. Amongst everything else, he complained how developers are not willing to pay for other software tools. He related how chefs will buy their own premium knives and carry them to […]

Regular Expressions and LINQ

Regular expressions are a great, albeit sometimes overused, tool for parsing and extracting text data. Sometimes I find myself looking at a list of data that I want to execute a regular expression against. I could do a for loop or encode a Regex match in a lambda but both interrupt the flow and require […]

Query Excel File Using LINQ

Lately at work I’ve had to pull data from a variety of Excel worksheets. Excel interop is quite handy, but making sure to release the used COM objects and dealing with ranges can be quite a pain. I found a nice little article that shows a basic example of loading all the data from a […]

Editable Label in WPF

While still in the dark woods of learning WPF, I was completely lost trying to fulfill a requirement to make an editable label that showed a formatted value when not selected. In my case, the formatted value would round a decimal value to a few digits to make long number more readable. I asked over […]

Detect InputBox Cancel

So we’ve all had the situation where we’d like to get an input from the user and we’re not too keen on creating a form, adding controls, and writing all the other underlying functionality. Many times, it’s just a lot easier to use an InputBox and validate the data afterward. Usually everything will go smoothly, […]