I encountered this problem when I was a web developer in college for a late night student activities program aptly named  Late Nite Binghamton.  My co-worker and girlfriend Mallory was a graduate assistant for the program and had many ideas for how to make the website better and more engaging.  While working with her she would often see me typing in the hexadecimal color codes in css such as:

color: #F24A7D

As I am inept with what color look good (I often say that I never learnt colors) I would often ask her for help with picking out colors and I decided that if she was able to give me these colors in their hex color codes it would make us more efficient :) I sat her down and described to her how they work but after talking for a bit I realized that although she understood everything that I said she wouldn’t gain a feel for what hex numbers related to what colors just from hearing me talk.

In order to help her gain this feel I created a simple game called The Mallory Color Guessing Game.  The game is a webpage which shows you a large colored box and it is your job to guess what the hex color code is. 

After you guess it tells you how close you were to the actual color:

This game was a hit! Mallory loved it and she would compete with me to see who could guess the color the best.  Pretty quickly she gained a feel for what the hex digits meant and what color they represented. And that is how I taught my girlfriend hex!

NOTE: Mallory consistently gets over 80% at the Mallory Color Guessing Game. 

I encountered this problem when I was a web developer in college for a late night student activities program aptly named  Late Nite Binghamton.  My co-worker and girlfriend Mallory was a graduate assistant for the program and had many ideas for how to make the website better and more engaging.  While working with her she would often see me typing in the hexadecimal color codes in css such as:

color: #F24A7D

As I am inept with what color look good (I often say that I never learnt colors) I would often ask her for help with picking out colors and I decided that if she was able to give me these colors in their hex color codes it would make us more efficient :) I sat her down and described to her how they work but after talking for a bit I realized that although she understood everything that I said she wouldn’t gain a feel for what hex numbers related to what colors just from hearing me talk.

In order to help her gain this feel I created a simple game called The Mallory Color Guessing Game.  The game is a webpage which shows you a large colored box and it is your job to guess what the hex color code is. 

After you guess it tells you how close you were to the actual color:

This game was a hit! Mallory loved it and she would compete with me to see who could guess the color the best.  Pretty quickly she gained a feel for what the hex digits meant and what color they represented. And that is how I taught my girlfriend hex!

NOTE: Mallory consistently gets over 80% at the Mallory Color Guessing Game. 

I encountered this problem when I was a web developer in college for a late night student activities program aptly named  Late Nite Binghamton.  My co-worker and girlfriend Mallory was a graduate assistant for the program and had many ideas for how to make the website better and more engaging.  While working with her she would often see me typing in the hexadecimal color codes in css such as:

color: #F24A7D

As I am inept with what color look good (I often say that I never learnt colors) I would often ask her for help with picking out colors and I decided that if she was able to give me these colors in their hex color codes it would make us more efficient :) I sat her down and described to her how they work but after talking for a bit I realized that although she understood everything that I said she wouldn’t gain a feel for what hex numbers related to what colors just from hearing me talk.

In order to help her gain this feel I created a simple game called The Mallory Color Guessing Game.  The game is a webpage which shows you a large colored box and it is your job to guess what the hex color code is. 

After you guess it tells you how close you were to the actual color:

This game was a hit! Mallory loved it and she would compete with me to see who could guess the color the best.  Pretty quickly she gained a feel for what the hex digits meant and what color they represented. And that is how I taught my girlfriend hex!

NOTE: Mallory consistently gets over 80% at the Mallory Color Guessing Game. 

It is featured in the Toolbox column where they highlight useful tools and blogs. Here is a snippet of what it says:

Creating Code Snippets is a lot easier when using Snippet Designer (version 1.1), a free, open-source Add-In for Visual Studio 2008 for creating and editing Code Snippets directly within the IDE. Once you install it, creating a new Code Snippet is as easy as going to the File menu and creating a new Code Snippet File.

That is so cool! If you are interested go and download the Snippet Designer from the Codeplex website and give me more feedback.

Also, in the same article my friend Sara Ford had her blog featured.  When I found out the Snippet Designer and Sara’s blog were in the magazine I quickly emailed to ask Sara if she knew about it.  She already did and also had an extra copy of the magazine for me!

It is featured in the Toolbox column where they highlight useful tools and blogs. Here is a snippet of what it says:

Creating Code Snippets is a lot easier when using Snippet Designer (version 1.1), a free, open-source Add-In for Visual Studio 2008 for creating and editing Code Snippets directly within the IDE. Once you install it, creating a new Code Snippet is as easy as going to the File menu and creating a new Code Snippet File.

That is so cool! If you are interested go and download the Snippet Designer from the Codeplex website and give me more feedback.

Also, in the same article my friend Sara Ford had her blog featured.  When I found out the Snippet Designer and Sara’s blog were in the magazine I quickly emailed to ask Sara if she knew about it.  She already did and also had an extra copy of the magazine for me!

It is featured in the Toolbox column where they highlight useful tools and blogs. Here is a snippet of what it says:

Creating Code Snippets is a lot easier when using Snippet Designer (version 1.1), a free, open-source Add-In for Visual Studio 2008 for creating and editing Code Snippets directly within the IDE. Once you install it, creating a new Code Snippet is as easy as going to the File menu and creating a new Code Snippet File.

That is so cool! If you are interested go and download the Snippet Designer from the Codeplex website and give me more feedback.

Also, in the same article my friend Sara Ford had her blog featured.  When I found out the Snippet Designer and Sara’s blog were in the magazine I quickly emailed to ask Sara if she knew about it.  She already did and also had an extra copy of the magazine for me!

Some of the most notable changes are:

1. Languages Service are turned OFF by default now.  Since I was unable to figure out a way to host the C# and VB language services in the snippet editor without causing fake errors in projects I decided to give the users an option to turn them on or off.  If you are ok with the fake error you can turn this back on but since it really annoyed me I have it off.  I plan in a future release to provide some basic color coding outside of the language service so you can at least have color coded code.
2. Many more aspects of the plug in are now configurable through the options menu under Snippet Designer.  you can now set the location of the snippet index, set preferences for which snippet languages you would like to appear in the snippet explorer.
3. Several bug fixes to how the highlighting of replacements works and performance improvements with it also.

Hopefully these changes will make it much more useful so please download it and try it out here. 

The future…

My plans for the future are still up in the air but some of the things I would like to add are:

1. More bug fixes and more feature enhancements suggested by many helpful users on the Snippet Designer Codeplex page.
2. Ability to color code snippets without using the language service.  I have a few options here I have been looking at.
3. Create a website to host snippets and allow you to consume and publish from Visual Studio to this website.

I don’t know how much time I will have to commit to any of these but hopefully I will be able to get more work done on this.

Thanks!

Some of the most notable changes are:

1. Languages Service are turned OFF by default now.  Since I was unable to figure out a way to host the C# and VB language services in the snippet editor without causing fake errors in projects I decided to give the users an option to turn them on or off.  If you are ok with the fake error you can turn this back on but since it really annoyed me I have it off.  I plan in a future release to provide some basic color coding outside of the language service so you can at least have color coded code.
2. Many more aspects of the plug in are now configurable through the options menu under Snippet Designer.  you can now set the location of the snippet index, set preferences for which snippet languages you would like to appear in the snippet explorer.
3. Several bug fixes to how the highlighting of replacements works and performance improvements with it also.

Hopefully these changes will make it much more useful so please download it and try it out here. 

The future…

My plans for the future are still up in the air but some of the things I would like to add are:

1. More bug fixes and more feature enhancements suggested by many helpful users on the Snippet Designer Codeplex page.
2. Ability to color code snippets without using the language service.  I have a few options here I have been looking at.
3. Create a website to host snippets and allow you to consume and publish from Visual Studio to this website.

I don’t know how much time I will have to commit to any of these but hopefully I will be able to get more work done on this.

Thanks!

UPDATE: New version on FastSharp that includes a Windows 7 Gadget!  Learn more here.

Last year I wrote this program which I named FastSharp.  It is a text editor which lets you compile and run C# code that would normally exist inside a method.  The inspiration for this came from getting tired of opening up Visual Studio and creating a project when all I want to do is execute one line of code and see what it outputs.

A prime example of this happened today (which is what sparked me to finally post this program).  My co-worker Bertan and I were talking about the System.DateTime object in .NET.  We were wondering if the ToBinary() method would return the same value regardless  whether the datetime object was in local time or in UTC mode.  He was about to fire up Visual Studio and create a project just to write this two line program when I showed him FastSharp.

First I opened the program:

Then I entered this two line program and hit the run button:

I got an error because I forgot the capitalize the second t in ToUniversalTime().  So, I corrected that and then ran it again:

And then we had our answer.  The to outputs are not the same so they do produce different results.

The way FastSharp works is pretty simple.  It takes whatever you enter and wraps it in a Main method which is then wrapped in a class which then has a list of import statements appended above it (configurable through the settings dialog).  It then compiles the code using the Microsoft.CSharp.CSharpCodeProvider class and executes it.  Because FastSharp wraps the code inside of a method block you can only write code that would normally compile inside of a method. (No classes or methods).

Things To Consider and Future Consideration

1. FastSharp can only do console output not input.  I was unable to figure out how to make Console.ReadLine() work inside the program.  This will be an important future feature if someone can figure it out.







2. FastSharp compiles only C# code but it is not hard to make it work for Visual Basic, which would also be a nice feature upgrade.




3. FastSharp uses the out-of-the-box winforms RichTextBox control as the code editor.  It would be nice to replace this with a code editor that color coded or even give intellisense

Give Me! Give Me! Give Me!

To download both the FastSharp binary and source code visit Click Here.

The Error

I restarted my computer for the first time in a couple weeks and it would not boot.  I was faced with a screen which said:

Grub Loading Stage 1.5

Error 22

A nice helpful error. 

Now I was faced with a problem and I needed to figure out how to solve this. My first step was to restart again, since that ALWAYS fixes problems.  Sadly, after several more restarts I still was stuck at that screen.  Then it hits me as to what is going on.

One Week Earlier

I had Ubuntu 7.04 dual-booting with Windows XP on my computer.  I was running low on hard drive space so I decided

to get rid of the Ubuntu partition.  That worked fine and then I go on using my computer not realizing that by removing that partition, the Grub application that was in the master boot record would now fail to run.

The Solution

I looked the error up online and found out that Error 22 means that Grub failed to find a partition.  Which makes sense since I deleted the partition it was looking for.  The simplest solution to this problem would be to put a Windows XP disc in and go to the recovery console. From there you can easily overwrite the master boot record with the default windows one.  One problem though, I couldn’t find my XP disc.  Now I know, I work for Microsoft I could just get one the next day.  I thought about that but I didn’t want to wait, I was determined to fix the problem.  The only solution  I could think of to re-install Ubuntu from a Live CD which would let me repartition, and fix the Grub boot record.

In The End

After all of that I am able to boot into my computer once more.  I also learned my lesson, Ubuntu does not like when I delete it  

For now I will stick with having my computer dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu.