While I was writing a stored procedure that did some string manipulation and was debugging some unexpected behavior, I came across a fascinating, infurating, hidden-in-plain-sight "feature" of the LEN function: it returns the length of a string expression excluding trailing blanks. So, for example:

declare @string varchar(10)
set @string = '123456789 '

declare @len int
set @len = len( @string )

print @len
print right( @string, @len - 5 )

returns 9 and '789 ', not the expected 10 and '6789 '. Also, with this code:

declare @string varchar(10)
set @string = '123456789 ...

I've been writing a lot of dynamic SQL that generates other SQL lately. While SQL isn't the best string manipulation language, it's got great native access to database schema information. However, my latest project was resulting in some very long scripts that coudn't be printed with PRINT, because it truncates the output after 8000 bytes, which is 8000 chars or 4000 nchars. One solution to this would have been to execute dynamic SQL to create a stored procedure containing the text, but in this case, I wanted to append multiple scripts together, so I chose to use PRINT as a simple ...

Using is one of those dual use keywords in C#. Everybody uses using at the top of your code file so that you don’t have to type all of those long namespaces. The other use is for taking control over the closing and disposing of objects that support the IDisposable interface. Sometimes a little using goes a long way. One IDisposable class that is a good candidate for using is SqlConnection. Without using code to access a database, you would need to use a try-finally block to make sure you free up the resource.

SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection...

This morning I discovered I could enter code to VS but couldn't backspace over it.  This would require me to code perfectly the first time, and for me that's a non-starter.  It turns out that none of the command buttons work.  The short story on the fix for this oddity is to either disable Auto-Hide or open one of the hidden windows, then click the X to close.  More info at the msdn blog site: Tabs, Backspace, Delete and other commands not working in the editor.

The full text of the error reads: "Commit failed. (details follow): 'pre-commit' hook failed with error output: all was unexpected at this time." I've run into this error when trying to commit files in Subversion (with TortoiseSVN) at least twice. At first, I thought it was caused by some obscure state error. I tried doing a cleanup on the directory, and then on the parent directory, with no success. I tried deleting the entire project and downloading it afresh from the repository. Nothing worked, until my associate Noel asked me what comment I'd used. It was then I realized that ...