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Selecting all the controls of a specific type, the (built in!) LINQ way

·2 mins
Dotnet Linq Visual Studio

We probably all worked with dynamically generated controls on forms, ASP.NET pages or (user) controls. And I guess we’ve all written for-each statements to loop through the ControlCollection and filter out all the controls of a specific type, right? I wanted to do the same today, so I started by trying to use LINQ for this:
Image missing This, as you can see, generated a compile time error:
Could not find an implementation of the query pattern for source type ‘System.Web.UI.ControlCollection’.  ‘Where’ not found.  Consider explicitly specifying the type of the range variable ‘control’.

‘EntLib Extensions To WSSF’ released to CodePlex

·1 min
Dotnet Enterprise Library Link WSSF

Some of my (Dutch!) Avanade colleagues recently released ‘Entlib Extensions To WSSF’ to CodePlex. Quite a cool addition to the already rich Enterprise Library.

Entlib Extensions to WSSF (Web Service Software Factory) is an extension that enables WSSF to easily integrate with Enterprise Library. This extension allows you to very easily handle cross cutting concerns in WCF services like Validation, Exception Handling and Logging without much programming. The extension accomplishes this by using the policy injection application block of enterprise library.

DropDownList SelectedIndexChanged doesn’t trigger UpdatePanel in SharePoint 2007 SP1

·2 mins
Dotnet Ajax SharePoint

A week ago I had a nice page that was hosted in SharePoint and, among others, contained an updatepanel with a dropdownlist in it. Everything worked, and all was well. Because our testers had found some issues we had delivered two newer versions to our development environment. In the last version they found an issue that wasn’t there before: selecting a different value in the dropdown did not only update the updatepanel, but resulted in a complete postback. My first idea was: that’s an easy one, I’ll check the triggers. Boy, was I wrong…

Getting the ModalPopupExtender to work in SharePoint 2007

·3 mins
Dotnet Ajax Ajax Control Toolkit Error HowTo Link ModalPopupExtender SharePoint WSS

Getting the ModalPopupExtender from the Ajax Control Toolkit to work (decently) in SharePoint was not exactly a walk in the park. With a default SharePoint installation, the modal popup is partly positioned ‘outside’ of the page (you only see the bottom right part of the popup in the top left corner of the browser). Postbacks are not executed or executed poorly and the page gets garbled up. A possible solution for the positioning of the popup is to set the X and Y property of the ModalPopupExtender. Downside is you never know (for sure) if the popup is positioned inside the visible part of the browser because of things like non-maximized browser, different resolutions and so on.
Today we seem to have solved our issues with the ModalPopupExtender in SharePoint. We haven’t tested it in all scenario’s yet, but we’ll get to that. At this point everything looks the way it is supposed to. And it seems to work, too… ;).

I8 converter – Download (sourcecode available)

·2 mins
Dotnet HowTo Link Work

One of my colleagues pointed out the new Fine-grained password policy feature in Windows Server 2008. As you can see in this post at The Sean Blog, some values have to be entered in the I8 format, which isn’t very user friendly. Because of that, he asked me if I could whip up a tool that converts days, hours, minutes and seconds to the I8 format. I quickly put together this small tool for him. It hasn’t been tested extensively, but I think it might be of some use to some of you.
For example, I used longs to store the info. When wanting to calculate huge values, this won’t work of course. This could be improved by using the multipliers divided by for instance 10,000,000 and add the appropriate amount of zeros (7) to the string after calculation, so the numerical value stays a lot smaller. Still, I think it does what it should do at this point. You can find the sourcecode [over here][2], or if you would like te change anything: be my guest. Let me know if you find bugs or add cool features: I would like to know.

(Single-Entry, ) Single-Exit, my 2 cents

·2 mins
Dotnet Link Visual Studio

As a reaction to this article at Peter Ritchie’s MVP Blog, I thought I’d give my two cents on having a single exit point for methods. Here we go…

When writing code, I always create only one exit point except for the occasional throwing of an exception. Most important for me is to always know where your code (really) stops. In case of long and complex methods there’s a chance you’re going to miss a return statement when scanning through a method. That way you could end up studying code not even applicable to the situation, while missing the real point. I do think there is no real reason to hold on to creating methods with a single exit point other than personal favoritism. This feels the same like using curly brackets with an if-statement that is followed by only one statement. I always use curly brackets, but there are lots of developers who don’t.

Now available: PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008

·2 mins
Dotnet Link Visual Studio Visual Studio Extensibility VSX

One of the most annoying things in Visual Studio (to me) was the fact that complete solutions (solution folders, projects, regulare folder)  would be expanded upon opening. And with big solutions, that isn’t too much fun. There are macros available online, but the ones i found were pretty slow. This is only one of the things that the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 solves for you. But there is more. Much more!