posted on 6 Jul 2008This post has been brewing for a little while. It stems from an
inconsistency I've seen in
code
posted
here
and
there
over the
web .
Quite specifically this happens often when trying to detect which
Accept-Encoding a browser can accept, so a GZIP or DEFLATE filter can be
used to compress the content. The Offending Code The code in question goes something like this: What's wrong with it? It seems to be pretty standard and widely in use. Well, consider the following… » more
posted on 6 Feb 2008So, I finally signed up to dotnetkicks ,
and submitted my first story - it just happened to be my own " Build Providers: Strongly typed page urls in ASP.NET "
post - which is an interesting take on improving productivity by using a
build provider to create a strongly typed hierarchy of the files in your
Visual Studio project, to avoid mis-typing page locations and improving
intellisense. On the same page It turns out that Kirill Chilingarashvili was trying to solve the same… » more
posted on 3 Feb 2008I'm a fan of strong typing in .NET as you gain compile time validation
of code, Visual Studio Intellisense support, not to mention less mucking
around with type conversion or dealing with (usually inconsistently)
entering strings for page names and configuration setting keys inline.
Visual Studio provides intellisense and some degree of validation for
pages (i.e. urls) within a project when using Design Mode, but using
those urls in code, e.g.. you're out of luck as there isn… » more
posted on 20 Dec 2007Update 2019-11-22: Code for this post has been moved to GitHub with a NuGet Package now available. I like Mads Kristensen , he's often
coming up with useful code snippets which he shares with the community
AND he heads up the BlogEngine.NET
project. He's produced the GuidEncoder helper class, which takes a
standard guid like this: And shortens it to a smaller string like this: Which is a huge help if you happen to be using guids in your URL's. You
can read his article… » more
posted on 19 Dec 2007In my last post on using an smtp pickup directory for ASP.NET development ,
I explained some of the reasons to use a pickup folder instead of an
SMTP server during ASP.NET development. One of the caveats of that
configuration is that you have to enter the full path of the folder you
want to store the application's mail in. This is fine if you're working
solo, or can agree on a common folder/path use amongst your colleagues
but it reduces the instant portability of your… » more
posted on 28 Nov 2007I don't know why this never occurred to me before, but using
as the SmtpDeliveryMethod for sending email
while developing ASP.NET websites is a very good idea. I was recently 'forced' to start using a mail pickup directory for
development when I upgraded to Vista (yes I said upgraded) and found out
that IIS7 doesn't ship with an SMTP Server .
Many blog posts out there recommend using third party software like
SmarterMail ,
Free SMTP Server or other cheap
shareware… » more
posted on 14 May 2007The 'smield', or sm art fi eld , is a useful little user interface
widget written in javascript. It combines the values of other fields on
the page to allow for easier input of repeated content. Based on some
javascript configuration, the smield will insert an unordered list of
label and radio button pairs under the target input field (of the
smield). A few common examples might be: You have a list of customers. Some of those customers might be
known by a their company… » more
posted on 1 May 2007It may seem like a fairly inconsequential idea since we already have the
DateTime and TimeSpan structs. You can take two DateTime instances and
easily calculate a TimeSpan. Once you have the TimeSpan, you can
retrieve the Days property, divide that by 365 for the round about
number of years and you're good to go. But wait, you can display that as an integer, or perhaps as a decimal
for a bit more accuracy, but what if you want a human readable and
understandable string like… » more
posted on 30 Apr 2007Recently, while working on a CMS project, I had the need to update a
part of the UI if certain values of my business object changed.
Basically, the scenario was that if the name of a page changed, the
navigational sitemap should also update to reflect the change. The objects in our business library implement the
INotifyPropertyChanged ,
so it's simple enough to subscribe to a event. But I
only wanted to determine if a select few of the properties changed so
that I could… » more
posted on 28 Apr 2007Although only a new blogger myself, my choice for entry into this realm
wasn't the best considering my background. I chose google's
Blogger service to get started quickly and
just get posting. It worked too, with practically no set up, I could
start writing and the results were automatically published via FTP to my
location of choice. Awesome. But by the second or third post, I found that I was becoming
increasingly frustrated with the editor provided. Being a web developer… » more
posted on 7 Mar 2007With the release of Yahoo!'s shared hosting for YUI (Read their article:
Serving YUI Files from Yahoo! Servers )
I thought I'd release a couple of ASP.NET server controls (and practices) I've
found as a great helper. Firstly, I think YUI (and I say it
yooey :)
is a great library. It uses some tight OO patterns, and is headed by
some of the key instigators in how we currently use javascript as a
first class object oriented language. A couple of years ago I read
Douglas… » more
posted on 28 Feb 2007Following yesterday's TextHelper.Coalesce post, I'd like to share
another useful method for separating cased words i.e. PascalCase or
camelCase. There are a few reasons you might want to do this. It's common place
today to use it in Javascript for dealing to CSS styles and the like.
The inspiration behind this one was to be able to display the members of
an enumeration in a meaningful way to the user e.g. using
Enum.GetNames
to bind possible values to a drop down list… » more
posted on 27 Feb 2007I thought that I should start with something simple, yet useful, to get
the blogging juices flowing. So I'm going to write about some of the
utility and helper classes I deal with on a day to day basis; The
TextHelper. TextHelper is static helper class containing useful methods for
dealing with text and strings. Existing language functionality: The first method, and the one I use the most, is a spin off of the
Transact-SQL COALESCE
function. It adheres to the same… » more
posted on 26 Jan 2007It's been talked about for a long time, although only amongst colleagues
and friends, but I finally have put some time into starting a blog. So
here it is, my first blog post ever, that is if you ignore the blogesque
style personal websites I started out with in the nineties, before
'blogging' came to, erm, fruition? Who am I? I've got to admit, I'm a nerd - I love programming , it's my
profession and a hobby too, and it is maybe the reason this blog hasn't
happened sooner… » more
