Friday, February 15, 2008

TIOBE Programming Community Index

I looked at this several years ago. It is interesting to see the long term trends of programming languages.

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

It has a nice graph displaying the trends.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Could not load type error in VS 2005 Web Application

Occurring in an existing project

Occasionally I get an error like
Could not load type 'MOS5.MOSLinks'

when editing a web page. I have seen a lot of posts that address this error. For MOS5 it has always come down to case sensitivity.

I end up comparing the existing version to a previous one. Today I noticed that the MOSLinks.aspx.vb had this at the top of the file.

Imports MOS5.mosLinks

I edited this line in MOSLinks.aspx

Inherits="MOS5.MOSLinks"

to this

Inherits="MOS5.mosLinks"

After compiling, the error went away.

Occurring in a newly published project

Make sure the folder you are publishing to is a virtual directory.

Repeat a String n Times

I was looking to repeat a string n times using only T-SQL. My friend found it in this article. This reference may prove useful later.

From SQL BOL 2000:
Replicate - Repeats a character expression for a specified number of times.


Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Keyboard Shortcuts in Gmail

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6594

c = Compose
/ = put cursor in Search box

Maybe these will save me time

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Beyond Compare File Comparison Rules

I was comparing two versions of my code. The right side of my comparison had tabs the left had spaces. Visual Studio 2005 must have put them in there. Beyond Compare (BC), highlighted the differences.

I made BC ignore leading whitespace in the "Everything Else" rule set by going to the Tools/Edit Current Rules/ menu. In the importance tab check "Leading whitespace". The right side was much more indented than the left. I fixed this my going to the General tab and choosing 4 characters = tab stops.

Now BC shows me only the important differences in my code versions.

You can pick rules by using the Tools/Pick Rules menu. I don't know why it did not pick VB when I was comparing two *.vb files.

I am using Beyond Compare version 2.4.3 (build 243).