Humanized dates in C#

I've been looking for a way to make dates in the Forum sections of the site more user-friendly. Did some googling on how to accomplish this in either SQL or C#, but somehow that came up completely blank.

I did manage to find some scripts for some stuff I never heard about, and 1 javascript file. Just my luck. I seriously dislike javascript. Maxxim from the wrox forum will most likely be chuckling now, since he's been advising me to brush up my skills in Javascript ;)

So here's the translation in C#. Since I'm not sure about the copyright notice, I'll just slap a copy of the original in:


/**
* C# translation: Copyright (c) 2007 Peter Schmitz
* http://entropia-online.blogspot.com
*
* Original Javascript code: Copyright (c) 2007 Blake Householder
* http://www.blake8086.com/
*
* Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
* obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
* files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without
* restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy,
* modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies
* of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
* furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
*
* The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
* included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
*
* THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
* EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
* MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
* NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS
* BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN
* ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN
* CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
* SOFTWARE.
*
*
*/

public string HumanizeDate(DateTime date)
{
DateTime dateNow = DateTime.Now;

// Determine the start of the date's week
DateTime startOfWeek = (date.Date - TimeSpan.FromDays((double)date.DayOfWeek));

// We'll use this variable for monthly comparison
int intMonthCompare = ((date.Year * 12 + date.Month) - (dateNow.Year * 12 + dateNow.Month));

// Do the monthly comparison first, as that's the biggest possible way to group
if (intMonthCompare > 1)
{
return "Beyond next month";
}

if (intMonthCompare < -1)
{
return "Older";
}

if (intMonthCompare == 1)
{
return "Next month";
}

if (intMonthCompare == -1)
{
return "Last month";
}

// Now do the same, but in weeks
TimeSpan ts = (startOfWeek - dateNow.Date);
if (ts.Days > 28)
{
return "Five weeks from now";
}

if (ts.Days > 21)
{
return "Four weeks from now";
}

if (ts.Days > 14)
{
return "Three weeks from now";
}

if (ts.Days > 7)
{
return "Two weeks from now";
}

if (ts.Days > 0)
{
return "Next week";
}

if (ts.Days < -35)
{
return "Five weeks ago";
}

if (ts.Days < -28)
{
return "Four weeks ago";
}

if (ts.Days < -21)
{
return "Three weeks ago";
}

if (ts.Days < -14)
{
return "Two weeks ago";
}

if (ts.Days < -7)
{
return "Last week";
}

// Nothing found so far. Let's see if it's tomorrow, today, or yesterday
ts = date.Date - dateNow.Date;

if (ts.Days == 1)
{
return "Tomorrow";
}

if (ts.Days == 0)
{
return "Today";
}

if (ts.Days == -1)
{
return "Yesterday";
}

// Still nothing? Must be a different day in this week then
return date.DayOfWeek.ToString();
}

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A strange error...

It's been a while since my last post. That is mostly due to trying to actually get the website as a whole working.

We planned on going beta last weekend, but illness and distractions (in the form of LOTRO) put a stop to that.

To top things off, I've been worrying about the forums. Our potential members are used to the vBulletin forums, and the current TBH forums are nothing even remotely like it. Heck, there's no subforums, and not even the ability to send one another private messages. In itself, that shouldn't be too hard to implement, but one also should take into account that just building it is not going to cut it.


The end-user will also demand to actually use the functionality, and vBulletin has all that conveniently located.

So for now, I'm undecided where to go. I downloaded a free forum coded in C# yesterday, courtesy of Frans Bouma, that I will give our beta users to test. I also can try just buying vBulleting, and then writing code to integrate the users from my site into the forum databases (which is mySql). As a third alternative, I can try and code things myself, and see if other TBH users are interested as well in adding functionality.

Time will tell.

In the meantime, I came across a particular error today:

"Error 110 It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level. This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS. C:\...\EntropiaOnline\forumsbck\web.config 56 "

Never seen it before, but what happened is that yesterday I changed some code. In order to ensure I'd not lose anything, before I overwrote the code on the actual site, I grabbed the code I was going to replace, and put it in a local subfolder of my website.

Due to there being a web.config file in it as well, I started getting the error. The solution was to remove the newly created folder from the project-folder. The error is caused by having duplicate web.configs in subfolders, that are not "registered" in Visual Studio (by registered, I mean you did not add the folder itself to the project).

Read more!