David Chappell, one the top speakers on the circuit, has a blog. But sadly it is missing two main features of a blog - an rss feed and comments. (http://www.davidchappell.com/blog/)
As anyone who has heard David speak or has read his Opiniari newsletter. his blog will definitely be worth reading.
First of all happy new year to everyone where ever you live.
I have not blogged for a while has I have been very busy and also suffering from a viral infection.
I decided to complete a personal project I have been working on : creating an rss feed from my yahoo email. Everything was going wonderfully well until I tried to extract the data I need from the html page received from yahoo when you view you Yahoo inbox. Even though I am no expect in Regular Expressions I decided to have a go. I was using the appropriate .Net framework classes and looping through the collection of matches. The problem was that sometimes an exception would be thrown : "Input string was not in a correct format" . I patiently searched using Google to find the explanation of how a regex expression passing text contained in a string could be in the wrong format. Maybe someone can explain this exception as to me it defeated my ability to use regular expressions. Is it a bug or am I just being stupid.
I spent hours trying to solve this problem. In the end I just used a combination of indexOf and substring to achieve the same effect as I would have done with the regex. Performance was great and it was much simpler to debug and program than the regex version.
My conclusion is if plan A does not work use plan B and often the old fashioned ways work best.