Run This!
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"Add a button to let your readers run snippets of code directly from your blog and see the results interactively.[...]". Pretty neat web application. It runs code snippets pretty fast and it's very easy to use (A WordPress plugin is available). Be sure to check out the examples on the page. It surely would be cool (and useful, too) if snippet hosting sites (like http://gist.github.com) would use this service to run the snippets. I actually didn't install the plugin yet, but I can imagine that WordPress users who have already installed the Dean's Code Highlighter plugin will have some issues with using the Run This! plugin, since both use the
<pre lang="...-construct for pasting snippets.
Inverse Graphing Calculator
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Quoted from the page: "[...]The way the IGC works is, you type something you'd like as your curve, like 'Hello World' or 'I love you'. The IGC produces an *equation* which has this phrase as its graph!". In the first version of the IGC, the equation was shown as a PNG in LaTeX style (the image name actually contained the LaTeX code), but the author removed it (surely because of the traffic the IGC got, since I couldn't load the IGC a few hours ago). I would love to see the code behind this thing. Pretty interesting!
HP Universal Print Driver Series
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Everybody who owns a printer from Hewlett-Packard knows how annoying it is when you just want to install the driver delivered with the printer. As most of you surely have already undergone such an installation, the alleged printer driver on the CD will also install some software utilities. The point is that if somebody wants to install the printer driver solely, the installation of additional software is surely an unwelcome overhead. Well, I may call this good news, then apparently a HP Universal Print Driver Series exists. As the homepage mentions it, "The HP Universal Print Driver is the single driver that gives users instant access to a range of HP print devices[...]". And this driver doesn't come with millions of little programs that the driver from the CD will install on your machine. I didn't test it yet, but it's surely a good alternative to the evil printer driver on the driver CD.
Why is String.Concat not optimized to StringBuilder.Append?
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Today I posted a tweet complaining about the lack of usage of .NET's
StringBuilder class when concatenating strings. Mirko replied that the Java compiler optimizes string concatenations using StringBuilder (or StringBuffer, as mentioned in the Java Language Specification). I got curious and so I tried to figure out if the .NET compiler optimizes string concatenations using StringBuilder, too. And so I stumbled upon the linked answer. As the original poster of the answer mentions it, the real answer to this question is the compiler team's secret. Maybe I'll write a mail to the guys of the C# FAQ regarding this.
Optimization Tips
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A list -- as the title suggests it -- of optimization tips. I liked the following one because of its elegance (and because I've never encountered it), although the achieved optimization is very subtle:
myString.Equals("foo", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) instead of myString.ToUpper() == "FOO". There are various other good (or better) tips on that list, so give it a look.
