Regex Match/Group syntax in .NET

I'm used to doing this in UNIX and there it's a lot easier. But I live in a .NET world.

For handling matching with REGEX you need to use the "Groups" construct of the "Match" object in .NET. An example says it all -- say I'm looking at a string followed (optionally) by an integer:

private Regex regex1 = new Regex (
"([a-zA-Z]+)([0-9]*)",
RegexOptions.IgnoreCase
| RegexOptions.CultureInvariant
| RegexOptions.IgnorePatternWhitespace
| RegexOptions.Compiled
);

This was used for creating a unique name in an Active Directory database -- a name was suggested and, if there's a collision, it takes the name and tacks a number to the end (e.g., "SSMITH" collides; suggest "SSMITH1"). It then checks that one against the Active Directory and if it sense a collision again it breaks it apart and increments the trailing number ... lather, rinse, repeat until a unique name is found. Here's a chunk that indicates the use of REGEX groups in .NET:

// Break current name down into text and integer increment components
Match mc1 = regex1.Match(ProposedSAMAccountName);
ProposedSAMAccountNameText = mc1.Groups[0].Value.ToString();
if (mc1.Groups[2].Length > 0) ProposedSAMAccountIncrement =
Convert.ToInt32(mc1.Groups[2].Value)++;

The first member of the "Groups" collection is the entire matching expression, the second is the first matching group, the third is the second matching group, etc.

This'll be the third time I've wasted an hour re-figuring out something so intuitive in PERL and UNIX. This syntax in .NET just seems awkward, I don't think I'll ever speak it without an accent.

I'll just add this to this cheatsheet because I'm sure this'll come up again.

Simple build versioning in VS2008

Visual Studio 2008 provides a simple build versioning system already built in.

You only need to edit the "AssemblyInfo.cs" file (in the "properties" section of a project) of a project/assembly and reset the entry:

[assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.0.0")]

to

[assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.*")]

It even describes how to do it in the comment section of the file.

Then you can reference the build version with calls to the assembly object thru reflection like this:

System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetName().Version.ToString()

It'll automatically update the build number after each new build. The updated numbers represent some sort of increment from some date in the past (1/1/2000? See the MSDN article for more details). For our purposes we just needed an incrementing number to show the latest version, so this works fine as a quick fix.