Friday, October 31, 2008

Misc : RSS reader

I think online RSS readers like Google Reader suck - I vastly prefer desktop ones. For many years, I used SharpReader. I liked it and it's free - what's to complain about?

But it's no longer maintained. The last update was "Changes in 0.9.7.0 - released August 2 2006" and there were more and more of my blogs that were just throwing feed errors that weren't actually errors.

So reluctantly, I look around for a new one. After a bit of research, I settled on FeedDemon. Took me a while to get used to its quirks but once I got over the initial learning curve, I'm quite happy with it.

And since I could export my subscriptions in opml and import them into FeedDemon, I didn't lose a single one.

Enjoy!

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Excel : Putting the row number in the cell

Comparing two versions of a spreadsheet (old versus new), I wanted to have a column of the current row number on the old spreadsheet and the corresponding row number on the new one.

For the old spreadsheet, this would just be the row number e.g. column 3 has number 3.

An easy way to do this is to type two numbers in the first two rows (i.e. 1 and 2) and then highlight them as if to drag them which causes the little box to appear in the bottom right hand corner of the cell. Then drag the box down the rest of the column.

When you do this, Excel works out the relationship between the two numbers (i.e. row x = x; row x+1 = x+1) and then applies this to the rest of the column.

Done.

Enjoy!

Excel : Viewing two windows side by side

I have two spreadsheets; one an earlier version and one that reflects the current state after many alterations and updates and I wanted to document all the changes.

So I tried to put them side by side so I could manually compare them row-by-row.

There are two buttons on the task bar (one for each window) but clicking them loads each spreadsheet in exactly the same window. They effectively overlay each other.

After doing some research, I found you need to click Window / Arrange / Vertical and hey presto it's done.

Enjoy!

Thursday, October 16, 2008

C# : T4 - the Text Template Transformation Toolkit

Been looking at code generation templates. Obviously CodeSmith is right up there but then I read an article by Scott Hanselman entitled "T4 (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) Code Generation - Best Kept Visual Studio Secret" which describes a Visual Studio add-in (I'm using VS 2005) which does pretty much the same thing.

There's a link in the article to another "How-To" by Oleg Sych entitled "
How to create a simple T4 template". You need to download DSL Tools and you may also want to install the T4 Editor by Clarius Consulting.

As an example, here's my template (Template.tt):


<#@ template language="C#" #>
<#@ assembly name="System.dll" #>

//
// This code was generated by a tool. Any changes made manually will be lost
// the next time this code is regenerated.
//

using System;

public class <#= this.ClassName #>
{
public static void HelloDude()
{
Console.WriteLine("Hello, Dude");

for (<#= this.Variable #> = <#= this.Start #>; <#= this.Variable #> < <#= this.End #>;
<#= this.Variable#>++)
{
}
}
}
<#+
string ClassName = "MyClass";
string Variable = "i";
string Start = "0";
string End = "10";
#>



and here's the class (TestClass.tt) that uses it:



<#
this.ClassName = "TestClass";
this.Variable = "i";
this.Start = "0";
this.End = "20";
#>

<#@ include file="Path to template\Template.tt" #>



which results in this code:



//
// This code was generated by a tool. Any changes made manually will be lost
// the next time this code is regenerated.
//

using System;

public class TestClass
{
public static void HelloDude()
{
Console.WriteLine("Hello, Dude");

for (i = 0; i < 20;
i++)
{
}
}
}



Enjoy!