blog has moved

I decided to move the blog to wordpress, as they have better support for displaying source-code.

to do this I used en excellent utility at http://blogger2wordpress.appspot.com/

If you were following me (I have no idea if anyone is) you might want to jump to http://andreascode.wordpress.com/

this will be the last post on this blog-system.

Cheers
A

Extension methods

Imho: Extension methods should reside in the same namespace as the class they are extending (even if that namespace belongs to the .Net framework or a 3rd. party vendor.) This is the easiest way to keep functionality discoverable in a large solution.

Shortcut your environment

The last few months I've spent a conscious effort to speed up my development. I have used resharper since version 1.5 (i think...) but have only recently found a lot of nifty stuff in it here's my favourites:

• ctrl + n = goto type (classes)
  
• ctrl + shift + n = goto file (web.config / language files / aspx / ...)
• Capitalized shortform (I write CMSG and r# suggests CustomerManagementServiceGateway (a class in our project) to me

These 3 alone amounts to 80% of my increased efficiency. I literally no longer search through the Solution explorer.

I have also used True Launch Bar for my quick menu for a long time.
having all programs I need categorized for easy access, but I started
creating shortcuts for all the relevant folders on all the relevant machines, and that's sped me up quite a bit also. To see the folder where the web project is deployed in the build environment I hover the folder icon on the toolbar which pops up a list of environments, and drill my way in like that, all the icons are easily recognizable ( i set them myself) so to find any relevant place on any environment takes me < .5 secs.

Oh, did I mention I put a shortcut to the hosts-file in there also for each machine?

I cannot recommend TrueLaunchBar.com enough. takes about an hour to set up the way I want it, but it's totally worth it

Tiny drips of Asp.Net juice

long time no see,

I've been a busy little bee working on a fairly large web site for online gambling (horse races), with some SERIOUSLY cool software/frameworks. Going from the outside in it's been jQuery, EPiServer 5, Asp.Net 3.5, WCF, SOA, NHibernate. And I have learned more from this project than any other. I'm going to publish reference code (for my own later googling pleasure) from this project for quite a while I reckon. I'm starting easy with some webcontrols we have used throughout the solution. using our own has made it possible to enable/utilize jQuery very easily.

to ensure the ID of controls are fixed, we have used this little trick:

public class ClientIdHiddenField: HiddenField

{

public override string ClientID{ get{ return ID; } }

}

This enables us to be certain that the jQuery selectors all work as expected

similarly we have overridden labels/buttons/etc to enable us to give the webcontrols a TextKey property (e.g. TextKey="/app/game/gamewindow/buygame" ) declaratively, the TextKey is then used to lookup the correct text from the Translate function in EPiServer

public class TranslateButton: Button

{

[DefaultValue("")]

public string TextKey{ get; set; }

protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e)

{

if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(TextKey) && string.IsNullOrEmpty(Text))

{

Text = LanguageUtil.TranslateOrBlank(TextKey);

}

base.OnPreRender(e);

}

}

As these are all just Custom Controls (no code-front file) we can specify their namespace in web.config:

[pages validateRequest="false" enableEventValidation="false"]

[controls]

...........

[add tagPrefix="cc" namespace="OurNamespace.CommonUC" assembly="OurAssemblies.Web" /]

[controls]

[pages]

(couldn't get < to work properly in markup here ...)

VS2008 crash on "Choose items" in toolbox

So, today I was trying to include some MS Ajax control toolkit stuff on the web pages I'm building for a client. I right clicked on the toolbox, added a tab and clicked "Choose Items" then VS up and died on me. Lather rinse and repeat.

Obviously something was very wrong here. After some googling I found a solution:
- Start VS from VS command line in safe mode: devenv.exe /safemode
- Click "Choose items" again.
- be sure to click all the tabs in the dialogue
- observe an exception somewhere, and VS will disable the faulty control
- quit the safemode VS.
- restart regular VS and try again

.. VOILA!!

string.Format returns the wrong kind of whitespace

ok, this one is weird:

I write a custom util method to format money strings,

it relies on string.Format("{0:n}", someValue).

I cover it with unit tests to verify it works, and when I run them

I get this little gem:



It turns out that the whitespace returned from string.Format is character 160, whereas the whitespace you normally get is character 32.

So I change my method to replace all char 160 into char 32, and voila! all the tests pass...



what's up with that? I didn't even know there were two chars in .Net that both returned whitespace...

changing the class item template in VS2008

It's been bugging me for too long, every bloody time I go new -> class in VS2008,
I get a class that is not set to public. I usually don't realize until I try to use the class at some later time.

Today I finally snapped and fixed it.

To change the template that is used to create new empty classes in VS2008,
- Go to 
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp\Code\1033
- unzip the class.zip.
- change the class.cs file
- zip it back up and replace the original .zip file.

In yo face VS2008 default settings!!