If you have a GridView that uses BoundFields but does not display line breaks or a lot of spaces quite right here is a way to get around that. This example uses a GridView with one BoundField that uses a DataField of comments. The comments are stored in a database and entered from another page which displays the comments properly in a textbox with all the spaces and line breaks you intended. The trick to get a BoundField to show those items is to take the item and replace the \r\n with a <br />...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. We’ve talked about the Select() and Where() LINQ extension methods before. The Select() method lets you project from the source type to a new type, and the Where() method lets you filter the list of items to the ones you are interested in. Most people know of these...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. So last week we covered the Enumerable.Range() method in the System.Linq namespace, which gives us a handy way to generate a sequence of integers to either use directly, or to feed into a more complex expression. Today we’re going to look at another static method...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Thanks for all of your patience while I’ve been dealing with other matters these last few weeks. I didn’t want to let my post slide a third week, so I decided to say a few words about a small static method in the Enumerable class from System.Linq. Using Range()...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. I’ve covered many valuable methods from System.Linq class library before, so you already know it’s packed with extension-method goodness. Today I’d like to cover two small families I’ve neglected to mention before: Skip() and Take(). While these methods seem so...
This post is pretty specific to an issue I had but still has some ideas that could be applied in other scenarios. The problem I had was updating a few buttons so their Text values could be set in the code behind which had a method to grab the proper value from an external source. This was so that if the application needed to be installed by a customer using a language other than English or needed a different notation for the button's Text they could simply update the database. Most of the time this...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Today I’m giving a brief beginner’s guide to LINQ and Lambdas at the St. Louis .NET User’s Group so I thought I’d post the presentation here as well. I updated the presentation a bit as well as added some notes on the query syntax. Enjoy! The C#/.NET Fundaments:...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Anyone who has done any .NET programming has most likely used the DateTime structure at one time or another in their development. It is a handy structure for storing dates, times, or date-times relating to the local time zone (or, alternatively, UTC). That said,...
Recently I ran into an issue where the paging text in a RadGrid control needed to be customizable. In my case I was specifically looking at the "Page size" and "xx items in yy pages" text. Getting around it for the "Page size" was a snap. If your RadGrid is called rgTest one line would do it: rgTest.PagerStyle.PageSizeL... = "your text here"; The "xx items in yy pages" was a bit trickier, but still handled in one line of code. rgTest.PagerStyle.PagerText... = "{4} {5} things in {1} my pages";...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. LINQ has added so many goodies that can be used to query IEnumerable<T> sequences that it can be easy to lose sight of some of the methods that are unique to each of the collection classes. This week, we will look at the range series of methods in the List<T>...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. First of all, thanks for all the well-wishers for me and my family, things are starting to settle down a bit, so I hope to be able to continue to blog at least on a bi-weekly basis – and I’m hoping to sprinkle in some C++ blog entries as well. But for today, we’re...
C# is a wonderful language for modern programming. While everything in C# has a reason and a place, occasionally there are things that can be confusing for a developer who isn’t aware of what is happening behind the scenes. This is another post in the Little Pitfalls series where I explore these issues; an index of the Little Wonders and Little Pitfalls posts is here. Many times, we create overloaded methods or constructors to allow them to accept different kinds of data. Further, there are times...
Here is an easy way to retrieve the user ID from who ever is logged on to a PC using ASP.Net. This is handy for ASP.Net applications where you want to put a "Welcome joe user" label at the top, auto populate a form with the user's ID or add the user ID to some data you are storing back into a database if you keep track of who edited a record last. The code below assumes you have an aspx page with two labels on it, lblFName and lblLName. It grabs the user ID with HttpContext and then splits the ID...
This post is an example of how to write a WCF Service using a class. The example uses Visual Studio 2010, written in C#, SQL Server 2008 and hosted in IIS. So lets have at it. The table is pretty simple just three columns, an TestID (int), Value1 (varchar(50)) and Value2 (varchar(50)). The stored procedure used will return one record from the table using the TestID as a parameter. Table SQL: CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Table_1]( [TestID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [Value1] [varchar](50) NOT NULL, [Value2]...
C# is a wonderful language for modern programming. While everything in C# has a reason and a place, occasionally there are things that can be confusing for a developer who isn’t aware of what is happening behind the scenes. This is another post in the Little Pitfalls series where I explore these issues; an index of the Little Wonders and Little Pitfalls posts is here. This week will be a short post since I’m travelling to Denver for design meetings, and otherwise spending most of my free time celebrating...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. A while back I talked about some goodies in DateTime, mostly the properties that let you split out just the date or time. This week, I wanted to look at a couple more methods of the DateTime struct that give you additional control over parsing an input string into...
A sample demonstrates the PGP Encryption/Decryption in pipelines. You can download code here. A sample is based on a sample by Brian Jones See original code here The main additions to original code: · Single pipeline component was separated to two Encrypt and Decrypt pipeline components. It simplifies the pipeline configurations. · Configuration parameters are stored in SSO, which, I hope, improves security. · File names for temporary files are regenerated randomly each time. That eliminates errors...
Here is one way to access a control in a GridView right after a user clicks a button to change from view to edit mode. This example shows a TextBox that gets populated with today's date. The GridView is setup like this:<asp:GridView ID="GridView2" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="False" DataKeyNames="TestID" DataSourceID="SqlDataSource1" onrowdatabound="GridView2_R... > <Columns> <asp:TemplateField> <ItemTemplate> <asp:Button ID="btnEdit" runat="server" Text="Edit"...
Everyone has an opinion. When you embark upon your first real job as a programmer you will find this out very quickly. I have found that software developers can be some of the most opinionated and dogmatic people you will ever meet. This certainly is not a bad thing. However, young programmers will need to cultivate the ability to make their own minds up when it comes to how to write software. There are those who start out in a corporate environment where the styles and conventions used have already...
The C#/.NET Fundamentals series is geared towards examining fundamental concepts in using C# (and .NET in general) to produce effective solutions. I wanted to attempt a brief post before the holidays, so I decided to quickly revisit part a post I wrote a few weeks back on The Generic Func Delegates, and in particular, the sidebar on using Func as a generator for unit testing. At the time, I did not give that short sidebar the attention I really wanted, including showing the setup of the unit tests...
I have been looking into InRule, a business rule management system (BRMS) from InRule Technology, recently and thought I would do an intro blog on it. I have worked with business rule engines before and from past experience have developed my own list of priorities on what I feel are the most important aspects. Here they are… Priority 1 - Reduce the cost of change For me, one of the primary reasons for implementing a business rules engine is because you are expecting change and want to reduce the...
In the last installment I discussed delegates, which have been in C# since version 1. The problem with delegates in some cases is that having to create separate, named methods to describe the function to be performed can be a bit unwieldy in cases where the method being called is simple and will not be used other than by the delegate invocation. This brings us to a feature added in C# 2.0 – anonymous methods. Anonymous methods distilled down to their most simple explanation are methods that are defined...
Sitecore has a powerful event pipeline infrastructure that you can leverage to plugin commands into various item creation, change, move, publish etc events. Recently I had to add functionality to Sitecore so that when an items version is created all fields from a target language are copied into the newly created version to ease editing. To do this first we add an event handler in the Web.Config file for the versionAdded event. <event name="item:versionAdded"> <handler type="MyNamespace.MyClass,...
This is another x64 issue where I was really surprised that it does exist. When you compile in VS2010/MsBuild a managed target for which the corresponding serialization assembly is generated you will find that all works until you try to compile for 64 bit. There you will get: "SGEN : error : An attempt was made to load an assembly with an incorrect format: xxxx.dll." Here is the 32 bit SGen is called for the 64 bit target which cannot load a 64 bit assembly. I have no idea why MS did not provide...
The C#/.NET Fundamentals series is geared towards examining fundamental concepts in using C# (and .NET in general) to produce effective solutions. There are times when we are writing a method that returns a sequence of items, that it occasionally becomes necessary in base-class, interface implementation, error, or default conditions to return a sequence of only one or even zero items. There are many ways to do this, of course, which begs the question of which way is best, in terms of readability,...
In my previous post we started a discussion about concepts that are critical to really understanding LINQ. The next couple of posts will build on the same theme by introducing three very closely related (and somewhat evolutionary) pieces of the C# language – delegates, anonymous functions, and lambdas. My original intent had been to introduce them together in single post, but that would be a rather long post. Delegates are a language feature that have been in C# since version 1 of the language and...
I was recently made aware of a couple of people having issues with WCF services (or ASP.NET applications) when using the MVVM Light project template for Silverlight. There is a blog post and a StackOverflow question, so what exactly is happening there? Well in fact it is pretty simple when you know how Silverlight connects to web services. Due to the security model of Silverlight, the application cannot connect to a web site if it is not originating of this very website. In laymen’s terms, it means...
I’ve been putting a lot of thought lately into how LINQ can be introduced to programmers whose C# skills range from being a fairly new programmer conversant in C# to a seasoned programmer who learned just what they needed to convert skills in another language to C# and the .Net platform and I think that a workable approach would be to introduce first some of the concepts and language features that I view as existing to enable LINQ and then tie them together. The first step we’ll take towards learning...
Upgrading a SharePoint farm can reveal hidden issues that may not be causing any visible consequences in your current environment. This was especially the case in a recent customer visit to assist with an upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. During the upgrade we encountered the error “Failed to create field: Field type <field name> is not installed properly” while attempting to upgrade hundreds of SharePoint lists and document libraries. The issue my customer faced related to a...
My friend in Zimbabwe sent me an email a day ago with the following contents suppose i have a table called week_days with only 3 fields i.e. SEQUENCE DAY SALES as follows: SEQUENCE DAY SALES 1 Sun 23 2 Mon 18 3 Tue 30 4 Wed 15 5 Thu 20 6 Fri 08 7 Sat 0 i need a query that converts DAY column to a header row and sort by SEQUENCE as follows: DAY Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat SALES 23 18 30 15 20 08 0 Pliz Help!!!!!!!! I was like’ this looks like a candidate for pivot, but it requires that the result...
Note No poker players where harmed during the making of my poker bot. Origin and idea One of my pet projects was a poker bot. This poker bot worked on Pokerstars. It was able to play poker without human intervention. Unfortunately it lost most of the time. The mouse movement was a issue with this bot. To avoid detection i wanted the mouse to move as humanly as possible. So no straight line and at normal speed. After searching on Google and grabing some ideas i have made some code to round the gathered...
It’s pretty widely accepted (and common sense) that if you’re putting a site out into the wild – such a simple task as minifying CSS and JavaScript files can save a bunch of load time, especially on mobile devices. I’ve been playing about with this today and was quite happily using jsmin as described here until I noticed that in IE 7 and IE 8 the minified CSS didn’t work. The problem seems to be when using a background style, it takes out the space between the image url close bracket and the next...
Threading was never so easy since .NET 4 with the TPL has been released. I know I am a bit late but there are so many nice things which might still be new to many of us. The IEnumerable interface has become famous with the introduction of LINQ but many of us have not yet realized that IEnumerable<T> and T[] or List<T> can be exchanged in many cases but there are cases where it is important to fall back to a pure IEnumerable<T> if you want to support lazy evaluation. .NET 4 has for...
I have had a total of 2 years, 3 months, 2 hours of Windows Azure developer experience and it humiliates me to suicidal extents to confess that I am hardly conversant with the platform’s native Diagnostics technicalities. “I am Tinu Thomas and I am a diagnostic-ignorant Azure Developer.” Oh my god…how could he?? Now that we have that past us <sheepish grin>, I would also like to bask in the afterglow of redemption. Thanks to a much-needed job transition phase, I was able to find enough time...
Today I thought I would just list a little tutorial on how to make an RSS feed reader in C#. The code is very simple… public class RssFeedReader { public IEnumerable<Post> ReadFeed(string url) { var rssFeed = XDocument.Load(url); var posts = from item in rssFeed.Descendants("item") select new Post { Title = item.Element("title").Value, Description = item.Element("description")... PublishedDate = item.Element("pubDate").Value }; return posts; } } public class Post { public string PublishedDate;...
The C#/.NET Fundamentals series is geared towards examining fundamental concepts in using C# (and .NET in general) to produce effective solutions. A couple of posts ago, I discussed the EventHandler<TEventArgs> and EventHandler delegates, and in particular at one point mentioned in a sidebar that you need to watch out for thread-safety in order to safely raise events in a multi-threaded environment. There was an interesting discussion in the comments about different ways that people achieve...
MVC 2 provides a GREAT feature for dealing with enumerable types. Let's say you have an object with a parent/child relationship and you want to allow users to modify multiple children at the same time. You can simply use the following syntax for any indexed enumerables (arrays, generic lists, etc.) and then your values will bind to your enumerable model properties. 1: <% using (Html.BeginForm("TestModelP... "Home"))2: { %>3: <table>4: <tr><th>ID</...
Problem this code does not work Type t = typeof(ESRI.ArcGIS.Framewor... System.Object obj = Activator.CreateInstance(t); but yet this code Type t = Type.GetTypeFromCLSID(typeo... System.Object obj = Activator.CreateInstance(t); Reason In the first variant the runtime tries to cast to AppRefClass . This is not possible. And in the second one, the runtime does not knows anything about AppRefClass. So it leave it as IUnknown. (originally communicated...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. In the last three weeks, we examined the Action family of delegates (and delegates in general), the Func family of delegates, and the EventHandler family of delegates and how they can be used to support generic, reusable algorithms and classes. This week I will...
Silverlight has a method called HtmlPage.PopupWindow() that opens new web browser window with a specific page. You can find this method in the namespace System.Windows.Browser. If you haven’t in your project, add a reference to System.Windows.Browser. The method HtmlPage.PopupWindow() has three parameters: Uri – location to browse String – the target window HtmlPopupWindowOptions – a class with the window options (full list of properties http://msdn.microsoft.com/e...
In this post I show how you can easily add a control to a silverlight grid layout from code behind. First you draw the grid in the xaml. <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Red"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="20"> </RowDefinition> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="300"> </ColumnDefinition> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions... </Grid> Now in the page constructor add the following code. public MainPage()...
Today I was looking for a solution to get finally the JScript/Javascript/jQuery Intellisense Featureworking with my ASP.Net Webform Project to work. I found some good articles: - JScript IntelliSense Overview- JScript IntelliSense: A Reference for the “Reference” Tag- Enabling JavaScript intellisense in VS.NET 2010 to work with SharePoint 2010- Rich IntelliSense for jQueryBUT, all of suggested solutions did not work right with my Master Page based Visual Studio 2010 Solution.Only with physical Javascript...
I recently was going over a great book called “Dependency Injection in .Net” by Mark Seeman. So far I have really enjoyed the book and would recommend anyone looking to get into DI to give it a read. Today I thought I would blog about the first example Mark gives in his book to illustrate some of the benefits that DI provides. The ones he lists are Late binding Extensibility Parallel Development Maintainability Testability To illustrate some of these benefits he gives a HelloWorld example using DI...
In this Issue: Michael Washington, Oliver Fuh, Jeremy Likness, Derik Whittaker, Jesse Liberty, Jeff Blankenburg(-2-), and Michael Crump. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Handling Extremely Large Data Sets in Silverlight" Jeremy Likness WP7: "31 Days of Mango | Day #8: Contacts API" Jeff Blankenburg LightSwitch: "LightSwitch Chat Application Using A Data Source Extension" Michael Washington Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's latest Visual Studio...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. In the last two weeks, we examined the Action family of delegates (and delegates in general), and the Func family of delegates and how they can be used to support generic, reusable algorithms and classes. So this week, we are going to look at a handy pair of delegates...
UPDATED Mar 23rd 2012: Added information about VS 11 UPDATED Mar 21st 2012: Added info and link to VS/TFS 11 tool for getting the Test Attachment Cleaner, now included with the TFS Power Tools UPDATED Mar 17th 2012: Added sql queries for TFS 11 Beta. Changed structure after Adam’s advices. Updated information. UPDATED Jan 9th 2012: Added link to SQL 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 for ghost file fix Background Recently there has been several reports on TFS databases growing too fast and growing too big. Notable...
Introduction Microsoft recently released the Kinect for Windows SDK Beta 2. It contains many enhancements and fixes that can be found here. The only problem with it is that a lot of current demo applications no longer function properly. Today, I’m going to walk you through a typical scenario of upgrading a Kinect application built with Beta 1 to Beta 2. Note: This tutorial covers WPF, but you can use the same techniques for WinForms. 1) Fix the references Let’s start with a fairly popular Kinect...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Back in one of my three original “Little Wonders” Trilogy of posts, I had listed generic delegates as one of the Little Wonders of .NET. Later, someone posted a comment saying said that they would love more detail on the generic delegates and their uses, since...
Today is the big day, the day I attempt to use Ajax in the app… I’ve never done this (well, tell a lie, I’ve done it in a ‘tutorial’ site, but that was a while ago now), so it’s going to be interesting.. OK, basics first, let’s start with the @Ajax.ActionLink Right, first stab: @Ajax.ActionLink("Click to get latest", "LatestEntry", new AjaxOptions { UpdateTargetId = "ajaxEntrant", InsertionMode = InsertionMode.Replace, HttpMethod = "GET" }) As far as I’m aware, I’m asking to get the ‘LatestEntry’...
Today we had an interesting problem with file copying. We wanted to use xcopy to copy a file from one location to another and rename the copied file but do this impersonating another user. Getting the impersonation to work was fairly simple, however we then had the challenge of getting xcopy to work. The problem was that xcopy kept prompting us with a prompt similar to the following… Does file.xxx specify a file name or directory name on the target (F = file, D = directory)? At which point we needed...