This is going to be the shortest post on this board, and one of the most embarrassing!

I ‘inherited’ a file full of string values that contained over 10,000 entries. Problem was, they were all lower case. I wasn’t about to sit there and manually capitalize the first letter of each word in the list so I thought, “Hey… just write a quick function in the program that does it for you. It should only take a few lines, right?” Well, not for me.

I started working on a function that read in each line, searched for the first character and capitalized it. But how would you account for some words that should not be capitalized like ‘de’ as in “Cul de Sac” or initials or abbreviations? The more I thought about it, the more complex the function got. I started worrying that I was missing something… Well, I was.

Like I said, it’s kind of embarrassing, but while Googling to try and make sure I covered all my bases, I came across this gem on the MSDN site:

myString = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.TextInfo.ToTitleCase( myString );

I couldn't believe it. It takes care of all automatic capitalization of the first letter of a word or string of words... Ugh! Oh well, I hope at least it saves some developer an hour of headaches!

Just one year ago I upgraded Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008. There were a number of enhancements that are ‘behind the scenes’ and some notable improvements to intellisense and AJAX, which motivated me to finally upgrade. Well, that and support for .NET 3.5. But it seems that just as soon as I upgraded I started receiving information about Visual Studio 2010.

I took some time to research the product (still in Beta) to see if the list of changes was significant enough to warrant me spending another couple hundred bucks on yet another upgrade. Here’s some of the things I found.

Code Editor

The new Code Editor makes code easier to read. You can zoom in on text by pressing CTRL and scrolling with the mouse wheel. Also, when you click a symbol in Visual C# or Visual Basic, all instances of that symbol are automatically highlighted.

Better tools for Web Development

To me, this is reason enough to upgrade. The publishing and FTP portions of Visual Studio past were a far cry from what Dreamweaver offers. Now with enhanced publishing and rebuilding web.config on the fly, it looks like they have finally caught up.

It also includes something completely new:

Visual F#

Visual Studio 2010 includes F#, a new .NET Framework language that supports functional programming and traditional object-oriented and imperative (procedural) programming. F# combines the succinct, expressive, and compositional style of functional programming with the runtime, libraries, interoperability, and object model of .NET. In other words, you get the best of both paradigms.

Right now I don’t have the time or patience to try another development product so an actual ‘hands on’ review is not coming anytime soon. For now, I’ll have to rely on what I’m reading in order to form an opinion. I think I’ll also wait for the product to go through it’s first service pack release before upgrading. Maybe by then they’ll have the kinks worked out.