Cheat Sheets from AddedBytes

I don't work with regex every day, the same applies to many developers I guess.

So I was very happy when I found the excellent regex cheat sheets from IloveJackDaniels.com. But here one day it turned out that page was gone - so to save anyone else the trouble, they have moved to addedbytes.com.

And here's a link to their cheat sheets:

http://www.addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/

You'll find two versions of Regular Expression cheat sheets, along with CSS, Python, Javascript and more.

ASP.NET Web service gotcha

The last 30 minutes spent debugging why suddenly my .asmx didn't show the default web service front end any more. I could not invoke the service through the browser.

Then I tried looking at the wsdl, which gave me a clue...

System.InvalidOperationException: Both System.String InsertNewUserInCRM(MBL.UserData.CobraMontelUser) and System.String InsertNewUserInCRM(System.String, System.String, System.String, System.String, System.String, System.String, System.String, System.String, System.String, System.String) use the message name 'InsertNewUserInCRM'.  Use the MessageName property of the WebMethod custom attribute to specify unique message names for the methods.

So now you see what I saw: I tried overloading web methods, which of course won't work. But there was no build error, no warning in VS and no error on the web page!

Fix: Either create a new name for the second method, or change the messagename, for example:

[WebMethod( MessageName ="InsertCobraMontelUser")]

Culture Performace .NET 3.5 vs .Net 4.0

After converting an application from .net 3.5 to .net 4, I noticed the performance was really reduced at the application startup, where it loads and processes lots of Quote data.

The Performance Wizard clearly showed that the function doing the most work was System.DateTime.Parse(string). If I changed the Target Framework for the application to 3.5, it was again back to normal behavior.

I then made a test console application with a single loop trying to parse 2000 dates to an array. The elements was processed at the same time in both frameworks, so I was clearly missing something.

Framework	Ms
.NET 3.5	4
.NET 4.0	3

I then noticed the only difference, was that I in the initial application changed the current culture in the function that was processing the data, like this: System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("nb-NO"); After adding this culture change to the test app, the .NET 4 framework was using considerable more time than in .net3.5:

Framework	Ms
.NET 3.5	398
.NET 4.0	2835

What they changed from .NET 3.5 to .NET 4 did not have time to figure out, but I found an easy solution. Instead of changing the culture of the thread, I set the culture when parsing like this:
.. = DateTime.Parse(feedarr[soucreIndex], CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("nb-NO"));

It then used 5 ms

Framework	Ms
.NET 3.5	6
.NET 4.0	5

I then took it further in using parseexact: DateTime dd = DateTime.ParseExact(feedarr[1], "dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss", CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("nb-NO"));

It then took 3 ms in .NET 4.0.

Framework	Ms
.NET 3.5	6
.NET 4.0	3

In a perfect world we would be no regional settings, but until further we are stuck with parsing the date format. As this post shows it’s important to do it the right way … 3 ms is a lot faster than 2 seconds 2835 milliseconds

Happy programming
Petter Søreide