Yet Another C# Blog

I’ve spent the last 4 posts talking about Regular Expressions and some difficult patterns. But, this is a C# blog, so I really want to be talking about C#. Today, I hope to provide you with a nice little start on a multi-threading "Task Queue" application. A Task Queue will place task requests in a queue that will be serviced Asynchronously and in the order received. Rather than keep you in suspense, here’s the code up front. If you'd like an explanation, I've attempted that below. (Update 10/6/2008: Sorry folks about the bug below. The Enqueue method must set the the Busy field to true when queing the first task in order to avoid the thread race. It's now been fixed.) using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Drawing; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Windows.Forms; using System.Threading; namespace TaskQueuePOC { public partial class Form1 : Form { public...

In my last article titled "Regular Expression Alternation" we discussed Alternation as one means of performing the AND operation in a regular expression pattern. (?(expression)yes|no) But, what if you don't have this pattern in your version of RegEx? Some of you may be reading to gain knowledge that you can apply in other programming languages besides C# or the .NET environment. The pattern I described in the last article does not work in all versions of .NET Regular Expressions. In particular, it does not work in JScript Regular Expression Syntax. And, when you use tools like ASP.NET’s RegularExpressionValidator, you are implicitly using JScript. So then, what do you do? To restate the original requirement, we want to validate a string that has at least one digit, at least one uppercase letter, and at least 6 characters. The problem statement is clearly an AND problem, so it begs to be written with the Alternation pattern. But in situations where we can...

I promised in my last article that I'd have more to say about regular expression. So here you have it. Today, we look at another tough problem for Regular Expressions. Let’s consider writing a pattern to validate that a string contains at least one digit, at least one uppercase letter, and at least 6 characters. One would think that this would be easy. But here we’re faced with an AND situation and the regular expression syntax doesn't provide an AND operator. Take, for example, any validation problem that has the form… A and B and C Without an AND operation in Regex, you are almost forced to go outside of the pattern and implement the test in multiple patterns and multiple passes of your validator. That may be the best approach, or it may be impossible if you are working with a blackbox validator and must provide a single Regex pattern. I've found two approaches that can be applied to solve such problems. We'll discuss one of those approaches today. The app...

In my last article on Regular Expressions, we looked at a couple of simple expressions and 3 algorithms to use the expressions for “validating” strings. The main point of the article is that Regular Expression behavior will be confusing if not considered in the context of the algorithm being used. Please take a look at Regular Expressions. What’s that got to do with C#? to get the background for this article. In this article, we will discuss one of the more difficult Regular Expression problems. How do you use “Negative Look-ahead” ? To use Regular Expression “Negative Look-Ahead” or “Negative Look-Behind”, you have to change the way you think about pattern matching. First, the negative look-ahead takes the syntax… “(?!pattern)” In the words of the MSDN documentation… (Zero-width negative lookahead assertion.) Continues match only if the subexpression does not match at this position on the right. For example, \b(?!un)\w+\b matches words that do not begin with un. This expres...

...Only that I often need to know Regular Expressions for my C# work. However, the online help and resources seem to come up a little short. So, today I diverge a little and discuss this cryptic yet valuable ancillary topic to try to help you through your next Regex dilema. I'm not going to waste time and internet bandwidth explaining what a Regular Expression is , there are plenty of sites for those. But, I will give special thanks here to OmegaMan who compiled and posted the following on the MSDN Regex Forum... OmegaMan's .Net Regex Resources Reference I refer to it often. So let's dive right in. Whenever you are considering using regular expressions, you need to determine what kind of pattern matching problem are you trying to solve. 1) Do I want a regular expression to check a string for validity? 2) Do I want a regular expression to find certain things in my string? 3) Do I want a regular expression so that I can replace patterns in my string? There can be some...

It has been a while since my last post. Things get crazy at times. But, here is another bit of sample code for you to muse over. We will look at enumerations and strings. In C#, an enumeration is NOT a string, nor can you define it to be one. An enumeration can be defined as any of a number of integer types. You can leave it as its default type... public enum unspecifiedTypeEnum { one = 1, two, three, } In which case you get named 32 bit values. Or you can specify the type of the underlying value as byte , sbyte , ushort , short , uint , int , ulong or long ... public enum byteTypeEnum : byte { one = 1, two, three, } // or... public enum ushortTypeEnum : ushort { one = 1, two, three, } // etc... ... But, you can't declare it as a string. That doesn't mean you can't use strings at all. When I want to save data to a file for future reference, I like to make my enumerations human readable and store them...