Chris Szurgot's Blog

I was chatting in Windows Messenger with a co-worker and transferring them a large file (again, over Messenger) and I was struck with how far we've come in the last 15 years since I've been working with computers. I remember using BBS systems where all you could do was one thing in the system, download, browse, read news, chat, read groups, and that was pretty much all your computer could do. Now we have programs that can multitask while the computer is multitasking several problems programs at once. Just amazing.

I just got back from a local MSDN/.NET event here in Virginai Beach. Not much, just a couple of hours of programing talk on “line of business applications in ASP.NET” and “ASP.NET Security”. More of an overview of good programming practices than anything in-depth, but a refresher is always nice.

Held in a nice comfortable theater, there were two tracks and two sessions each. What impressed me the most however, was the atmosphere of the whole thing. For a free event, they still went out the their way to make it enjoyable and comfortable. Free muffins and bagels, a coupon for free popcorn and soda, a raffle (with a PocketPC I didn't win) and a little goodie back that would be a nice little breifcase since I don't carry a laptop or much else.

At any rate, worth a trip if they come to a town near you. (Mind you, I wouldn't travel too far) Good indication that DevDays will be an enjoyable event as well.

A while back I wished for keyboard consistency across Microsoft products, (especially keystrokes like Ctrl-I for iterative search in VS.NET) Today, my wish is for a tabbed interface in Query Analyzer. Trying to work on several stored procedures at once, along with a testing window or two, makes it hard to find the right window.

Cool tip, for the time being. Ctrl-W brings up a list of active windows in Query Analyzer along with filename, user and database. Cool. Now, VS.NET needs this one.

Has there ever been an official word on what version of Whidbey will be available at DevDays? I'm already signed up, so I guess the matter is academic, but I'm still kinda curious. There seems to be noises about a new version, but nobody seems sure.

Also, wouldn't it be great if DevDays attendees got onto the public betas for Whidbey? Somehow, I ended up on the public betas for Everett, and it was an interesting trip. I even got a t-shirt out of it for submitting some noteworthy bug. Free T-shirts are always good.

(Update: I asked this question because since a few weeks ago, there seems to be new information pointing to a new version of Whidbey, as opposed to the PDC version. Plus, like someone else said, the PDC bits will be almost eight months old by then :( and the first beta is due out soon, isn't it?)

(Update2: Since I forget the heart of blogging, the links, here's the link to the article that made me try to ask for clarification. I must admit, I'm not sure where he got the eight month figure from, but I'm sure that the PDC build was a little older than one day before the PDC. http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2004/02/whidbey_tech_pr.html)

There is a new release of Mozilla FireFox out (formerly FireBird formerly Phoenix) I'm trying to download it, but since it was *very* recently released, it seems they are a bit busy. For such a major project, they seem to have a lot of trouble with names.

I generally use Mozilla for my browsing, except that we use IE for work. We use Rich Client Forms from HREF-EXEs, and it occurs to me that if MS wants to make hosted .NET controls and one click stuff a reality, they need to refine IE some more to have some the enhancements from the browsers (tab browsing, good popup blocking, etc...), or when people try to one-click and host IE controls, they aren't going to work.

Whew! Finally managed to get in and download Firefox. Visibly, not much different, but it does seem more responsive. Enjoy!

I'm currently going through the unenviable task of building up a name-parsing routine. The goal is to take a name in various formats, and based on recognizable patterns, break out the first, last, middle and suffix information. What makes it interesting is that the data can come from multiple sources, and be formatted in different ways depending on the source. And then, within each source, there are deviations as well, like suffix being put in (parens), Or with a dot, or without a dot or with a comma. Or first name could appear as person 1 & person 2 then last name. First cut gets me about 95 % accuracy, probably about 97% if I make certain assunotions about business names.

I will say that Regular expressions help make this task easier (or, less lines of code at least) but handling these exception cases is going to be about the same amount of code as the 97% matching.

And now that this is working, I get to create a weighted matching routines that takes my mostly correct names, and finds likely existing name matches and compares other information to see if they are an existing record. That one should be easier, but I'm thinking I need to use T/SQL, and I can't find a way to return an array from a T/SQL function or Stored Procedure (or work with one for that matter) so I'm still trying to figure that part out.

Like many other did, I'll be having my blog be more active, but off the main feed, so if you are interested, visit me at http://weblogs.asp.net/cszurgot.

I guess I'll still be posting items of technical/dotnet related on the main feed, just more esoteric items off-line, so to speak.