As many who read my blog may already know (if nothing else because of proximity to me and this state of Utah), that President Gordon B. Hinckley passed away this evening (01/27/2008).  While I usually refrain from anything religious or centered around things non-technical (except for a few notable departures), I thought I would post this information as it's important to me.

Gordon B. Hinckley has been a fixture in my life for years.  For almost half of my years he has held the distinction of being the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the prophet to whom I most related.  As child I recall President Spencer W. Kimball with distinction, and Presidents Benson and Hunter through my adolescent years were instrumental in my upbringing.

President Hinckley was an amazing individual, having served the Lord and His Church his entire life.  I distinctly recall a time when we were at my grandparents house in Las Cruces, NM watching conference.  Pa, my grandfather, expressed his great respect and admiration for President Hinckley (then a counselor to President Benson).  It was then that I began really listening to him and trying to follow his counsel.  I grew to love the man and have great admiration for him.

He shared a unique and brilliant wit in his talks and his wisdom was unsurpassed.  He will be missed.  At the same time, I'm happy for him, as he led a wonderful life and has undoubtedly been reunited with his lovely bride beyond the veil.

We are very excited and happy to welcome Aaron Joseph Zupancic into this wild world!  The youngest of five children, Aaron has four older sisters.  In other words, 5 moms.  I fear for his well-being!

Seriously, though, Aaron was born on January 8th, 2008 at 8:19 AM, weighing in at 8 lbs 10oz.  What a wonderful blessing he is to our home!  Mom and baby are doing great and we expect them home this weekend.

On a selfish note: we can finally get some cool toys around here! (no offense to his sisters .

Tonight we, at the Utah .NET User Group, will be putting on a special event: Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest.

We're very excited to be able to put on such an event; a big thanks goes out to Craig Berntson for working with the folks at Microsoft to acquire the DVDs.  In fact, we were able to acquire 35 such copies to give out to attendees.  So, bring your laptop and a power strip and come join in the festivities, it'll be a great time!

Place: Digital Draw Network - Suite 300 (10897 South River Front Parkway, South Jordan)
Time:  6:00 PM
Date:  Thursday, January 10th, 2008 (tonight)

Alright, there has been a particular issue with the Regular Expression Builder that I've known about since its creation and it's long bugged me.  I haven't, until today, taken the time to address the issue.  Essentially, in order to maintain the root namespace within the regex assembly created, I had created a custom Attribute (AssemblyBaseNamespaceAttribute) that was baked into the target DLL.  This hasn't truly proven to be an issue (at least when running on Windows), though the compiler would warn you when referencing it because the RegexAssemblyBuilder.exe application wasn't to be found.  It was more of an annoyance.  However, as I learned today, it does seem to be an issue when running on Linux/Mono.

Now I had the incentive I needed to fix the problem.

So, today I present a minor (but important) update to the Regular Expression Builder.  Version 2.0.0.1 provides two updates:

• The ability to save a 'Release' version of the assembly.  This version is saved to a \Release folder beneath the project path and is created without the AssemblyBaseNamespaceAttribute so the dependency is no longer there.  Applications should reference this DLL and this is the one you should deploy.  However, when making changes, use the original as it still has the attribute.
• You can now TAB through the pattern field in the regex editor form.  If you want, however, you can still insert TABs (ASCII 9) within your regular expression in the Zoom window via CTRL+TAB.  This is particularly helpful if you want your regular expression to be broken up onto multiple lines for readability and/or to comment it and use the IgnorePatternWhitespace option.

Download it here