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  • The search for a C# DAL code generator that actually works. Part 1 - the problem.
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Textpad

In the financial industry you deal with a lot of flat positional or delimited files. Not many places have been able to make the leap to xml and messaging. So there is not a day goes buy where I have the need for a good text editor. Some of the cool features I find in textpad are

• Portable - runs on a usb key
• Opens large files quickly and does not seam to suffer that much in performance as the files get larger
• Regular expression search and replace. I am always replacing a delimiter for a tab, (\t ), then pasting into excel.
• cut and paste columns is a must have. Just right click on a document and select block select mode then you can cut and paste columns of text between documents. Saves many hours building sample files or using it as a adhoc code gen utility whe you have to take a list of fields from a spec and turn it into some code.
• And for repetitive tasks there is a macro recorder which has saved me many hours of coding.

I have even converted the vi and emacs experts over to the power of textpad. I once worked at a fund manager here in Sydney back in 99 and was amazed that there was about 20 developers slugging it out writing cobol programs in vi on a telnet session. They did not even have xwindows running. So I downloaded textpad and added a button to the toolbar to sync the cobol source up with the unix server. I started to scream through the work and fairly soon 95% of the developers, (except a few die hard vi guys), were coding in textpad. Soon after that they stopped asking vi questions in the job interviews.

http://www.textpad.com/

By the way the vi guys did eventually come around and make the swap.

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  • tubby taylor on The search for a C# DAL code generator that actually works. Part 3: the solution.
  • tubby taylor on The search for a C# DAL code generator that actually works. Part 3: the solution.
  • tubby taylor on The search for a C# DAL code generator that actually works. Part 3: the solution.
  • tubby taylor on The search for a C# DAL code generator that actually works. Part 3: the solution.
  • tubby taylor on The search for a C# DAL code generator that actually works. Part 3: the solution.

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