XSLT Intellisense in Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition

First, make sure you have the xslt.xsd file in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Xml\Schemas folder. If not, copy it from VS2005.

Next, add a new string value to the registry named 'XsltIntellisense' under 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\XmlEditor' and set the value to 'True'. This will enable some other nice features to the standard tag completion stuff.

Registry info from the Signs on the Sand blog.

XmlSerializer - invalid characters

Using the XmlSerializer class, I got the following error:

'', hexadecimal value 0x0F, is an invalid character.

This was down to some dodgy legacy database data that contained ascii control characters (0 - 31). I wrote this SQL script to remove all ascii chars 0 - 31 from all character columns in a table:

I used this T-SQL Beautifier to make the SQL look nice

Use at your own risk!

DECLARE @table varchar(50)
SET @table = 'MyTable'

SET NOCOUNT ON

DECLARE @column varchar(50)

DECLARE column_cursor CURSOR FOR 
    SELECT    column_name
    FROM    information_schema.columns
    WHERE    table_name = @table
    AND        data_type LIKE '%char'

OPEN column_cursor
FETCH NEXT FROM column_cursor INTO @column

WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0 BEGIN

    DECLARE @charCode int
    SET @charCode = 0
    WHILE @charCode < 32 BEGIN

        DECLARE @sql varchar(max)
        SET @sql = 'UPDATE ' + @table + ' SET ' + @column + 
            ' = REPLACE(' + @column + ', char(' + CAST(@charCode AS varchar) + '), '''')' +
            ' WHERE ' + @column + ' LIKE ''%'' + char(' + CAST(@charCode AS varchar) + ') + ''%'''

        --PRINT @sql

        DECLARE @rowcount int
        EXEC(@sql)
        SET @rowcount = @@rowcount

        IF @rowcount > 0
            PRINT 'char ' + CAST(@charCode AS varchar) + ' replaced ' + 
                CAST(@rowcount AS varchar) + ' times in column ' + @column

        SET @charCode = @charCode + 1
    END
    
    FETCH NEXT FROM column_cursor INTO @column

END

CLOSE column_cursor
DEALLOCATE column_cursor

SET NOCOUNT OFF

C# Google Maps Polyline encoder

I've started the csharp-polyline-encoder project to encode polylines using C# after reading this post. It is just a direct translation of the Java version of the original polyline encoder.

One thing to watch out for - the main class escapes backslashes in the encoding for when the data is output to javascript. If you are using something like Json.NET to write out the encoded polylines, it will escape the backslashes again causing the line to be plotted incorrectly. I'll take out the escaping code at some point...

Populating Umbraco styles dropdown

Make sure you check the "Related stylesheets" under Developer -> Data Types -> Richtext Editor