.NET Development

Regular expression for Time of day

Neil Thompson — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 00:46:00 GMT

I recently tried to validate a time input on an ASP.NET form and I didn't manage to find a good regular expression on the net for the times I was trying to validate. I call these “natural times” becaues it's the way that most north americans write time. (12 hr clock, with : and whitespace separators). This won't take UTC dates or 24 hr times that I know of but it works well (so far) with the .Tostring(”t”) short time representation of times.

((1+[012]+)|([123456789]{1}))(((:|\s)[0-5]+[0-9]+))?(\s)?((a|A|p|P)(m|M))

It seems longer than necessary (they always seem to), but it's pretty forgiving for the user typing the time.I won't take the time to explain all of the features of the expression but you can use the following links to help test it out.

Regular expressions are one of those things that you run into often enough that you need to know them, but not often enough that you ever really get good at them. So each time we struggle to get back in that mindset and then do some trial and error to get through the expression development. I'm keeping this on my blog mostly for my own sake, so that I have it again when I need it.

But feel free to lift it and give me feedback.

Team System Trials

Neil Thompson — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 16:29:00 GMT

I've recently added Team System as a category on this blog because I *intend* to explore this awesome new IDE pretty thoroughly. Well, at least enough to hit all of the major problems with it and try to find answers.

For those of you looking to get started with Team System, the price is almost certainly a barrier. Also, it is more complicated to setup because of all the plumbing in the background. If you have the MSDN subscription, there is actually a fully installed version of Visual Studio Team Suite (VSTS) on a virtual server. It comes in two pieces and takes a long time to download, but it's still faster than trying to set it up for yourself. For those of you without MSDN, sorry, you're stuck scrounding for trial editions.

At the time of writing, you can get some trial editions at the following locations: (I hope you have a fast internet connection)

Team Foundation Server Trial Edition
Team Suite Trial Edition

I will be setting up the whole package in a VM environment shortly. I'll be making notes on it and sharing it in my next post (unless it kills me)

New Articles

Neil Thompson — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 19:27:00 GMT

I've been posting pretty consistently into the artices BizTalk / .NET/ VS etc. I'm adding one for the UIPAB (User Interface Application Block) from Microsoft. Wow! How can one component be so great and suck so bad at the same time? I'll see what I can do to help you out on that by posting my pain and corresponding medecine.