Quick and dirty

One of the most interesting comments I ever found in source code is
//QD:

I am familiar with the well known //TODO: style of comment used by Visual Studio, but QD was new to me. As I found later, QD stands for "quick and dirty" and it is basically a low quality piece of code that will cause you a lot of trouble in the future. A quick search throughout the sources revealed plenty of QD comments. It seemed someone made a way of living out of this.
But sometimes programmers gotta do what programmers gotta do and even if I don't like it, I have to be quick and dirty.

Few days ago I was working on Windows mobile and I needed to decode a string that was HTTP posted to a web server. This is best accomplished by HttpUtility.UrlDecode method. Out of luck! HTTPUtility class is not available on .Net Compact Framework.

Here is where .Net Reflector came to help. I simply decompiled UrlDecode method in .Net Framework and copy-pasted the code to mobile project. Luckily, the generated code was short and it doesn't reference a lot of other classes. I was amazed by the quality of the decompiled code. Reflector did a great job!

Yes, it was quick, it was dirty but also it was very effective. As a bonus, the code is better than any code I can possibly produce in this very short time. After all, it was tested by Microsoft QA team!

Blogs and C++ syntax highlighting

This wasn't supposed to be my first post. I wanted to start my blogging existence writing about something else. It proved that being a blogger is not as easy as it should be, especially when trying to post some C++ code. The online editor allows to directly modify the HTML code but this is not the simplest or most enjoyable thing to do. Because I wanted C++ syntax highlighting so hard I decided to create a little tool to automate this task as much as possible and to allow me to focus on the real subject.

The result is cpptohtml.exe that takes a .cpp file as a command line argument and generates a .html file. If no file name is provided as argument, a standard "file open" dialog allows the user to specify the source .cpp file. The tool also accepts /C as command line arguments. When used the source code is taken from clipboard and the HTML result is put also in clipboard.

I found creating a windows shortcut to cpptohtml.exe very useful. This way I can launch the tool by pressing a shortcut key combination (CTR+ALT+T).
I'm gonna use this tool like this:

• open preferred IDE and copy the C++ source code into the clipboard.
  
• launch the tool using the shortcut key combination. The HTML result is in the clipboard.
• paste the formated HTML in the online blog editor.

Download:
You can find here the full source code and the executable. I used Visual C++ and LEX. The archive also contains a .js script to automate the shortcut creation. I am pretty happy with the final result and how C++, LEX and JScript combines to automate a boring repetitive task.

Beautiful the technology is!