BareGrep

I recently ran across a great tool ( BareGrep ) to perform UNIX-like grep commands in Windows. The more I use the tool, the more I continue to appreciate it.

You can download and use the software for free. If you purchase it, then the nag screen goes away and I think there may be more functionaity.

Anyway, today I was asked to extract all the references to color ( embedded styles and CSS classes ) from our web application. With all the RGB and HEX values dispersed across the site it could have been a tedious daunting task, however, with the help of BareGrep it didn't take very long.

I used BareGrep with the following settings to recursively search our codebase for references to RGB values.

<table width="100%" border="1"><tbody><tr><td> Folder:</td> <td>C:\starteam\myhealthIQ\UserInterface\Web</td></tr><tr><td> Files:</td> <td>..(cs|aspx|html|xsl|js|css|ascx|master)</td></tr><tr><td> Text:</td> <td>((\s\d+,\s\d+,\s\d+\s))</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>Note: I did another search for HEX values using another regular expression.</p> <p>Once I got the results from the above two searches, I exported the values and ran a BareGrep “Invert Match” search against our standard colors ( example: “(196,\s38,\s39)|(165,\s176,\s*65)|etc…” ) to isolate any unapproved colors.</p>
I actually came across the above tool while I was looking for a Tail application for Windows and found BareTail. I recommend this tool as well if you need a tool to show the end of a log file in real time.

Google Code Search

Google is at it again. This time they have come out with a new tool to search open source code… called Code Search.

Some other code search tools that I found ( not associated with Google ) are
<ul>
<li>Koders</li>
<li>Krugle</li>
</ul>

Cheat Sheets

I’m a big fan of Cheat Sheets. I currently have HTML, JavaScript, Regular Expressions, and CSS cheat sheets hanging up in my cube. I have plenty of other Cheat Sheets downloaded on my Thumb Drive.

If you are interested in collecting some Cheat Sheet as well you can find many of them from Smashing Magazine.

V2005 IDE Enhancements

Yesterday, Microsoft made Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 IDE Enhancements available for download on their website.

The Enhancements include
<blockquote cite="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cd7c6e48-e41b-48e3-881e-a0e6e97f9534&DisplayLang=en">“Source Code Outliner : The Source Outliner tool is a Visual Studio extension that provides a tree view of your source code’s types and members and lets you quickly navigate to them inside the editor.

Visual C++ Code Snippets: The Visual C++ Code Snippets tool lets you insert snippets in your code by using a pop-up menu that contains programming keywords. VB.NET and C# languages have this functionality in Visual Studio 2005.

Indexed Find: The Indexed Find tool is a Visual Studio extension that uses the Microsoft Indexing Service to provide improved Search capabilities to the integrated development environment (IDE). It sends the results of a search to the Output Window.

Super Diff Utility: The Super Diff Find tool is a Visual Studio extension that compares text files. It uses color coding and graphics to show the difference between the files in deleted text (red), changed text (blue), inserted text (green).

Event Toaster Utility: The Event Toaster tool is a Visual Studio extension that notifies users about specific events within the Visual Studio IDE.”</blockquote>

Ready for IE7?

Is your website ready for Internet Explorer 7.0 ( IE7 )? If you aren’t ready or your not sure, then please checkout the Checklist created by Microsoft to see if your website is compatible.

If your site isn’t ready, then you should consider updating it soon because Microsoft is going to push out IE7 as a High Priority Automatic Update soon. This is rumored to happen sometime in November ( which is very close ).

You can install IE7 from Microsoft’s main Internet Explorer Home. You might consider installing IE7 on a machine other than your development machine to test with first. Other than using virtual machines, I don’t know of a good way to have both IE6 and IE7 side by side on your machine.

For those of you who like shortcuts, here is a Quick Reference Sheet for IE7.

Note: If you do install IE7 as your primary browser and you have difficulty with other websites, that haven’t been as meticulous as you to make your site compatible, then you can install the User Agent String Utility version 2 developed by Microsoft.
<blockquote cite="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9517db9c-3c0d-47fe-bd04-fad82a9aac9f&DisplayLang=en">“This utility changes certain registry keys on an IE 7.0 installation to allow a user to emulate an IE 6.0 installation as a simple workaround until problematic sites update their code. It also offers users the option to report these problematic sites to Microsoft.”</blockquote>