I’ve added a tool for styling / formatting text. It works by replacing regular letters of the alphabet with mathematical and other symbols defined in Unicode standard. Downsides are that it does not support non-alphabet letters and is not accessible.

Background

One day I wanted to emphasise part of the text I was posting to a social network, but there was no option for making the text bold or italic. I remembered that I saw people (ab)use Unicode for that and went to search for the web tool. There were some, but with rather poor page layout and filled with ads. So I thought - how hard can it be? After a few minutes, a Stackoverflow answer referred me to the excelent piece of Javascript which does the thing. With that, I had the main building block and after a while my version of the text formatter was done. It has no adds, runs fast and has only styles I needed so far - bold, italic and script. Perhaps underline and strikethru should be added also…

Have you ever wondered why ocasionally you can find some code along the lines of:

try
{
    SomeFancyThing();
} 
catch 
{
    throw;
}

On the face of it, it is a noop. It doesn’t wrap the exception into a new, more likable, one. It doesn’t prevent propagating of the exception. It doesn’t even log the exception. So, it does the same (ok, it also slows the execution down a little bit) as just writing

SomeFancyThing();

However, when lines of code are taken into account, things change dramatically. Instead of one line code, there is eight… 🤔 So, if productivity is measured by contributed LoC one can dramatically improve productivity by using this approach.

More weirdness

Worse, ofcourse, are

try
{
    SomeFancyThing();
} 
catch 
{
    
}

and

try
{
    SomeFancyThing();
} 
catch (Exception e)
{
    throw e;
}

In first example, at least log the exception so you know something bad happened. In second, stack trace is destroyed.

And still more

try
{
    SomeFancyThing();
} 
catch (Exception e)
{
    throw new MyFancyException(e.Message);
}

I have a gut feeling this somehow originates from Java. Or it’s forced by some team agreement on wrapping all exceptions. Then at least make it

throw new MyFancyException(e);

when throwing to preserve the original exception. You’ll thank yourself later.

On Windows.

The problem

Deeply nested directories are sometimes created during the course of software development. Imagine NPM packages, or C# solution with bin\debug directories and dlls named after project name. It quickly adds up. Issue is exacerbated with tendency of (some) development tools to suggest user dir as a home for new stuff. As a result we get a file path like C:\Users\user.name\source\project\MyAwesomeCompany.MyAwesomeProduct\MyAwesomeCompany.MyAwesomeProduct.Repository.Interface\bin\debug\MyAwesomeCompany.MyAwesomeProduct.Repository.Interface.dll

With even more creative names hitting the maximum path length of 260 characters is within reach :)

Deleting such path can prove difficult as doing it from Windows Explorer fails. Sometimes, a directory near the root can be renamed to one character which then helps with the delete. Sometimes, that does not work either.

Robocopy

One approach that consistently works and does not depend on third party utilities is using robocopy:

1. create an empty directory, e.g. c:\temp
2. open command prompt
3. copy and paste the following command, replacing the example directory with the one you want to delete:

robocopy c:\temp C:\Users\user.name\source\project\MyAwesomeCompany.MyAwesomeProduct /mir

Essentially, it tells robocopy to mirror the source directory onto the destination. Since the source is empty, it will delete everything in the destination. And it will do that quickly.

Bonus tip - if there is space somewhere in problem directory path, double quotes can be used:

robocopy c:\temp "C:\Users\user with a space\source\project\MyAwesomeCompany.My Awesome Product" /mir