Suggestion: Case adaptive text replacement in Visual Studio editor

Have again suggested this long before to Visual Studio team, but since Visual Studio 2013 has a “Send a Frown” feature, I’ve sent it again with some suggestions on how it could be implemented.

I need some clever replace in cases like that one shown in the screenshot below, where I have the implementation of a Sounds property and want to clone that and rename it to Music (this is useful when repeating a coding pattern, but more importantly can use this when refactoring code and need to rename something).

When doing replace on the selection, replacing "sounds" to "music", I want the word/target phrase to detect the casing of the source word/phrase and keep the same casing style, that is:
– IsSoundsOn should become IsMusicOn
– soundsOn should become musicOn
– PROPERTY_SOUNDS should become PROPERTY_MUSIC

As you can understand now I have to do 3 replacement operations, having selected the option "Case sensitive":
– Sounds to Music
– sounds to music
– SOUNDS to MUSIC

I’d rather have an option "Case adaptive" or something like that (marketing people might call this "Smart replace").

 

 

Implementation-wise, every time it detects the source text (case insensitive search), it would check if it is found in one of the following casings:
– first letter non-capital
– first letter capital
– all letters small
– all letters capitals
and when replacing with the target text it would apply the same casing state to it (affecting just the first letter of the target or all letters depending on which of the above casing states were detected for the source string at each position it was found in the source text)

HowTo: Code folding in NetBeans IDE source code editor

As explained near the end of https://ui.netbeans.org/docs/ui/code_folding/cf_uispec.html, the NetBeans IDE source code editor supports custom code folding tags for any language, like below (here defining the code folding tag in a Java comment, obviously need to use specific comment syntax for the respective language).

// <editor-fold desc="isUserStudent"> —————————————-

public static boolean isUserStudent(PortletRequest request)
   throws NamingException, PortletServiceUnavailableException,  PumaException, SQLException
{
   return isUserStudent(new DbAccess().getConnection(), request);
}

public static boolean isUserStudent(Connection connection, PortletRequest request)
   throws NamingException, PortletServiceUnavailableException,  PumaException, SQLException
{
   return !StringUtils.isNotPresent(getUserStudentId(connection, request));
}
 
public static boolean isUserStudent(int studentId, PortletRequest request)
   throws NamingException, PortletServiceUnavailableException,  PumaException, SQLException
{
   return isUserStudent(studentId, new DbAccess().getConnection(), request);
}

public static boolean isUserStudent(int studentId, Connection connection, PortletRequest request)
   throws NamingException, PortletServiceUnavailableException,  PumaException, SQLException
{
   return (String.valueOf(studentId).equals(getUserStudentId(connection, request)));
}
 
public static String getUserStudentId(Connection connection, PortletRequest request)
   throws NamingException, PortletServiceUnavailableException,  PumaException, SQLException
{
   return DbStudent.getStudentId(connection, Puma.getUserName(request)); 
}

// </editor-fold>————————————————————-

 

This shows up in NetBeans like below when folded:

You can also optionally specify defaultstate="collapsed" at the code folding tag so that when the file is opened that region appears collapsed.

HowTo: Type in double-quote in Windows Live Writer

A big nuissance in Windows Live Writer is that when you try to type in a double-quote character you get some special Unicode character (“ or ”, at the start and end of a string respectively), other than the classic ASCII character used in programming.

That way people copy-pasting snippets from your blog can get lots of errors. I remember having that issue sometime ago with people copy-pasting (into a .reg text file) a registry script to add Google search engine into Copernic Agent from my blog and not understanding why it wasn’t working as expected.

However, I found a keyboard shortcut to work-arround this issue. You just press BACKSPACE key right after typing in a double-quote character in Windows Live Writer to restore it a real ASCII double-quote.

Microsoft Research Kodu Game Lab (formerly called Boku)

Kodu from Microsoft Research is a new visual programming language made specifically for creating games. It is designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone. The programming environment runs on the XBox, allowing rapid design iteration using only a game controller for input.