Last Friday, Scott Hanselman announced the release of the Rockscroll Visual Studio Add-in. Rockscroll replaces Visual Studio’s code-view scrollbar with a miniature visual representation of your source code. This feature makes navigation in large source files that much easier.

Before Rockscroll, I’d oftentimes make mental notes of the scrollbar’s position while traversing code. That, and when spending a lot of time on a project I’d become so familiar with the source code that I’d begin to recognize most code blocks by shape. Rockscroll provides both of these mnemonic devices, but with less brain work. That is a good thing. Thank you, Rocky Downs. Can I have this in NetBeans? :)

XML is like violence. If it doesn’t solve your problem, you’re not using enough of it.

I got a chuckle out of reading this in a comment on Jeff Atwood’s latest post, XML: The Angle Bracket Tax. The quote is more than fitting for the XML I’ve been working with lately. For the severely twisted, check out the ODF (OpenDocument Format) and OpenXML (Office Open XML) document file formats.

An ASP.NET project of mine recently required the calculation of the start and end date of the current date’s previous month. This was more difficult putting into words than code. It did, however, get me thinking about other common date routines.

public static DateTime FirstDayOfPreviousMonth
{
    get
    {
        return new DateTime(DateTime.Now.Year, DateTime.Now.Month, 1).AddMonths(-1);
    }    
}

public static DateTime LastDayOfPreviousMonth
{
    get
    {
        return new DateTime(DateTime.Now.Year, DateTime.Now.Month, 1).AddDays(-1);
    }
}

Being preemptive, I decided to include a few methods for determining the start and end date of the current date’s fiscal quarter. I started by calculating the current date’s quarter. This was accomplished with just a little division.

public static int CurrentQuarter
{
    get
    {
        return (DateTime.Now.Month + 2) / 3;
    }
}

Finding the start and end dates of the current quarter was harder, but could still be expressed in a single line of code (or two).

public static DateTime FirstDayOfCurrentQuarter
{
    get
    {
        return new DateTime(DateTime.Now.Year, 1 + ((CurrentQuarter - 1) * 3), 1);
    }
}

public static DateTime LastDayOfCurrentQuarter
{
    get
    {
        int lastMonthOfCurrentQuarter = 3 + ((CurrentQuarter - 1) * 3);

        return new DateTime(DateTime.Now.Year, lastMonthOfCurrentQuarter, DateTime.DaysInMonth(DateTime.Now.Year, lastMonthOfCurrentQuarter));
    }
}

I’d like to extend this collection to include other common date routines. Feel free to post your date methods as comments if you’d like to share.

*The methods I’ve created for calculating the current quarter’s start and end dates assume the fiscal year starts on January 1st. This may not be suitable for your needs.