What? No updates in a year? How can this be!?

Pretty easily actually. I have all the admiration in the world for people who manage to maintain a professional working life and a blog, but unfortunately I'm not one of those people. Far too many distractions, and not enough time in the day - that's my excuse.

I've just had a discussion with a colleague: Is it a ternary operator, or a tertiary one?

Probably the most common example of one of these is :


return a > 5 ? b : c


What we're talking about is an operator that takes three arguments. But again, ternary or tertiary?

Simply, one refers to importance, the other to how many parts there are:

Primary, secondary, tertiary...
Unary, binary, ternary...

Can you guess which is which now?

I jumped onto the .NET bandwagon quite late, and as a consequence have missed out on all the improvements that have been made between versions. It's now on version 4, but I'd never be able to tell you the differences between 3.5 and 4, for example! So (more as a lesson for me than you), I thought I'd do quick run down of a few of the brand spanking new language features that were introduced into the latest version of the framework.

I've already had a ramble explaining the advantage of using scripts (over compiled code) in certain situations, but one of the things that often put people off of them is the fact that the source code is just there for anyone to read, stored in plaintext. What if it contained someone's name, or email address, or (heaven forbid) a password for a database, and fell into the wrong hands!? Obfuscation, whilst not neccessarily the answer, can help...

I've been using quite a lot of VBScript for my work, which we use for general admin tasks such as transferring or downloading files, logging, or interacting with databases. Basically, stuff we need a quick and dirty script for and where creating a program would be too much effort!

VBScript, which is actually a subset of VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), is actually quite handy for stuff like this, and whilst not the most flexible or powerful, it has its advantages.

This is a little something I cooked up during second year at uni. My mother was complaining that her sudoku puzzles were too hard, and that she needed some help...

NickMoores.com will be back online very, very soon...