Lounge Scene

Well, as much as I hate to admit it, I was recently working on VB6 application that uses Office COM automation. It needed to have Word and Excel do a few things while the main application waited.

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Instead of doing a college survey and asking a bunch of probing questions about the lives of twenty-somethings, there's an easier way to get information about your current culture. Just look at CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.

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Recently someone had a problem where they had some massive control block full of if statements looking at a string, dispatching one of a variety of functions. The if block was massive. Hundreds of if statements, hundreds of magic strings.

Interestingly all the functions had the same signature…

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So not that long ago, someone posted a question asking how to deal with a certain situation. The situation is such that there is a network file stream coming from somewhere, that has certain data you want to keep, and certain data you don't want to keep. Control blocks, extra header information, weirdo protocols, too much data coming back from an API, etc…

My suggestion was to create a simple container object (aka wrapper) to the existing network stream, that operates the same as the network stream, but does the necessary filtering.

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So, recently I needed to make an application that allowed a user to enter an arbitrary SQL query, and elsewhere in the UI I needed to display a drop-down with the fields that this arbitrary query returned. This poses a small problem.

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