I Suffer Too – Computer Science

I read an interesting post on James Hague’s “Programming in the 21st Century” blog recently entitled “Recovering From a Computer Science Education“.

I wanted to tag it in my blog and make a few comments of my own since he does not allow comments on his blog at this time.

I can relate to this post and especially the statement, “… you can get so immersed in the technical and theoretical that you forget how wonderful it is to make amazing and useful things.”

Over the years I have been one of those that has got caught up in all the talk and hype about technology, operating systems, languages, etc. that I have just not been very creative or productive.

I can’t shift my brain back into the mode of hey lets do something creative and fun. It seems that has been lost.

What does one do to correct this? James has a list of suggestions that I am going to try and follow to see if I can get my brain to recover and get back on track.

Happy New Year – 2012

Greetings!!

As I write this post the new year is in full swing. I wish everyone a safe and happy 2012.

I would like to take a few moments to reflect on some of the events that have taken place in my life over the past year.

The most dramatic event that took place in 2011 was that my mother passed away on December 16th at 11:45pm. She was suffering from kidney failure and wished not to do dialysis. I must say that it was much more painful and rough than the kidney doctor told us it would be.  She is in Heaven now pain free.

I completed more bike riding in 2011 than I did in 2010 but I did not get the chance to ride in any organized rides. My plans were to ride a 100 mile century ride in Clarksville, TN over the Labor Day weekend but I sprang my ankle and could not attempt it.

I got to attend my first programming conference in 2011. I was able to attend the devLink conference in Chattanooga, TN. It was very interesting and I learned allot of new coding tricks and met allot of great developers.

I took my first major vacation in 2011. I went to Chicago, IL. It was amazing. I was with the love of my life and we all had a great time visiting such places as the Field museum, “The Bean”, Connie’s Pizza, A Cubs game at Wriggly. (Btw: I am a Cardinals fan!), Lego Land, Six Flags, Navy Pier, and more.

Got to visit “Great Wolf Lodge” in Ohio with my sweetie. An indoor water park! Wow! Also got to check out MagiQuest too.

In all 2011 was an amazing year for me. I hope 2012 will be equally amazing or better.

For 2012…

I plan to study my Bible more often and attend church more regularly than I have in the past, post more to my blog, learn 2 new programming languages, write more free software, redesign my personal and business website, create 4 new products, ride my bike more, camp, read more, and last but not least I am planning something really, really big that I cannot share at this moment. ;)

 

Counting Lines of Code

I had a need at my day job to give a count for the total lines of code in a solution. I searched around for something to help or a plug-in the Visual Studio but what I found was something really cool and already in place in Visual Studio.

You can count the number of lines of code in your solution files, projects, or just a file by doing the following simple steps I have outlined below. This information was obtained off another blog. I wish I could remember the name so I can give it proper credit.

Select Edit -> Find & Replace -> Find in files… or just press CTRL+SHIFT+F

Check Use and select Regular expressions.

Type the following as the text to find:

for C# :

^~(:Wh@//.+)~(:Wh@{:Wh@)~(:Wh@}:Wh@)~(:Wh@/#).+

for VB.NET :

^~(:Wh@'.+)~(:Wh@/#).+

Select where you want to do the search/count: file, project or solution.

If you select Current project or Entire solution, you also need to specify the file types that will be included in the search.

The regular expression that is used match every line that are not a comment (//), a compiler directive (starts with #), a single opening or closing brace, or blank lines.

Look at the bottom of the search results on the lower left and you will have the total number of lines of code.

Cool uh?