Articles by Luc Pattyn (Articles: 8, Tip/Tricks: 13)

My entry to the lean-and-mean programming competition.

From automatic code recognition to fully automated code snippet pasting; no more missing PRE tags!

Delegates: how to add them to an event, how they get removed and when that is necessary

A simple app demonstrates unexpected behavior of .NET timers and Thread.Sleep(); native multimedia timers come to the rescue.

A viewer for CodeProject's recently introduced reputation information; futile, but fun

A simple Sokoban implementation in C# with some extras

ow to copy code snippets with Internet Explorer while preserving newlines and indentation

A utility that removes phantom icons from the Icon Tray

You shouldn't be working with huge strings at all.If this represents a file's content, read it using File.ReadAllLines() and take the array's Length.Otherwise, count the lines while you collect the data, not afterwards.Dealing with a huge string isn't doing the caches any favors.And if...

This alternative probably is less expensive than Andrew's alternate 1; rather than calculating the maximum value the enum can have, it checks each individual bit that is set in the input value, one by one. There is a hack involved, for any non-zero value the expression value & (-value) yields a...

The code snippet below returns the first Thursday of a given year without iterating anything.DateTime FirstThursday(int year) { DateTime dt=new DateTime(year, 1, 1); return dt.AddDays((11-(int)dt.DayOfWeek)%7);}The formula used may seem a bit bizarre, it computes the distance...

I don't mind multiple exits in such a simple method, hence I'd write:public static bool Equals(this DateTime now, DateTime then, DatePartFlags flags) { if ((flags & DatePartFlags.Ticks) != 0 && now.Ticks != then.Ticks) return false; ... if ((flags & DatePartFlags.Month) != 0...

Less magic, more readable, would be:DateTime dt1;DateTime dt2;if (DateTime.TryParseExact(str1, "dd-MMM-yyyy", null, DateTimeStyles.None, out dt1) && DateTime.TryParseExact(str2, "dd-MMM-yyyy", null, DateTimeStyles.None, out dt2)) { // do something with those datetimes}

Showing an image in a WinForm WebBrowser without using files

It may not be very fashionable, but when I need to know the inheritance chain while creating some code, I read the MSDN documentation page on the class of interest, and all is there, near the bottom, under Inheritance Hierarchy. And while I'm there, I typically read the entire page, there is...

Assuming the range of numbers is small, and all of them are required in the result (those are the assumptions implied by your code), and with a small change in the API definition, a much more compact and faster implementation would be this:public IList randomPermutation(int min, int max)...

I'm afraid there are better ways doing this, based on the power of the framework; in this case ColorMatrix is the tool to use. See e.g. here[^] (warning: make sure to use correct matrix elements, corresponding to the coefficients mentioned in the tip/trick).:)

Less code, and much faster, would be:public static string ReverseSB(string text) { int len = text.Length; if (len>1) { StringBuilder sb=new StringBuilder(text); int pivotPos=len/2; len--; for (int i = 0; i < pivotPos; i++) { int...

And even simpler, faster and better would be this:public static string ReverseCA(string s) { char[] chars=s.ToCharArray(); Array.Reverse(chars); return new string(chars);}Whatever the string's length, only three objects get created; and all characters get copied three...

Way too much code. Using arrays of characters, your switch constructs can be reduced to just a few lines of code, like so:switch (c) { case 'a': sb.Append("4"); break; case 'e': sb.Append("3"); break; case 'i': sb.Append("1"); break; ...

How to use PRE tags to preserve formatting, and improve readability of code snippets or tabular data in posts.