Usually it’s as simple as doing a search for the class name. Let’s look at a couple of examples. Let’s say that the class name is “button” or “text”; not easy. “button” will find <button ..> and “text” will find <textarea …>, etc. Next I tried using “Match whole word” option in the “Find and Replace” dialog. This helped narrow down some results, but not enough and not for all search terms. Is there anything that’s bulletproof?

Regular expressions, I thought. VS has a Regular expression search option.

Press Ctrl-F to bring up the “Find and Replace” dialog. Click the “Use” checkbox and select “Regular expressions”

What might that look like? I’m not a regex expert by any means, but I read enough of a regex book to figure this out. If you’d like to better understand the regex code, I may later write that explanation. I don’t yet understand the usage of < and >.

Before I get into my process, let’s take a look at the final result so we know where we’re headed. The class we are looking for is “className”.

(class=['|"][a-zA-Z ^"']*<className>)|(\.className *[{|,])|(addClass\(['|"]className['|"]\))

Ok, how did I get to this? I started out with this…

class="className    and    class="[a-zA-Z ^"]*<className>"

The first is to catch the class name at the beginning of the class list; the second is for the end.

Next I wanted to combine these into a single statement and allow single quotes ( ‘ ) as well as double quotes ( “ ).

class=['|"][a-zA-Z ^"']*<className>

That’s better. It finds class names anywhere in the class list. What about in the CSS itself?

\.className *[{|,]

Combined looks like

(class=['|"][a-zA-Z ^"']*<className>)|(\.className *[{|,])

This may be enough for most people doing HTML and CSS. Next is adding references to jQuery dynamically adding the class. Again, allowing for usage of single or double quotes.

addClass\(['|"]className['|"]\)

All together it looks like this

(class=['|"][a-zA-Z ^"']*<className>)|(\.className *[{|,])|(addClass\(['|"]className['|"]\))

I will continue to update this until I get it just right and understand all of the code. As always, feel free to comment, add to what I wrote, or critique the code.

– Ryan D Kyle

• jQuery Homepage – Download jQuery
• jQuery API – Look up jQuery functions
• jQuery Documentation – Awesome
• Google hosted jQuery codebase – for fast client downloads and caching
• Featured jQuery questions on StackOverflow

Ryan D. Kyle | Digital Lifeboat

In the process I ran into an issue of duplicate code in my tests. I found myself copy/pasting test code just to change the method that was called during that particular test. Hmm… that’s not good practice.All the methods had one of two method signatures. I thought to myself: “I’m sure there’s a better way of doing this”. And sure enough, after writing a quick example program of delegates, I discovered my solution. This post takes the form of a refactor rather than writing tests from scratch.

None of these steps should take long to perform since very little new code is being written. This process took me 15 minutes total. I will write example code for all this soon and post it.

Steps: Test, Identify, Declare, Rewrite one, Test, Rewrite, Test.

Step 1: Run all the existing tests you plan to modify and note their result.

Step 2: Identity the method signatures that are commonly being used.

Step 3: Declare delegates using the method signatures from step 1. I made them private fields in the test class.

Step 4: Factor out the test code into a separate method that takes arguments including the delegate.

Step 5: Rewrite the first test using the delegate, above the existing code. Comment out the old code instead of deleting it!

Step 6: Run the test! It’s very important to run that test to make sure that your new test code came to the same conclusion as your old test code. It doesn’t hurt to step through the test code briefly to make sure everything flows smoothly.

Step 7: Rewrite the rest of the tests that are very similar.

Step 8: Run all your rewritten tests. See step 5 for more detail.

Alright! You’ve greatly simplified your unit tests by using delegates. This is likely a niche technique, but quite useful if you have a need. If you have more innovative uses for delegates, write a blog post and then post a link to it in the comments.

Ryan D. Kyle | Concord Mfg LLC

I recently spoke at Portland Code Camp 2010 on May 22nd.

I also spoke at Seattle Code Camp 2010 on April 18th.

Here is the link to my slide deck.

http://cid-6b3c5da3aeceb52c.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/Potential%20of%20Code%20Generation.pptx

Thanks everyone for attending!

Most of my time on Sunday was spent setting up edot’s secondary websites, namely the blog, store, and feedback. The rest of my time was spent networking with the wonderful people at the event.

Presentations were amazing! I enjoyed every one of them. Some were exceptional. Many great applications came out of this weekend and I look forward to using a number of them.

edot’s presentation seemed to go well. We started our presentation at eighty something fans on our Facebook fan page. After the edot presentation we had 106 fans! Because we broke the 100 mark in one day, we gave away a free “I did a thing!” edot t-shirt to one lucky Facebook fan.

The big winner of the night was Digri.

Every Day One Thing won the Socially Responsible Award!

Overall, it was a great weekend. A BIG thanks to Clint and Mark for their work to setup such a wonderful event.

Check it out at www.EveryDayOneThing.com

While you’re there, take a look at the about us page, blog, and store, and please give generous amounts of feedback about everything on the feedback site. We love to hear what you think.

My role on the team changed as the day went on, from a primary developer, to jack-of-all-trades for whatever needed to be done. I did everything from logo design to secondary website building (blog, store, feedback, etc) to product and team evangelism.

By about 6pm on Saturday our team had a functional prototype that we declared to be beta. At that point I started recruiting our first non-team users. By the end of the day we had somewhere between 15 and 20 users from other teams at the event.

Jesse stayed a bit later than everyone else and reworked the iPhone mobile css for the website. Great job Jesse!

The Every Day One Thing group:

The purpose of Startup Weekend is to foster entrepreneurship and new ideas. How it works is people pitch ideas on Friday night and the entire attendance votes on the ideas. After the top ideas are chosen, people choose the team the wish to join. Work starts at 9am on Saturday and ends around 6pm on Sunday (with or without sleep) when presentations are made.

This weekend there are plenty of great ideas. For a full list, check out the homepage for SW Seattle I will share a few of them that got me excited and want to be a part of. The name in (parentheses) is the person who pitched the idea.

• Everyday One Thing (Leah) – Track your impact on the environment when you make positive environmental choices. The idea is that small things add up and through this site/app you can see how.
• Lake Tagger (Cole) – Foursquare for boating. Information about gatherings, events, locations for the boating community.
• FourFriends (Ayush) – Foursquare app.
• SpeakUp (Kumaresh) – students ask anon Qs in classroom. More cool uses.
• Best thing to do (Jeff) – Real-time ratings for events to choose the best event/ happening / place /speaker to attend / visit / listen to. Could be used for conferences / bars / clubs / local events.

There were 40 total pitches tonight and I believe that it was narrowed down to about 12 ideas/teams. I will confirm this info in the morning. The Adobe Conference Center is so far a great space for this event. Apparently the first SW Seattle (this is the 4th) took place in the same location.

Looking forward to tomorrow.

Ryan D. Kyle | Concord Mfg LLC

Windows Phone 7 (WP7) was announced at MIX10 on Monday. The keynote is roughly an hour and a half and most of it is worth watching. I watched the entire keynote on Monday night on my 46 inch LCD TV through my laptop. Quite an enjoyable night.

Monday night I downloaded the free development tools and installed the tools Tuesday morning. By 6pm I had written my first Windows Phone 7 application. BTW, on a 46 inch TV, the phone emulator is 16” x 8”.

Here’s what’s special about Windows Phone 7: The applications you write are Silverlight applications. My barrier to writing Windows Mobile 5 and 6 applications was the need to learn the SDK. With my existing Silverlight, Blend, and Design experience, I’m able to start writing WP7 applications immediately.

If you’re interested in jumping in and learning how to write a WP7 application, check out this blog post with links to Developer Training Kits.

If you’re wondering about my application, I used the first Presidents of the USA as sample data. Apparently all of the presidents had cell phones in the Seattle area… I also designed the buttons in the lower part of the detail page (on the right).

I will be finishing up a large project soon and plan to show off the creator of that software shortly thereafter. I also plan to get back into school, at least part time, working toward an associate degree. Ok, one last thing. I hope to get time soon to write my series on building n-tier applications on the .NET stack.

If you will be attending events in the future in the Seattle area that you think I should attend, just let me know by leaving a comment.

Ryan D. Kyle | Concord Mfg LLC

It was really great seeing lots of people again without the pressures of shipping a product by 7pm. The gathering was a much more relaxed atmosphere where everyone had a story or two to share about their SWRedmond projects or other current business endeavors.

Marc showed up (who did not attend the SWRedmond), but Clint, who ran the event, was not present. What’s the deal?

I learned that stories written in online articles about a product don’t necessary result in sales of the product, simply views of the website.

As for my own startup from SWRedmond, Find Common Ground was not ready to go live for this event. I will be spending some time on it this month. There are a few features that need to be implemented before going live. I will definitely blog about it when that happens.

There are two more Startup Weekend events coming up that I plan to attend: Seattle and Corvallis.

Thanks everyone for a great night and a great event.

P.S. Here are the links to my previous posts about SWRedmond:

http://ryankyle.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/startup-weekend-in-review-friday/

http://ryankyle.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/startup-weekend-redmond-in-review-saturday/

This series might take a while to finish, since there are many layers to the application and I’m writing this entirely in my free time at coffee shops. As I write this, it seems this entire series could become a small book.

Let me make some assumptions about this software application.

1. The application has multiple tiers.
2. The middle tier is written on the .NET framework.
3. The database is SQL based. I’m using SQL Server 2008.

With these assumptions, I will walk through one way of how to write an end to end application that should scale. I say ‘should’ because I have not load tested the completed application. I will include code, and at the end I will provide a full Visual Studio solution that can be downloaded and run.

The next post in the series will be on writing a Data Access Layer.

So check it out! Networking events in the Seattle area .

They have put together a great lineup of speakers. I’m looking forward to hearing from Richard Barton of Zillow, Ksenia Oustiougova of Lilipip Studios, and Dave Schappell of TeachStreet.

Sunday edit:

I took notes at the event and I’d like to share some of them with you. If you’re one of the speakers and like (or don’t like) what I wrote, let me know! I hope I do justice to the speakers with these comments.

Marcelo Calbucci (Event Organizer)

Did a good job of introducing the event and promoting the sponsors. Put an a spectacular event.

Hillel Cooperman – Why Do a Startup?

An unexpected view on why to create a startup. He mostly talked about why he created a startup and how much damn work it takes. A reality for those unaware.

Takeaways: Don’t quit your day job; not even when you think it’s time, because it’s probably not. It takes a lot of work.

Josh Petersen – Pick an Idea

First, have lots of ideas. Collaborating is a necessity. When selecting an idea, keep in mind that we have biases, including towards our own ideas. Solve your own problems. Use a technique called “regret minimization framework” to decide on what project would you later regret not doing. Ask yourself: What if it works? And will I be happy with that outcome?

Colin Wong – Co-Founders and Advisors

Trust is critical. Find cofounders who complement you. Cofounders can provide operations, capital, knowledge, and introductions. Advisors provide knowledge and introductions. Pitfalls to cofounders: delivery (or not) of promises, conflict of personality. Build mechanisms to modify terms, partially to allow for a graceful exit if necessary. Put the terms on paper, even if they feel informal. Set expectations (of time, etc) with advisors. Be open to offering 1-2% equity instead of cash.

Alex Algard – Growing Through Bootstrapping

Cut non essential expenses. Work understaffed. Work with people with complementary skills. Know key financial terms – don’t get ripped off. All decisions inside the startup should be based on the $ it has today. Read “The Bootstrapper’s Bible”. Join local organizations for startups.

T.A. McCann – Funding Through Angels or VCs

T.A. talked mostly about how to go about acquiring outside funding for your startup. Write an operational plan instead of a big business plan. What investors are looking for: 50% people, 25% idea, 25% execution. I listened to T.A. give advice to a pre-entrepreneur during lunch. He really knows what he’s talking about.

Kelly Smith – Naming and Branding

Getting noticed is the hardest part. Be straightforward with intent and purpose. Feel special! Brands start with good products. Brand is difficult to replicate. Make fun stories. Say audacious, yet truthful, statements.

Dave Schappell – Building the Product

Cycle: build team, ship prototype, simplify, test, avoid the giant decider, scrum. PODS- Product Owner Daily Scrum.

Alex Berg – User Experience and Metrics

A small team that’s fast. Design patterns – not just for code. Fail quick, fail cheap. Use prototyping tools. Use personas. Despite the title, Alex shied away from talking about metrics.

Mike Mathieu – Acquiring Customers and Marketing

The worst insults for your startup are: feature or product, not business. You have to have sauce to have secret sauce.Value is defined by the customer. Working capital. Customer scalability. Know the unknowns. Build a revenue engine.

Shelly Farnham – Networking and Partnering

When networking, ask yourself “could this person be a: partner? customer? investor? advisor?” Seek diversity. Freely give away your ideas and knowledge. Go to events with possible customers.

Unfortunately I missed two presentations, which were:

• Ben Huh – Advertcraptizing: Where’s the Silver Lining?
• Alex Castro – Making Money Through SaaS

Ksenia Oustiougova – When It All Fails

I was so into Ksenia’s stories, I forgot to take notes. She talked about how startups can fail. About putting too much into the business and how it impacted her family.

Jonathan Sposato -  Being Acquired

17 secrets: 11 things you can control.

Rich Barton – Closing Keynote

Be revolutionary. Have a big hairy audacious dream (BHAD).

This is what the Microsoft Conference Center looked like at 8:30 in the morning. You can see all the white boards and huge notepads on the right. People started pouring in around 9:30am.

Two people showed up out of nowhere to help out Find Common Ground.

First, a woman named Pam came around to my team’s table (where I was sitting alone) and essentially asked to help out. Pam walked me through all the steps of designing a business plan and brainstorming of revenue generation. Pam was incredibly helpful and after 10 minutes we had the outline of a business plan. Shortly thereafter, she left the building. As far as I know, it could have all been a mirage. It was like magic! Thank You Pam!

The second magical person showed up just a few minutes after Pam left. His name was Bruce. Bruce decided to join my team for the duration of the event. He was not able to make it on Friday and wanted to contribute. As luck would have it, Bruce is a developer (and a good one at that). Thank you Bruce for joining the team! Again, like magic!

As my two other team members showed up, we started working out the details of the application, Find Common Ground. We worked in 1 hour agile iterations.

Speakers

There were several speakers provided by Microsoft, including Scott Guthrie and Adam Kinney. Other speakers included Andy Sack. Thank you all who presented and shared your knowledge.

We stayed programming until about 10pm. Another late night.

Here is my my current list. All of this software is publicly available, although some may be beta or research.

Windows 7 x64

Security

1. Windows Update – Run this over and over again until it says no more updates.

RESTART

2. Avast Home Edition (free anti-virus)

RESTART

3. Web of Trust

4. Spybot Search and Destroy (free anti-spyware)

 Development

5. Sql Server 2008 Developer Edition (from DVD)

6. SQL Server 2008 SP1 – Required on Windows 7

RESTART

7. Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite (from DVD)

8. Visual Studio 2008 SP1

9. Web Platform Installer – A single installer for all of these tools and more.

    A. ASP.NET MVC 1.0

    B. Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio

    C. SQL Server 2008 Express

10. Expression Studio 3 (DVD)

11. Pex – Automated White box Testing for .NET (Microsoft Research Pre-Release)

12. Windows Installer XML (Wix)

Document / Web Apps / More

13. Microsoft Office 2007 (from DVD) -OR- Microsoft Word Viewer

14. Adobe Flash Player

15. Adobe Reader

16. Outlook Connector – Recieve Live Hotmail emails in Outlook.

17. Windows Mobile Device Center – for syncing my Windows Mobile phone.

18. Zune Software - To sync music to my Zune.

Well, last night, I tried an install of Windows 7 with a complex hardware setup. I was building my next development machine along side my old development machine by way of a KVM switch. In addition to adding a KVM switch, I also switched around video cards (PCI Express and AGP) and moved to all DVI video cables from simple blue VGA cables. And I did all of this without testing, just before installing Windows on the new machine.

I learned a couple of lessons from this. It’s a good idea to test the video cards on the desired machine prior to hooking it up to a KVM switch with all new cables. Second, Windows 7 was not able to figure out what was not able to recognize the keyboard through KVM switch at all times (namely in parts of BIOS). The installation of Windows actually failed. I believe this was due to not being able to recognize the keyboard. After installation and subsequent connection to the KVM, Windows 7 immediately recognized the switch and installed all of the necessary drivers. Pretty impressive.

So, long story short, this is how to install Windows 7 if you have a KVM switch:

1. Connect devices directly to computer.
2. Install Windows 7.
3. Shut down the computer.
4. Connect devices through KVM switch.
5. Start computer.

This was an unexpected learning opportunity at 8pm, but good information to know for the future. Hope you learned something too.

Very soon (and I mean it this time), I will post my build order of installing software for building a software development machine on the Microsoft stack.

Pitches

Shortly after arriving at the Microsoft Conference Center, I heard about pitches. People would have an opportunity to get up on stage and pitch their idea for a software solution. I figured that I should have one myself. Why not? So just two hours before pitches started, I began brainstorming ideas. I came up with four ideas, but one looked like it could actually be done in a weekend and be useful.

My Pitch

So I actually went up on stage and pitched my idea in front of 200+ people! The problem I wanted to solve was that finding a meeting place and time is cumbersome and requires a lengthy phone call or series of emails. My solution is a website where each user can input their location and time available and it figures out places and times that work for both parties.

Voting

The audience was allowed to start voting before all of the pitches were done. I put all three of my votes into my idea. I got three other votes total from two other people, bringing my total up to 6 votes. That was enough to make it to #14 in the idea rankings. The top 15 were chosen as the startups of the weekend. Yay!

Team building

This was the most difficult aspect of the startup process and the part I was least successful at. Having one of the lowest ranked ideas chosen, people really wanted to be a part of other teams. I had to fight to get people to even consider joining. In the end, I found a team with a relatable idea that was not chosen and got them to join with me. At this point “Meeting Place” was me and two guys from Romania. One was a backend developer and the other had skills in marketing. I have experience with end to end development, which meant that I became the UI guy.

Rest of the Night

Several people went out to a local venue to continue talking. After that, I spent the rest of the night, without sleep, rebuilding my laptop as a VS 2008 development box. VS2008 installed on the ride over (in the back seat) to Microsoft at 8 in the morning. The team had no business plan and no name.

I’m writing this from Startup Weekend in Redmond, WA. Today is the last day of the event. It has been incredibly exciting. I pitched an idea on the first day, Friday, along with about 35 others. I put all my votes in and a few other people supported it. The idea managed to be in the top 15 (#14), which made it one of the software projects of the weekend.

The idea of Common Ground is to find a mutually acceptable location and time for 2 people to meet. With only a few developers and two days, we are developing a working prototype. We will be presenting later today, in just a few hours. The current url is http://www.findcommonground.biz. Presently parked, it will host our application in the near future. Look for it soon! I have a wonderful team of hard working developers and deep thinkers. I think we are fairing well given that we are one of the smallest teams of the weekend.

I will be posting a series over the next few days documenting my time here at Startup Weekend.

Ryan D. Kyle | Concord Mfg LLC

Monday | Eastside Small Business Meetup (Redmond), Bellevue Job Club Meetup (Bellevue)

Tuesday | Seattle Startups Open Coffee (Seattle)

Wednesday | Eastside Startups Open Coffee (Redmond)

Thursday | NWEN House Party (Seattle)

Friday – Sunday | Startup Weekend (BizSpark at Redmond)

Very soon I will be creating a dedicated page to networking events in the greater Seattle area. Look there for reviews of all of these events and more. Expect a post on Tuesday about Startup Weekend.

Enjoy your weekend! I certainly will, programming.

I picked the following books because they are already on the bookshelves behind my desk. There are hundreds of books on these bookshelves, but these particular books stood out to be because they are about patterns, process, and architecture. My goal will be to read at least one of these book per week.

Here’s my list of books to read in the near future:

• Martin Fowler – “Refactoring”
• Web Services Architecture and Its Specifications: Essentials for Understanding WS
• Application Architecture for .NET: Designing Applications and Services

If I had any books on Silverlight or better books on WPF, I would probably add those to the list. For those that are connected to me on LinkedIn, you can look at my Reading List to see what else I have read.

Reading technical books like these is one of my favorite and fastest ways to learn new technologies. I encourage those who want to learn, to find a book on a topic you are interested in and just start reading.

• Answers to every Seattle tech startups question ever asked – humorous slide show of questions and answers of Seattle tech startups.
• Hard work is essential for startups but how much is too much (part 1) – life balance article.
• Building Startup Sales Teams Tips For Founders – found this through OnStartups blog.
• Your revenue and a harsh fairytale when building a good sales team you kiss a lot of frogs – building a sales team: when and how. Found this from above article.
• Why Your Business Blog Shouldn’t Be On BlogSpot.com – after reading this article, I decided this blog should really be on it’s own domain. I need to do lots more research first, though. I have heard that WordPress is much nicer than BlogSpot when it comes to transitioning.

Let me know what you found interesting, what changed your thinking, and what was boring. I love getting comments! I respond to all.

I’m also interested in how you came across my blog. Comment about that too.

• Seattle Tech Calendar – the most populated online calendar of tech events in Seattle that I know of.
• Startup-Entrepreneurship Events in Seattle – Seattle 2.0’s list.
• nPost event list – nPost’s event list.
• Gary’s Guide – just found this a few seconds ago.
• list by TechFlash – includes STC from above.
• Seattle Tech Startups – Last Wednesday I met Robert and Nathan at STS. Thanks guys! Great event. Monthly event.
• Seattle Startups Open Coffee – I will be there the day this is published (Tuesday).
• Eastside Startups Open Coffee – I will probably be there the day after this is published (Wednesday). If I do go, I will be bringing a guest.
• Seattle Job Social – Heard good things about this networking event. Employers, recruiters, job seekers, etc. I might be there this Thursday.
• Hops & Chops – regular event. Again, heard good things. I will be at one of these soon.
• TechFoam – Eastside version of Hops n Chops. Yet to go.
• Six Hour Startup – Recently heard about it. Yet to go.
• Saturday House – Recently heard about it. Yet to go.
• Startupweekend with MS BizSpark – Design and code a small application in a weekend. $50 entry.

Lots of events, so little time. Also, check out Meetup.com for more local events. I think all of my links are are tech or startup related, but Meetup has great meetings as well. I’m participating in two so far. If you have more events or lists of events, please comment.

By popular demand (about 5 people). Hope to see you at an event.

• nPost
• Seattle 2.0
• On Startups
• Seattle Tech Startups

Another category of links I found useful is local tech events. Many of the above sites have a list of events. In an upcoming post, I will list all of the event sites (Seattle specific) I know of so far. If you know of more sites I should be connected with, post a comment. I will read it and respond.

For those of you that read my first post, I will be posting more than once a week, for a few months, just to get my blog out there. Two or three post per week will be my goal.