Tooltips are great additions to any interface and in this article I'm going to show you how to attach a tooltip to control in Silverlight 2.
To start, let's assume that we have a button that we want to add a tooltip to:
[XAML] <UserControl x:Class="KeithRull.Silverlight.CreatingTooltips.Page"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Width="400" Height="300">
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="#FF1E238E">
<Button Content="Hover over me!"
Height="20"
Width="100" Margin="30 40"
VerticalAlignment="Top"
HorizontalAlignment="Left">
</Button>
</Grid>
</UserControl>
[Rendered UI]
In order or us to attach a tooltip to our button we need to create a reference to the TooltipService.Tooltip inside the our button's XAML declaration. We also need to setup the Tooltip.Content to tell the compiler what to show when the user hover's to our button.
[XAML] <UserControl x:Class="KeithRull.Silverlight.CreatingTooltips.Page"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Width="400" Height="300">
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="#FF1E238E">
<Button Content="Hover over me!"
Height="20"
Width="100" Margin="30 40"
VerticalAlignment="Top"
HorizontalAlignment="Left">
<ToolTipService.ToolTip>
<ToolTip>
<ToolTip.Content>
<TextBlock TextWrapping="Wrap">
Hooray! I'm alive!.
</TextBlock>
</ToolTip.Content>
</ToolTip>
</ToolTipService.ToolTip>
</Button>
</Grid>
</UserControl>
[Rendered UI (at runtime)]
The message "Hooray! I'm alive!" appeared when the user hovers over our button. We can also cutomize how our tooltip appears by adding more XAML elements in the Tooltip.Content property.
[XAML] <UserControl x:Class="KeithRull.Silverlight.CreatingTooltips.Page"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Width="400" Height="300">
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="#FF1E238E">
<Button Content="Hover over me!"
Height="20"
Width="100" Margin="30 40"
VerticalAlignment="Top"
HorizontalAlignment="Left">
<ToolTipService.ToolTip>
<ToolTip Background="#FFFFFF" Width="150">
<ToolTip.Content>
<StackPanel>
<Image Source="images/silverlight.png" />
<TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Right">
It rocks like a champ!
</TextBlock>
</StackPanel>
</ToolTip.Content>
</ToolTip>
</ToolTipService.ToolTip>
</Button>
</Grid>
</UserControl>
[Rendered UI (at runtime)]
Another customization that you might want to do is specifying the HorizontalOffset and the VerticalOffset. This allows you to specify where the tooltip will appear in reference to your target control.
I just saw this twitter...
Sweeeeet!
Time to start polishing my ASP.NET MVC skills. I've played with ASP.NET MVC before but never had the chance to use it other than building small samples. I might be rusty but I know I'll have a great companion book in learning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 once Rob, Scott, Scott and Phil's upcoming book comes out.
A user a devpinoy.org posted a question on the forum section asking if there's a way to restrict files from being saved in a directory. I know you can do this via the FileSystemWatcher class so I quickly whipped my Visual Studio 2008 IDE and started building a prototype application to demonstrate the solution.
The first thing that you need to do is to set-up some key details on what we want to watch/monitor private const string ALLOWED_FILE_EXTENSION = ".doc";
private const string DEFAULT_WATCH_FOLDER = @"E:\Test Folder\";
Next, the FileSystemWatcher specify what directory you want to monitor. FileSystemWatcher watcher = new FileSystemWatcher(DEFAULT_WATCH_FOLDER);
After that you need to setup the notification filters on what type of filesystem changes you want to watch; watcher.NotifyFilter = NotifyFilters.LastAccess |
NotifyFilters.LastWrite |
NotifyFilters.FileName |
NotifyFilters.DirectoryName |
NotifyFilters.CreationTime;
And finally, we need to set-up the FileSystem events you want our FileSystem. In this case, we only want to monitor Created and Renamed events. watcher.Created += new FileSystemEventHandler(watcher_Created);
watcher.Renamed += new RenamedEventHandler(watcher_Renamed);
Now, let's start coding our event handlers.
For our event handler, I decided to use one method that would handle both the Created and Rename event. Ideally you want to seperate this to into two different methods because you might want to handle the tow events differently but since all I want to do is to block files\folders that doesn't match my criteria i decided to handle them both using a single method called FileSystemHandler. void watcher_Renamed(object sender, RenamedEventArgs e)
{
FileSystemHandler(e.Name, e.FullPath);
}
void watcher_Created(object sender, FileSystemEventArgs e)
{
FileSystemHandler(e.Name, e.FullPath);
}
Below is the implementation detail for our FileSystemHandler method. void FileSystemHandler(string name, string fullpath)
{
try
{
//read the contents of our directory
DirectoryInfo di = new DirectoryInfo(DEFAULT_WATCH_FOLDER);
//get the filesysteminfo[] objects
FileSystemInfo[] fileSystemInfoArray = di.GetFileSystemInfos();
//there's always going to be one object matching this criteria all the time
FileSystemInfo found = fileSystemInfoArray.Single(f => f.FullName.Equals(fullpath));
//if it finds something
if (found != null)
{
//cast the found object to directoryinfo
DirectoryInfo d = found as DirectoryInfo;
//if it's null it means it's a FileInfo object
if (d == null)
{
//cast found to a fileinfo object
FileInfo f = found as FileInfo;
//delete the file if the extension doesn't match our desired/allowed extension
if (!f.Extension.Equals(ALLOWED_FILE_EXTENSION))
{
f.Delete();
}
}
else
{
//directories are not allowed on this folder too!
d.Delete(true);
}
}
}
catch
{
//let it sleep for 30 seconds
Thread.Sleep(30000);
//it failed so we need to try again recussively
/*
note: it's a good idea to set a retry limit here because if we don't
then the app will retry to infinity but i'll leave that up to you.
*/
FileSystemHandler(name, fullpath);
}
}
What the function above is doing is that it checks to see if the filesystem object that was created on the directory is either a file or a directory. If it is a directory, automatically delete it since we dont want any directory to be saved on our folder. If it is a file we need to check if it's extension matches the allowed file extension. If it matches the allowed extension we let it thru. If it doesn't we call the the Delete method on the FileInfo object to delete the file.
All we need to do now is to tell the watcher to start monitor our folder watcher.EnableRaisingEvents = true;
Setting EnableRaisingEvents to true triggers our watcher to start monitoring the folder. Setting it to false will stop the watcher.
And we are done! Now we have an application that blocks saving or renaming of files in a folder that doesn't match the allowed file extension.
Below is the full listing of the code for the demo project I built for this article: using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.IO;
using System.Threading;
namespace KeithRull.FolderSpy
{
public partial class MainForm : Form
{
private bool IsCurrentlyWatching = false;
private const string ALLOWED_FILE_EXTENSION = ".doc";
private const string DEFAULT_WATCH_FOLDER = @"E:\Test Folder\";
FileSystemWatcher watcher;
public MainForm()
{
InitializeComponent();
}
private void MainForm_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
SetUpWatcher();
}
private void watchButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (!IsCurrentlyWatching)
{
watchButton.Text = "Stop watching";
IsCurrentlyWatching = true;
//start the watcher
watcher.EnableRaisingEvents = true;
}
else
{
watchButton.Text = "Start watching";
IsCurrentlyWatching = false;
//stop the watcher
watcher.EnableRaisingEvents = false;
}
}
void watcher_Renamed(object sender, RenamedEventArgs e)
{
FileSystemHandler(e.Name, e.FullPath);
}
void watcher_Created(object sender, FileSystemEventArgs e)
{
FileSystemHandler(e.Name, e.FullPath);
}
void FileSystemHandler(string name, string fullpath)
{
try
{
//read the contents of our directory
DirectoryInfo di = new DirectoryInfo(DEFAULT_WATCH_FOLDER);
//get the filesysteminfo[] objects
FileSystemInfo[] fileSystemInfoArray = di.GetFileSystemInfos();
//there's always going to be one object matching this criteria all the time
FileSystemInfo found = fileSystemInfoArray.Single(f => f.FullName.Equals(fullpath));
//if it finds something
if (found != null)
{
//cast the found object to directoryinfo
DirectoryInfo d = found as DirectoryInfo;
//if it's null it means it's a FileInfo object
if (d == null)
{
//cast found to a fileinfo object
FileInfo f = found as FileInfo;
//delete the file if the extension doesn't match our desired/allowed extension
if (!f.Extension.Equals(ALLOWED_FILE_EXTENSION))
{
f.Delete();
}
}
else
{
//directories are not allowed on this folder too!
d.Delete(true);
}
}
}
catch
{
//let it sleep for 30 seconds
Thread.Sleep(30000);
//it failed so we need to try again recussively
/*
note: it's a good idea to set a retry limit here because if we don't
then the app will retry to infinity but i'll leave that up to you.
*/
FileSystemHandler(name, fullpath);
}
}
void SetUpWatcher()
{
watcher = new FileSystemWatcher(DEFAULT_WATCH_FOLDER);
watcher.NotifyFilter = NotifyFilters.LastAccess |
NotifyFilters.LastWrite |
NotifyFilters.FileName |
NotifyFilters.DirectoryName |
NotifyFilters.CreationTime;
watcher.Created += new FileSystemEventHandler(watcher_Created);
watcher.Renamed += new RenamedEventHandler(watcher_Renamed);
}
}
}
As always, you can download the code for the complete project here: KeithRull.FolderSpy.zip (40.38 KB)
I had some free time during the holidays and saw at the MIX09 website that they have a contest entitled MIX09 10K Challenge where they ask participant to create a web application that is either using Microsoft® Silverlight™ or Windows Presentation Foundation, as a XAML Browser Application running in Partial Trust or as a ClickOnce application in 10 kilobytes or less. I decided to take a stab at it and this is what I've comed up with
SilverCalendar: A Silverlight Pregancy Calendar
You can see the app live here http://2009.visitmix.com/MIXtify/TenKDisplay.aspx?SubmissionID=0051
Dont forget to vote when you're there :P LOL
My primary motivation when I built the app is the idea of having something that is going to be useful and at the same time fun to build. My wife is currently 34 weeks pregnant and it made me think that a pregnancy calendar would be q great application to do since it relates to me and my current day to day life. I love pregnancy calendars because it gives you a good daily insight on the progress of your baby and what you might expected as you go along in your daily life as a soon to be parent.
The application that i built is using Microsoft Silverlight 2 with a backend WCF web service. You can find the pregnancy calendar web service here. I wasn't able to add any animations to the application because I decided to concentrate in adding functionality to app rather than the eye candy' With that said, I'll be posting the non-10K application this week.
Be sure to comeback on this blog in the coming weeks because I'll be publishing the source code to both project soon together with a 11 part tutorial and screencast walkthrough that i have prepared to show how to to build an application using .NET 3.5, WCF, WPF and Silverlight.
A week ago, I started a contest at DevPinoy.org about writing a Bible application and a few people have asked me if I tried my own challenge. I actually did took the challenge and built my own Bible application. I wasn't able to post it as soon as I wanted to do it due to time constrainst. What I built is a WPF Bible application but still needs some polishing to truely call it a "WPF app".
Now let's begin the tour of the WPF app that I built.
The screen below shows the main interface for the program. The first tab is the browsing tab that allows the user to select a Book and a Chapter they want and displays the contents of your selection on the list below the Comboxes
The bold letters on the upper right side of the list tells you what book and chapter you are currently reading
The second tab is the search tab. This tab has a textbox that allows you to enter your search parameters
It allows you to search by keyword\s
By book and chapter
or by specifying the Book, Chapter and Verse
There are a few more things that I wanted to add this app but wasn't able to do so like building a TreeView similar to CryptoKnight's implementation that allows you to see the Document Map and also a matching word highlighting on the search screen would be a great addition too. Another thing that could be improve is refactoring the code and making the service layer a little bit more generic. I wanted to refactor it a bit more after I finished it but never had a chance to do so. I'll leave it as is for now and hope to update it in the future.
There's a lot more improvements I could think of but I'll leave it for you guys to check and comment on what I could do with this app to improve it. Maybe we could make it an OpenSource application someday.
Anyhow, you can get the source code for this project here. KeithRull.NBible.zip (1.84 MB)
Thanks to everyone who tried the challenge. I promise to do more of these type of contest in the future.
Again, Thank you, God Bless and Mabuhay ka Filipino Developer!
In part 3 of this 5 part series I am going to show you how to make a Master-Detail View in ASP.NET. I you weren't able to see the two previous post you can check them out here:
This post is a continuation of what we started in the two previous post wherein i show you how to consume a webservice ins ASP.NET and present the values returned by the service to the user in a much more meaninful way.
To start off with this post lets look at how the application from our last article look-liked:
As you can see, we have a textbox that accepts a user-input asking for the symbol to lookup in our webservice, a button that triggers that query event and a DetailsView that displays the returned resultset. This works great.
But what if I have a list of symbols that I want the user to see information regarding them? The answer is to show them in a master-detail view so that the user can get a clearer view of the information on each symbol.
To start with this demo lets begin by deleting everything that we have on the page. Yup! we are starting from scratch so that we can get a clearer picture on how we can build a master-detail view screen. Once everything is cleared on the page let's begin by adding a DataList control on our page with a Label control inside its ItemTemplate: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
<title>Keith Rull's Consuming Web Services Sample</title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
<asp:DataList ID="stockDataList"
runat="server">
<ItemTemplate>
<asp:Label ID="quoteLabel"
runat="server"
Text='<%# Container.DataItem %>'>
</asp:Label>
</ItemTemplate>
<SeparatorTemplate>
<br />
</SeparatorTemplate>
</asp:DataList>
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>
The first thing that you would notice on the code above is that we have assigned a value to the Text property of our Label control. This value signifies that we are binding the Container.DataItem value to the Text property. This DataItem will come from the value that we are going to set in the codebehind file for this page which in this case is just going to be a List<string>.
Next, lets go the codebehind file and create the Page_Load event for our page: public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (!IsPostBack)
{
//create a list of stock symbols
List<string> listOfSymbols = new List<string>();
//add some symbols to our list
listOfSymbols.Add("MSFT");
listOfSymbols.Add("GOOG");
listOfSymbols.Add("CSCO");
listOfSymbols.Add("MER");
listOfSymbols.Add("F");
//bind the list<string> to our datalist
stockDataList.DataSource = listOfSymbols;
stockDataList.DataBind();
}
}
}
All i did in the code above is create a list of strings, add some values to it and assign and bind that colletion of strings to our DataList. Running the application now would give us this result:
Nothing really impressive yet. Now let's add the cool part wherein we call a web service and show the information for each stock symbol.
To do that we need to add another DataList inside the ItemTemplate of our first DataList. The second DataList will serve as the list that shows the imformation about the specified execution symbol. We also need to add an event that is triggered each time a ListItem is binded to a data. Below is our modified HTML page: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
<title>Keith Rull's Consuming Web Services Sample</title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
<asp:DataList ID="stockDataList"
runat="server"
OnItemDataBound="stockDataList_ItemDataBound">
<ItemTemplate>
<asp:Label ID="quoteLabel"
runat="server"
Text='<%# Container.DataItem %>'>
</asp:Label>
<asp:DataList ID="stockInformationDataList"
runat="server">
<ItemTemplate>
<table cellpadding="1"
cellspacing="1"
border="0"
width="600px">
<tr>
<td><b>Last:</b> <%# Eval("Last") %></td>
<td><b>Date:</b> <%# Eval("Date") %></td>
<td><b>Time:</b> <%# Eval("Time") %></td>
<td><b>Change:</b> <%# Eval("Change") %></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><b>Open:</b> <%# Eval("Open") %></td>
<td><b>Low:</b> <%# Eval("Low") %></td>
<td><b>High:</b> <%# Eval("High") %></td>
<td><b>Volume:</b> <%# Eval("Volume") %></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><b>MktCap:</b> <%# Eval("MktCap") %></td>
<td><b>PrvClose:</b> <%# Eval("PreviousClose") %></td>
<td><b>PerChange:</b> <%# Eval("PercentageChange") %></td>
<td><b>AnnRange:</b> <%# Eval("AnnRange") %></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><b>Earns:</b> <%# Eval("Earns") %></td>
<td><b>P-E:</b> <%# Eval("P-E") %></td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
</table>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:DataList>
</ItemTemplate>
<SeparatorTemplate>
<br />
</SeparatorTemplate>
</asp:DataList>
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>
I modified the ItemTemplate of our second DataList () and added an html table to hold the values that the web service returns. This way the view that we are presenting is much more readable.
Next stop is looking at the code behind where all these magic is going to be wired. All the work for the detail view will happen on the stockDataList_ItemDataBound event and no further modification to our Page_Load event is needed. Let me show you the code for that event before I start explaining every bits and pieces of that code: protected void stockDataList_ItemDataBound(object sender, DataListItemEventArgs e)
{
//check whether the current listitem is an acceptable ListItemType
if (e.Item.ItemType == ListItemType.Item
|| e.Item.ItemType == ListItemType.AlternatingItem)
{
//get the binded symbol
string symbol = e.Item.DataItem.ToString();
//find the datalist in our itemtemplate
Control foundControl = e.Item.FindControl("stockInformationDataList");
//cast the control to a DataList
DataList stockInformationDataList = (DataList)foundControl;
//get the stock information for the specified symbol
DataSet stockInformationDataSet = StockQuoteHelper.GetStockQuoteDataSet(symbol);
//bind the dataset to our datalist
stockInformationDataList.DataSource = stockInformationDataSet;
stockInformationDataList.DataBind();
}
}
What we are doing on this blog of code is we are checking if the ItemType of the current item being binded-to is either a ListItemType.Item or ListItemType.AlternatingItem. If it passes this criteria we then read the DataItem that was binded to this ListItem which in this case is our executionSymbol. The next step is to find our stockInformationDataList control and assign the stockInformationDataSet to it. The stockInformationDataSet contains the values that is retrieved from our stock web service by passing the exection symbol to our StockQuoteHelper.GetStockQuoteDataSet method.
Running our completed application will result to this screen:
And that's it! We've accomplished a master-detail view in ASP.NET. Pretty easy right? I hope you learned something from this tutorial. Next up we'll update this project and implement some Asynchronous Web Service calls via ASP.NET AJAX and show you some fun ways to present a master-detail view in a much more interesting way.
As always, source code is available for download here: KeithRull.ConsumingWebServices.Part3.zip (6.9 KB)
As a side note, many thanks to John A. Miller from Trofholz Technologies, Inc. for reminding me about this series. I totally forgot about it already after being assigned to a large project the past few months. Thanks John!
Whew! It's been a long time since the last time that we had a cool contest here at DevPinoy and I think it's about time to start giving away cool stuff those developers who are willing to take the challenge. This time around I've decided to make the contest a little bit more interesting than the usual...
Ok, enough with the teaser and on with the contest!
Our challenge this months is to build a Windows-based Bible application in C#, VB.NET or Java. The idea is to build an application that reads from a Bible database and displays testaments, books, chapters and verses based on these simple requirements:
- The user should be able to search for books base on a selected Testament (Old and New).
- The user should be able to see the contents of each Book
- The user should be able to search the contents of the Bible based on different search criterias like "Luke", "Genesis 1", "John 3:16", "love", "Abraham" and the application should be able to return the matching results.
- The user should be able to jump from one book to another.
- The user should be able to jump from one chapter to another.
That is all that is required for the app and it's up to you to add additional functionalities if you like. You can find the database for this challenge here: http://devpinoy.org/media/p/30310.aspx
Simple right? Here's the caveat! You are not allowed to use any third-party library in your solution (Yup! No NHibernate or Hibernate for you buddy!). Everything should be straight up what your language of choice supports. The only acceptable third-party library is a testing and mocking framework as part of your test harness but this is not required.
So what's the prize? Glad you asked! We are going to chose 2 winners for this contest and they will be able to chose 1 of these lovely prizes courtesy of JetBrains: IntelliJ IDEA, ReSharper, Team City(one Build Agent), dotTrace and JetBrain's forthcoming Ruby IDE(they don't have a name for it yet).
So who is entitled to join this contest? This contest is open to all Filipino developers who are willing to take the challenge regardless of location and ofcourse you should be a member of the DevPinoy website.
So how can I participate? All you need to do is finish the application and send it to keith.rull@gmail.com together with the source code before October 26, 2008 PST. Please include "DevPinoy October 2008 Code Challenge" on the subject line of your email when submitting your code. Please also include a screenshot of your application and your fullname in your submission email.. All submissions would be posted on October 27, 2008 PST in my devpinoy blog so the community can view your work. The announcement of winners will take place on October 29, 2008 PST.
Ready for the challenge? Stop reading, start typing and send your solution as quick as you can!
In part 1 of this series i showed you how to specify the voice, gender, rate and volume of the our SpeechSynthesizer object. This time i'm going to show you how to use predefined Voices in your machine and utilize it as hints to your SpeechSynthesizer object.
The first thing that I did to our sample project is change the UI since we would not need the Gender and Age combo box in our form. The result is a UI like this:
Next, we need to figure out a way to extract the names of the installed voices in our machine. To this we need to use the SpeechSynthesizer.GetInstalledVoices() method. This method, when invoked returns a readonly collection of TTS(text-to-speech) voices also known as InstalledVoice objects that are readily available in your machine. The InstalledVoice object contains a property called VoiceInfo which represents the voice information about that TTS voice. To begin our project we need to get all the VoiceInfo objects on each and every InstalledVoice. Below is a code snippet showing how we can accomplish this task: //create a new speechsynthesizer object
static SpeechSynthesizer speechSynth = new SpeechSynthesizer(); /// <summary>
/// a method that returns all the currently installed voice
/// info objects in the machine
/// </summary>
/// <returns>a list of VoiceInfo objects</returns>
private static List<VoiceInfo> GetInstalledVoices()
{
//get the current cultureinfo
CultureInfo currentCulture = CultureInfo.CurrentCulture;
//use linq to select each voiceinfo object from the intalledvoices collection
var listOfVoiceInfo = from voice
in speechSynth.GetInstalledVoices(currentCulture)
select voice.VoiceInfo;
//return the selected voiceinfo objects
return listOfVoiceInfo.ToList<VoiceInfo>();
}
Next, we need to bind the resulting list to our voiceComboBox. private void MainForm_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
BindData();
}
/// <summary>
/// Bind the voices to our combobox
/// </summary>
private void BindData()
{
//get the installed voices
List<VoiceInfo> listOfVoices = GetInstalledVoices();
//bind the list to our combobox
voicesComboBox.DataSource = listOfVoices;
voicesComboBox.DisplayMember = "Name";
}
And finally we need to create the logic inside our button click event to initiate our SpeechSynthesizer private void speakUpButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
//get the values specified in our form
string messageToSay = wordsTextBox.Text;
int selectedVolume = volumeTrackBar.Value;
int selectedVoiceRate = voiceRateTrackBar.Value;
//get the selected voice info
VoiceInfo vi = voicesComboBox.SelectedItem as VoiceInfo;
//specify the volume for our SpeechSynthesizer object
speechSynth.Volume = selectedVolume;
//specify the rate for our SpeechSynthesizer object
speechSynth.Rate = selectedVoiceRate;
//specify the voice info specifying the voice to use
speechSynth.SelectVoice(vi.Name);
//say the message
speechSynth.SpeakAsync(messageToSay);
}
And we are done ;) Running the application would show as all the installed TTS voice in our machine. One thing to note is that this list is machine dependent and different machines might contain different voices.
Clicking the "Speak!" button should echo our selected voice.
Next time I'll show you how to export the resulting speech to a wave file. HTH
One of the cool things that came out with .NET 3.x is the addition of System.Speech library. This library is a collection of classes that enables you to do alot of speech related things like speech recognition and text-to-speech conversion. It's a handful to talk about so i suggest you read up MSDN to learn more about this library[1][2][3].
The app I'm going to show you today is a basic application that shows how to utilize the SpeechSynthesizer class that is located inside the System.Speech.Synthesis namespace.
To start this demo lets add a reference to the System.Speech namespace to our project. You can do this by doing a right-click on References > Add Reference and selecting System.Speech from the list.
Once added we can now beging utilizing this library by adding a using directive pointing to the specific System.Speech namepace that we want to utilize. For this demo we will use System.Speech.Synthesis
Next, we need to create a new SpeechSynthesizer object. SpeechSynthesizer is class that enables you to convert text-to-speech. The class also has several properties and methods that you can use customize the voice information on your speech synthesizer.
Next is the fun part which is making our application say some words. The cool thing about SpeechSynthersizer is that all you need to do to make your application speak is call the SpeechSynthesizer.Speak() method and your done ;)
Run our application and once started you should here the words "Hello, World" spoken by your machine. Pretty cool huh?!
What we did was a simple demonstration on how to make our apps speak with a few lines using SpeechSynthesizer. But what about customizing the voice? Fear not! I created a sample application that will show you how you can customize the synthesizer by specifying the rate, volume, gender and age of the emitted sound. Below is the screenshot showing the UI for the application
And here is the code snippet with comments detailing how to customize our SpeechSynthesizer object. using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.Speech.Synthesis;
namespace KeithRull.TalkToMeGoose
{
public partial class MainForm : Form
{
public MainForm()
{
InitializeComponent();
}
//create a new speechsynthesizer object
SpeechSynthesizer speechSynth = new SpeechSynthesizer();
private void speakUpButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
//get the values specified in our form
string messageToSay = wordsTextBox.Text;
int selectedVolume = volumeTrackBar.Value;
int selectedVoiceRate = voiceRateTrackBar.Value;
string selectedGender = genderComboBox.SelectedItem.ToString();
string selectedAge = ageComboBox.SelectedValue.ToString();
Type voiceGenderType = typeof(VoiceGender);
Type voiceAgeType = typeof(VoiceAge);
//convert the selectedGender value to a VoiceGender
VoiceGender gender = (VoiceGender)Enum.Parse(voiceGenderType, selectedGender);
//convert the selectedAge value to a VoiceAge
VoiceAge age = (VoiceAge)Enum.Parse(voiceAgeType, selectedAge);
//specify the volume for our SpeechSynthesizer object
speechSynth.Volume = selectedVolume;
//specify the rate for our SpeechSynthesizer object
speechSynth.Rate = selectedVoiceRate;
//specify the voice info by using hints regarding the gender and age
speechSynth.SelectVoiceByHints(gender, age);
//say the message
speechSynth.SpeakAsync(messageToSay);
}
private void MainForm_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
speechSynth.Speak("Hello, World!");
}
/// <summary>
/// Bind the enums to our combobox
/// </summary>
private void BindData()
{
BindAgeToComboBox();
BindGenderToComboBox();
}
/// <summary>
/// bind the VoiceGender enum to our combobox
/// </summary>
private void BindGenderToComboBox()
{
//convert the enumeration to a string array
Array voiceGenderArray = Enum.GetValues(typeof(VoiceGender));
//bind the array to the datasource of our combobox
genderComboBox.DataSource = voiceGenderArray;
}
/// <summary>
/// Bind the VoiceAge enum to our combobox
/// </summary>
private void BindAgeToComboBox()
{
//convert the enumeration to a string array
Array voiceAgeArray = Enum.GetValues(typeof(VoiceAge));
//bind the array to the datasource of our combobox
ageComboBox.DataSource = voiceAgeArray;
}
}
};
As always, you can download the source code for this project here: KeithRull.TalkToMeGoose1.zip (27.46 KB)
I hope I was able to show you how simple it is to add text to speech functionality to your .NET application. Next time I'll show you how to use predefined voices. Till next time ;)
Below is a code snippet that allows you to determine what groups a Windows user is part of.
[C#] using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Security.Principal;
using System.Text;
namespace KeithRull.ActiveDirectory.IdentifyingUserGroups
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
//get the WindowsIdentity of the current user
WindowsIdentity currentWindowsIdentity = WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent();
//retrieve the groups that the user belongs to
IdentityReferenceCollection currentWindowsIdentityGroups = currentWindowsIdentity.Groups;
//iterate thru each group
foreach (IdentityReference identity in currentWindowsIdentityGroups)
{
//translate the identity into an NTAccount identity
IdentityReference ntAccountIdentityReference = identity.Translate(typeof(NTAccount));
//get the value
string groupName = ntAccountIdentityReference.ToString();
//print to console
Console.WriteLine(groupName);
}
//pause
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}
[VB.NET] Imports System
Imports System.Collections.Generic
Imports System.Linq
Imports System.Security.Principal
Imports System.Text
Namespace KeithRull.ActiveDirectory.IdentifyingUserGroups
Class Program
Private Shared Sub Main(ByVal args As String())
'get the WindowsIdentity of the current user
Dim currentWindowsIdentity As WindowsIdentity = WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent()
'retrieve the groups that the user belongs to
Dim currentWindowsIdentityGroups As IdentityReferenceCollection = currentWindowsIdentity.Groups
'iterate thru each group
For Each identity As IdentityReference In currentWindowsIdentityGroups
'translate the identity into an NTAccount identity
Dim ntAccountIdentityReference As IdentityReference = identity.Translate(GetType(NTAccount))
'get the value
Dim groupName As String = ntAccountIdentityReference.ToString()
'print to console
Console.WriteLine(groupName)
Next
'pause
Console.ReadLine()
End Sub
End Class
End Namespace
HTH
Speaking of free books... Below are the list of free ebooks that I recommend reading/downloading for this month. I personally love Karl Seguin's book and giving it 5 out 5 stars is actually an understatement if you ask me. :)
Karl Seguin's Foundation Of Programming: Building Better Software rocks so much I recommended it to everyone I know. This 79 page book is pack with a hearty bowl of software development knowledge that would teach you about the principles of development that you should have known way before you started coding that nightmarish system.
Red Gate's Dissecting SQL Server Execution Plan is a must read for anyone who deals with data on a daily basis. It talks about how to optimize your querries and understand whats causing your querries to sleep on you while being executed.
InfoQ's Domain Driven Design Quickly is a quickly-readable summary and introduction to the fundamentals of DDD that tries to summarizes Eric Evans' book as well as Jimmy Nilsson's Applying Domain Driven Design and various other sources. The book gives you hints and tips about DDD as well as ideas on how to start DDD in your own projects.
Minh T. Nguyen's Visual Studio.NET Tips & Tricks is a must read for all developers who use Visual Studio. Enuff said!
So what are you waiting for? Download and read 'em now!
Ever heard of ColorTranslator? It's a really cool class that you can use to convert colors in .NET. One of the things that it can do is that enables you to convert HTML colors to Windows colors and vice versa. One particular scenario wherein you might want to use this class is when you want to use HTML colors on your WinForm.
Below are examples on how to use this calls: using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Windows.Forms;
namespace ColorTranslatorTest
{
public partial class Form1 : Form
{
public Form1()
{
InitializeComponent();
}
private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
//convert a system.drawing.color to html
Color c1 = Color.AntiqueWhite;
button1.BackColor = c1;
button1.Text = ColorTranslator.ToHtml(c1);
//convert an html color to a gdi+ color
string htmlColor = "#FFAD55";
Color c2 = ColorTranslator.FromHtml(htmlColor);
button2.BackColor = c2;
button2.Text = ColorTranslator.ToHtml(c2);
//convert a win32 color to gdi+ color
int colorHexadecimalValue = 0xA267;
Color c3 = ColorTranslator.FromWin32(colorHexadecimalValue);
button3.BackColor = c3;
button3.Text = ColorTranslator.ToWin32(c3).ToString("X");
}
}
}
HTH
Ever thought of how to capitalize the first letter of every word in a string? Here's how:
[C#] using System;
using System.Globalization;
namespace KeithRull.CapitalizingLetters
{
internal class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
string textToTransform = "keith, you need to post more blogs!";
Console.WriteLine("Original text: " + textToTransform);
//capitalizing the first letter of our text using the current culture
Console.WriteLine("Capitalize using the current culture: "
+ CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.TextInfo.ToTitleCase(textToTransform));
//capitalizing the first letter of our text using a defined culture
CultureInfo newCultureInfo = new CultureInfo("zh-Hans", false);
TextInfo textInfo = newCultureInfo.TextInfo;
Console.WriteLine("Capitalize using a specified culture: " + textInfo.ToTitleCase(textToTransform));
Console.Read();
}
}
}
[VB.NET] Imports System
Imports System.Globalization
Namespace KeithRull.CapitalizingLetters
Friend Class Program
Shared Sub Main(ByVal args() As String)
Dim textToTransform As String = "keith, you need to post more blogs!"
Console.WriteLine("Original text: " + textToTransform)
'capitalizing the first letter of our text using the current culture
Console.WriteLine("Capitalize using the current culture: "
Dim CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.TextInfo.ToTitleCase(textToTransform)) As +
'capitalizing the first letter of our text using a defined culture
Dim NewCultureInfo As CultureInfo = New CultureInfo("zh-Hans",False)
Dim textInfo As TextInfo = NewCultureInfo.TextInfo
Console.WriteLine("Capitalize using a specified culture: " + textInfo.ToTitleCase(textToTransform))
Console.Read()
End Sub
End Class
End Namespace
HTH
Sorry for not being able to post anything interesting the past few months. Anyway, I saw this old thread at DevPinoy.org the other day and I realized that nobody has posted a complete sample solution that would solve and show how to accomplish dynamic input rows in a GridView. I was thinking of replying to it a few months back but i guess work caught up at me and I wasn't able to do so. I found some free time last week and decided to build an app to demonstrate how to solve this question.
Ok, lets start by analyzing the question:
Hi guys,
I have a problem here. How can i create a dynamic row in gridview the row will defend from the user input. For example the user enter a 4 then the gridview will generate 4 rows. Please site me an example.
Thanks,
D_Conqueror
From what I understood the user wants to be able to create dynamically rows of data in the GridView depending on the number he enters on a Textbox. We can accomplish this by creating a datasource with the same number of rows as the user specified and binding it to our GridView.
To demonstrate how to solve this problem i decided to create this sample.
To start off with our tiny project we need to create a page that would ask the user for the number of rows he wan'ts to display on the GridView. The page will contain a TextBox for input and a LinkButton that we will use for submitting the value to a seperate page. Below is the HTML code for our first page (Default.aspx):
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
<title>Dynamic GridView Input Rows</title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div style="width:330px;">
Number of rows to create:
<asp:TextBox ID="numberOfRowsTextBox" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>
<div style="text-align:right;">
<asp:LinkButton ID="submitLinkButton" runat="server"
onclick="submitLinkButton_Click">Submit</asp:LinkButton>
</div>
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>
and below is the code listing for Default.aspx using System;
public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
protected void submitLinkButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Response.Redirect(String.Format(
"DynamicGridViewPage.aspx?rows={0}"
, numberOfRowsTextBox.Text));
}
}
As you can see, all we are doing is passing the value of our TextBox as a query string parameter to our second page. The true juice of our solution is on the next page. But before we go into detail to that we need to setup first what type of values needs to be shown on the page. For this example i've decided to display a simple Person class that has for fields. An ID, a Firstname, a Lastname, and a boolean field called IsChristian. Below is the code for our Person class: using System;
/// <summary>
/// Summary description for Person
/// </summary>
public class Person : IPerson
{
private int _ID;
private string _firstname;
private string _lastname;
private bool _isChristian;
public int ID
{
get { return _ID; }
set { _ID = value; }
}
public string Firstname
{
get { return _firstname; }
set { _firstname = value; }
}
public string Lastname
{
get { return _lastname; }
set { _lastname = value; }
}
public bool IsChristian
{
get { return _isChristian; }
set { _isChristian = value; }
}
public Person() {}
public override string ToString()
{
string returnValue = @"ID: " + this.ID.ToString() + "<br />"
+ "Firstname: " + this.Firstname + "<br />"
+ "Lastname: " + this.Lastname + "<br />"
+ "Is Christian: " + this.IsChristian.ToString();
return returnValue;
}
}
I also created a class Persons that is a generic list of type Person. In that class I created a contructor that accepts a integer value that we will use to create the dummy list of person. The code for our Persons class is listed below: using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
/// <summary>
/// Summary description for Persons
/// </summary>
public class Persons: List<Person>
{
public Persons() {}
public Persons(int rowCount) {
this.Clear();
for (int i = 1; i <= rowCount; i++)
{
Person p = new Person();
p.ID = i;
this.Add(p);
}
}
}
Now on our second page, DynamicGridViewPage.aspx, I decided to place 4 controls. A GridView that would contain our input boxes, a label to display messages, a button to submit the fields and another GridView to show the submit values. I've added these few quirks on the page to demonstrate how you can retrieve entered values in a GridView. Below is the HTML listing for the DynamicGridViewPage.aspx. <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
<title>Untitled Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
<asp:GridView ID="dynamicGridView" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="False"
DataKeyNames="ID">
<Columns>
<asp:TemplateField>
<ItemTemplate>
<asp:Label ID="idLabel"
runat="server"
Text='<%# Bind("ID") %>'>
</asp:Label>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateField>
<asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Firstname">
<ItemTemplate>
<asp:TextBox ID="firstnameTextBox"
runat="server">
</asp:TextBox>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateField>
<asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Lastname">
<ItemTemplate>
<asp:TextBox ID="lastnameTextBox"
runat="server">
</asp:TextBox>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateField>
<asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Christian">
<ItemTemplate>
<asp:CheckBox ID="isChristianCheckBox"
runat="server"
Enabled="true" />
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateField>
</Columns>
</asp:GridView>
<asp:LinkButton ID="submitLinkButton" runat="server"
onclick="submitLinkButton_Click">Submit</asp:LinkButton>
<br />
<br />
<asp:Label ID="messageLabel" runat="server"></asp:Label>
<asp:GridView ID="submitedRecordsGridView"
runat="server">
<EmptyDataTemplate>
<b>No record submitted!</b>
</EmptyDataTemplate>
</asp:GridView>
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>
One of the things that you would quickly realize on our page is that the only thing I'm binding to our GridView is the ID property. The reason is because we don't really need to bind all the fields to our GridView because we are just creating rows. Next, lets look at the code behind for our page. using System;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Text;
public partial class DynamicGridViewPage : System.Web.UI.Page
{
public int RowCount
{
get
{
int returnValue = 0;
if (Request.QueryString["rows"] != null)
{
try
{
int.TryParse(Request.QueryString["rows"].ToString()
, out returnValue);
}
catch{
messageLabel.Text = @"Invalid row count!
Go back to the <a href=""Default.aspx"">home page</a>
to enter a value!";
}
}
return returnValue;
}
}
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (!IsPostBack)
{
Persons listOfPersons = new Persons(RowCount);
dynamicGridView.DataSource = listOfPersons;
dynamicGridView.DataBind();
}
}
protected void submitLinkButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Persons listOfPerson = new Persons();
StringBuilder messageBuilder = new StringBuilder();
foreach (GridViewRow gr in dynamicGridView.Rows)
{
if (gr.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow)
{
Person p = new Person();
if (gr.FindControl("idLabel") != null)
{
p.ID = int.Parse((gr.FindControl("idLabel") as Label).Text);
}
if (gr.FindControl("firstnameTextBox") != null)
{
p.Firstname = (gr.FindControl("firstnameTextBox") as TextBox).Text;
}
if (gr.FindControl("lastnameTextBox") != null)
{
p.Lastname = (gr.FindControl("lastnameTextBox") as TextBox).Text;
}
if (gr.FindControl("isChristianCheckBox") != null)
{
p.IsChristian = (gr.FindControl("isChristianCheckBox") as CheckBox).Checked;
}
if (!p.Firstname.Equals(String.Empty)
&& !p.Lastname.Equals(String.Empty))
{
listOfPerson.Add(p);
}
else
{
messageBuilder.Append(String.Format(
@"Record on line number {0}
was not submitted because
it doesn''t have a
Firstname or Lastname!<br />"
, p.ID));
}
}
}
if (messageBuilder.Length > 0)
{
messageLabel.Text = messageBuilder.ToString();
}
else
{
messageLabel.Text = String.Empty;
}
submitedRecordsGridView.DataSource = listOfPerson;
submitedRecordsGridView.DataBind();
}
}
What happens on the code-behind is pretty simple. When the page loads it checks to see if it is not a PostBack, if it's not then it tries to retrieve the rows to create using the RowCount property. Once retrieved, that value is then passed to the contructor of the Persons class to create a dummy list of items that would then be assigned to the DataSource property of our GridView.
I've added code to the submit button to simulate submissions to show how you can retrieve the values entered on our GridView.
And that's it. Thats how you create a dynamic rows in a GridView and access the values. I hope i was to shed light on this issue. Thanks!
Want the source code? Download it here: KeithRull.DynamicGridViewRows.v2.zip (6.37 KB)
Just in case you are studying WCF.. You might want to check out the .NET StockTrader Sample Application.
The .NET StockTrader Sample Application is an end-to-end sample application illustrating Windows Communication Foundation and .NET Enterprise Technologies. It is a service-oriented application based on Windows Communication Foundation (.NET 3.0) and ASP.NET, and illustrates many of the .NET enterprise development technologies for building highly scalable, rich "enterprise-connected" applications. It is designed as a benchmark kit to illustrate alternative technologies within .NET and their relative performance.
The application offers full interoperability with J2EE and IBM WebSphere's Trade 6.1 sample application. As such, the application offers an excellent opportunity for developers to learn about .NET and building interoperable, service-oriented applications.
Read more here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/bb499684.aspx
I've been diving into WCF lately and I have found this sample application as a great blueprint on how to develop applications using WCF & ASP.NET. The sample includes a smart client and an ASP.NET application that you can jump on and play that showcases as huge list of technologies and approaches when developing an SOA app via WCF and .NET
Below is a list of technologies that's demonstrated in this sample application:
- Service-oriented, n-tier design with ASP.NET and WCF
- Clean separation of UI, business services and DB access
- Design and tuning for performance
- Horizontally scalable via dynamic clustering
- Centralized configuration management of clustered service nodes
- .NET 3.5 with Windows Communication Foundation
- Interoperability with J2EE/WebSphere Trade 6.1
- Incorporates alternative designs for performance comparisons
- Loosely-coupled, message-oriented design with WCF and MSMQ
- Achieving assured message delivery with transactions
- Self-hosting WCF Services
- Custom WCF Behaviors
- Service host failure detection and automatic restarts
- .NET Enterprise Application Server Technologies
- ASP.NET 2.0
- ADO.NET 2.0
- .NET Transactions
- MSMQ 3.5 (Windows XP/Windows Server 2003)
- MSMQ 4.0 (Windows Vista/"Longhorn Server CTP")
- Transaction batching with WCF and MSMQ
Try and see for yourself ;) I bet you will enjoy it too!
Do you want to use LINQ but you are still stuck with .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.0? Are you still waiting for your company to upgrade to VS 2008 to get a hold of LINQ? Then wait no more because the good guys who wrote the book C# 3.0 In A Nutshell have created a .NET library that implements all the standard LINQ operators so that you can enjoy the goodness of LINQ in .NET 2.0 and 3.0.
LINQBridge is a reimplementation of all the standard query operators in Framework 3.5's Enumerable class. It's designed to work with the C# 3.0 compiler, as used by Visual Studio 2008. LINQBridge comprises a "LINQ to Objects" API for running local queries. (It doesn't include an implementation of LINQ to SQL, nor LINQ to XML; a good compromise can be to force Framework 3.5 out to just the server machines, allowing LINQ to SQL to be used where it's needed most).
LINQBridge also includes Framework 3.5's generic Func and Action delegates, as well as ExtensionAttribute, allowing you to use C# 3.0's extension methods in Framework 2.0.
In fact LINQBridge lets you use nearly all of the features in C# 3.0 with Framework 2.0—including extension methods, lambda functions and query comprehensions. The only feature it does not support is compiling lambdas to expression trees (i.e., Expression<TDelegate>).
Awesome huh?! Get this goodie here: http://www.albahari.com/nutshell/linqbridge.html
In my previous article I showed you how to add a web service reference in your ASP.NET application, call a webmethod and the display the values returned byt the web service to a Label. This time I'm going to show you how to transform that Xml string into a DataSet.
I suggest that you read the previous article before continuing in reading this post so you'll have a better insight on what we are trying to accomplish on this article.
Let's begin!
To start off this article let's look at how the application that we built for the previous article.
and the HTML code for the UI <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
<title>Keith Rull's Consuming Web Services Sample</title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
<strong>Symbol</strong><br />
<asp:TextBox ID="symbolTextBox"
runat="server" />
<asp:Button ID="executeButton"
runat="server"
Text="Execute"
OnClick="executeButton_Click" />
<br />
<br />
<strong>Result</strong>
<br />
<asp:Label ID="xmlResultLabel"
runat="server" />
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>
and the underlying code for the click event of the "Execute" button
protected void executeButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
//get the execution symbol entered in the TextBox
string executionSymbol = symbolTextBox.Text;
//get the stock quote information
string quoteInfo = GetStockQuoteInformation(executionSymbol);
//HtmlEncode the string to properly render it on the page
string htmlEncodedResult = System.Web.HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(quoteInfo);
//assign the HtmlEncoded string to our Label control
xmlResultLabel.Text = htmlEncodedResult;
}
As you can see the code above does the job of displaying the retuned xml from the webservice. It works. We can understand that XML because we are techie enough but imagine a normal user seeing a xml values on his screen? Yup. Not good. The best way to present data to a user is to show values in tabular form. A lot more pleasing to the eyes and much easier to understand. With that said let's start by replacing the Label control in the form with a DetailsView control. The new aspx page for our form should look like this: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
<title>Keith Rull's Consuming Web Services Sample</title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
<strong>Symbol</strong><br />
<asp:TextBox ID="symbolTextBox"
runat="server" />
<asp:Button ID="executeButton"
runat="server"
Text="Execute"
OnClick="executeButton_Click" />
<br />
<br />
<strong>Result</strong> <br />
<asp:DetailsView ID="stockQuoteInfoDetailsView" runat="server" Height="50px" Width="125px">
</asp:DetailsView>
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>
As you can see in the old code for the Click event we are able to get the XML and display it on a Label. What we need to do now is to read that XML string and assign it to a our DetailsView but there is one problem... The XML string needs to be converted to an object that supports IList or IEnumerable first before it could be loaded to our DetailsView.
To solve this problem I've decided to create this method that accepts an XML string and converts it to a DataSet. /// <summary>
/// A function that takes an XML string and converts it into a DataSet
/// </summary>
/// <param name="xmlString">The xml string to tranform into a DataSet</param>
/// <returns>The DataSet representing the values and schema from our xml string</returns>
private DataSet XmlString2DataSet(string xmlString)
{
//create a new DataSet that will hold our values
DataSet quoteDataSet = null;
//check if the xmlString is not blank
if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(xmlString)) {
//stop the processing
return quoteDataSet;
}
try{
//create a StringReader object to read our xml string
using (StringReader stringReader = new StringReader(xmlString))
{
//initialize our DataSet
quoteDataSet = new DataSet();
//load the StringReader to our DataSet
quoteDataSet.ReadXml(stringReader);
}
}
catch{
//return null
quoteDataSet = null;
}
//return the DataSet containing the stock information
return quoteDataSet;
}
Now we can modify our our executeButton_Click event protected void executeButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
//get the execution symbol entered in the TextBox
string executionSymbol = symbolTextBox.Text;
//get the stock quote information
string quoteInfo = GetStockQuoteInformation(executionSymbol);
//create our quote DataTable
DataSet quoteDataSet = XmlString2DataSet(quoteInfo);
//assign the quote information to our DetailsView
stockQuoteInfoDetailsView.DataSource = quoteDataSet;
stockQuoteInfoDetailsView.DataBind();
}
All we did was pass the xml string to the XmlString2DataSet function to retrieve a DataSet containing the stock quote information and then assigning that DataSet object to our DetailsView for display. Below is how the final form looks-like after our modification
Now that is more presentable! I hope I was able to share with you something useful. Next stop, we'll be building Master-Detail pages in ASP.NET ;)
Care for the code? Grab it here: KeithRull.ConsumingWebServices.Part2.zip (5.76 KB)
I've been meaning to write this tutorial for a month now and finally i found time to write it. As you may have noticed, I have been blogging about accessing files (here, here and here), reading XML, and loading XML data to a GridView lately. The reason behind this is that I am preping you guys up for a much larger article that would span to 5 articles with different demos for each post... something that needs to spend a little bit of time on the lower end of the grid to make the whole thing easier to explain once we start building the big picture... but I won't spill the details about the post yet ;) so better keep up with the site to learn what I've been brewing since early March.
In the meantime let's talk about how to consume XML Web Services in ASP.NET. I don't want to bore you with explanations on what an XML Web Service means so I'll just lead you to a document written by Roger Wolter in 2001 that explains the whole enselada about Web Services. Below is an excerpt from that document:
XML Web services are the fundamental building blocks in the move to distributed computing on the Internet. Open standards and the focus on communication and collaboration among people and applications have created an environment where XML Web services are becoming the platform for application integration. Applications are constructed using multiple XML Web services from various sources that work together regardless of where they reside or how they were implemented.
There are probably as many definitions of XML Web Service as there are companies building them, but almost all definitions have these things in common:
- XML Web Services expose useful functionality to Web users through a standard Web protocol. In most cases, the protocol used is SOAP.
- XML Web services provide a way to describe their interfaces in enough detail to allow a user to build a client application to talk to them. This description is usually provided in an XML document called a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) document.
- XML Web services are registered so that potential users can find them easily. This is done with Universal Discovery Description and Integration (UDDI).
Now that we have nailed the basic definition let's build a simple application that consumes a publicly available web service. There are a lot of sites that list useful public web services and one of those sites is WebServiceX. WebServiceX's website contains 70+ freely available web service that you can use and utilize in your projects. For this demo I've decided to use the StockQuote service which is a web service that allows you to query stock information by using the symbol of the stock. Here's some information about the service taken from their website:
Summary: Get Stock quote for a company symbol by using this web service
Endpoint: http://www.webservicex.net/stockquote.asmx
Disco: http://www.webservicex.net/stockquote.asmx?Disco
WSDL Location: http://www.webservicex.net/stockquote.asmx?wsdl
Let's begin building!
First, let's start by creating a new ASP.NET Website Project
Once that's done we need to add a Web Reference to our project that would point to the StockQuote service hosted on the WebServiceX website. We can do this by right-clicking on our solution and then selecting the Web Reference menu item.
A new screen will appear that will enable you to specify the URL of the web service. Input http://www.webservicex.net/stockquote.asmx on the URL dropdownlist to create reference to the StockQuote service.
Click "Add Reference" to add the reference to the project. You'll notice that the folder structure of your project has been updated and a new folder called "App_WebReferences" has been added to the project.
Ok, now let's build our UI. My idea for this sample application is to have a TextBox that allows users to enter the symbol, a Button control that will trigger the lookup to the web service via it's Click event and a Label control that will used to display the values returned by the web service. Below is how I envisioned our form to look-like:
And here's the accompanying HTML source for our form <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
<title>Keith Rull's Consuming Web Services Sample</title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
<strong>Symbol</strong><br />
<asp:TextBox ID="symbolTextBox"
runat="server" />
<asp:Button ID="executeButton"
runat="server"
Text="Execute"
OnClick="executeButton_Click" />
<br />
<br />
<strong>Result</strong>
<br />
<asp:Label ID="xmlResultLabel"
runat="server" />
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>
Now that we have the infrastructure in place it's time to write some code. The first thing that we need to do on the code-behind level is to add the using declaration to include the web service class in our page.
This enables us to create objects from our web service. The class that we would be using in this exercise is the StockQuote object which has the StockQuote.GetQuote method that returns the XML data containing the information for a specified symbol. Below is the method I wrote to show you how to use this class: /// <summary>
/// A function that retrieves the stock information
/// from the StockQuote web service
/// </summary>
/// <param name="executionSymbol">the execution symbol to lookup</param>
/// <returns>The string containing the XML information regarding the symbol</returns>
private string GetStockQuoteInformation(string executionSymbol)
{
string quoteInfo = String.Empty;
//check if the executionSymbol is not blank
if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(executionSymbol)) {
//stop the processing
return quoteInfo;
}
try
{
//create a StockQuote object
StockQuote quote = new StockQuote();
//get the stock quote information for the specified symbol
quoteInfo = quote.GetQuote(executionSymbol);
}
catch (Exception ex) {
//raise the error
string errorMessage = String.Format("Error while trying to connect to the Web Service. {0}", ex.Message);
throw new Exception(errorMessage);
}
//return the quote information
return quoteInfo;
}
Now that we have the function that will call our web service it's time to hook up our method to the Click event of our button. protected void executeButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
//get the execution symbol entered in the TextBox
string executionSymbol = symbolTextBox.Text;
//get the stock quote information
string quoteInfo = GetStockQuoteInformation(executionSymbol);
//HtmlEncode the string to properly render it on the page
string htmlEncodedResult = System.Web.HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(quoteInfo);
//assign the HtmlEncoded string to our Label control
xmlResultLabel.Text = htmlEncodedResult;
}
As you can see the whole process was built with little code. Run the application and see how the easy it is to connect to a web service, call a web service method and use it's returned value.
I hope you learned something from this tutorial. On our next article i'll show you howto display the XML returned by the web service to a GridView.
Later ;)
Last week I showed you how to read an XML file, load it to a DataSet and assign those values into a GridView. Today I'll show you how you can read an XML file using the XmlDataSource object.
Let's assume that we have an XML file called Symbols.xml in our App_Data folder
that contains the following data <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Symbols>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="ATT" Name="AT&T"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="MSFT" Name="Microsoft"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="GOOG" Name="Google"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="CSCO" Name="Cisco"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="IP" Name="International Paper Co."></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="MF" Name="MF Global"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="Q" Name="Qwest Communications International Inc."></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="BMC" Name="BMC Software Inc."></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="WCI" Name="WCI Communities Inc."></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="SPY" Name="SDRs"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="LEH" Name="Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc."></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="XLF" Name="Financial Select Sector SPDR"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="QQQQ" Name="PowerShares QQQ TR 1"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="IWM" Name="IShare Rus 2000 INDX"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="GE" Name="General Electric Co."></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="MER" Name="Merrill Lynch Co., Inc."></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="BAC" Name="Bank of America Corporation"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="INTC" Name="Intel Corp"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="F" Name="Ford Motor Co."></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="QID" Name="UltraShort QQQ ProShares"></Symbol>
</Symbols>
and we want to load it to a GridView with no server-side code and a quick and easy way. The answer is to use the XmlDataSource object. The XmlDataSource control is an ASP.NET control that allows you to automatically read XML Data and make that data readily available to any ASP.NET control.
To start using this control, go to your Toolbox and drag the XmlDataSource control to your page.
Once the control is on the page it would popup a dialog that has configuration options for our XmlDataSource control. Click the "Configure Data Source" button to configure our XmlDataSource
A popup like below will come up that allows you to select the Xml file you want to your XmlDataSource object to read. It also gives you the option to select the XSL file. You can also specify an XPath expression to use to filter the data in our Xml.
Click the "Browse" button for the "Data File" option to select an XML file.
A new dialog will appear that will let you navigate the folder tree to select your desired XML file
Click "Ok" and you'll be taken back to the "Configure Data Source" screen. Click "Ok" again to finalize the XML data assignment.
Now that we have the file set in to our XmlDataSource control we need assign it to a control. We can do that by dragging a GridView control to our form.
Next, we need to assign the XmlDataSource control as the data source for our GridView. We can do this by selecting our XmlDataSource from the "Choose Data Source" dropdownlist.
Click "XmlDataSource1" and you will notice that our GridView was automatically updated and now shows the contents of our XML file.
Easy huh? Next up, Consuming Web Services in ASP.NET
Last week I showed you ways on how to read text files. This time around we will be looking at how to load XML files into a DataSet.
Let's assume that we have a file called Symbols.xml which contains some XML data. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Symbols>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="ATT" Name="AT&T"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="MSFT" Name="Microsoft"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="GOOG" Name="Google"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="CSCO" Name="Cisco"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="IP" Name="International Paper Co."></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="MF" Name="MF Global"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="Q" Name="Qwest Communications International Inc."></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="BMC" Name="BMC Software Inc."></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="WCI" Name="WCI Communities Inc."></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="SPY" Name="SDRs"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="LEH" Name="Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc."></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="XLF" Name="Financial Select Sector SPDR"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="QQQQ" Name="PowerShares QQQ TR 1"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="IWM" Name="IShare Rus 2000 INDX"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="GE" Name="General Electric Co."></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="MER" Name="Merrill Lynch Co., Inc."></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="BAC" Name="Bank of America Corporation"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="INTC" Name="Intel Corp"></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="F" Name="Ford Motor Co."></Symbol>
<Symbol ExecutionSymbol="QID" Name="UltraShort QQQ ProShares"></Symbol>
</Symbols>
And you want to load that data into a DataSet and display it to a GridView. How would you do it?
There are different ways you can load an XML file to a DataSet and i'm here to show you 4 of them. I don't have alot of time to explain the intrinsicts of each sample or performance comparisson of each technique because of time constraints so i'll leave that part for you to figure out the best among this examples. ;)
SAMPLE 1 //Sample 1
//the code below shows us how to load the XML document
//directly to our dataset by just specifying the file
//location to the DataSet.ReadXml method of the DataSet
using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Xml;
using System.IO;
public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string xmlFilePath = Server.MapPath(@"App_Data/Symbols.xml");
if (File.Exists(xmlFilePath))
{
//create the Dataset object
using (DataSet ds = new DataSet())
{
//load the xml data to the dataset
ds.ReadXml(xmlFilePath);
//bind the values to our GridView
symbolGridView.Caption = "<h4>Loaded the data using Sample1</h4>";
symbolGridView.DataSource = ds;
symbolGridView.DataBind();
}
}
}
}
SAMPLE 2 //Sample 2
//The code below is using the TextReader object to read
//the contents of the file and then assign those values
//to our dataset object
using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Xml;
using System.IO;
public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string xmlFilePath = Server.MapPath(@"App_Data/Symbols.xml");
if (File.Exists(xmlFilePath))
{
//Create the TextReader object
using (TextReader sReader = new StreamReader(xmlFilePath))
{
//create the Dataset object
using (DataSet ds = new DataSet())
{
//load the xml data from the TextReader to the Dataset
ds.ReadXml(sReader);
//bind the values to our GridView
symbolGridView.Caption = "<h4>Loaded the data using Sample2</h4>";
symbolGridView.DataSource = ds;
symbolGridView.DataBind();
}
}
}
}
}
SAMPLE 3 //Sample 3
//The code below is basically the same as the above code
//but this time we are using the XmlTextReader object
//instead of using the TextReader object. Please note that
//the XmlReader object calls the TextReader internally.
using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Xml;
using System.IO;
public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string xmlFilePath = Server.MapPath(@"App_Data/Symbols.xml");
if (File.Exists(xmlFilePath))
{
//Create the XmlTextReader object
using (XmlTextReader xTextReader = new XmlTextReader(xmlFilePath))
{
//create the Dataset object
using (DataSet ds = new DataSet())
{
//load the xml data to dataset
ds.ReadXml(xTextReader);
//bind the values to our GridView
symbolGridView.Caption = "<h4>Loaded the data using Sample3</h4>";
symbolGridView.DataSource = ds;
symbolGridView.DataBind();
}
}
}
}
}
SAMPLE 4 //Sample 4
//The code below uses an XmlDocument object and reads a file
//using the XmlDocument.LoadXml method. That data is then
//transfered to a DataSet by using the DataSet.ReadXml method
//and passing a XmlNodeReader object based on our XmlDocument
using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Xml;
using System.IO;
public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string xmlFilePath = Server.MapPath(@"App_Data/Symbols.xml");
if (File.Exists(xmlFilePath))
{
//Create the Dataset object
using (DataSet ds = new DataSet())
{
//create the XmlDocument object
XmlDocument xDoc = new XmlDocument();
//load the contents of the file to our XmlDocument object
xDoc.LoadXml(File.ReadAllText(xmlFilePath));
//load the xml data in the XmlDocument object to the Dataset
ds.ReadXml(new XmlNodeReader(xDoc));
//bind the values to our GridView
symbolGridView4.Caption = "<h4>Loaded the data using Sample4</h4>";
symbolGridView4.DataSource = ds;
symbolGridView4.DataBind();
}
}
}
}
And that's it. On my next post i'll show you how to load XML data directly to the GridView using the XMLDataSource object.
HTH.
Sample 3 is similar to Sample 1 and and Sample 2 but it uses the File.ReadAllText method which reads the content of the whole file instead of reading the data line by line or reading the data and putting the values into a string[].
[C# Version] using System;
using System.IO;
namespace KeithRull.ReadMyFile
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
//the filename of the file to read
string xmlFilename = "Symbols.xml";
//validate if the file exist
if (File.Exists(xmlFilename))
{
//read the contents of the file
string fileContent = File.ReadAllText(xmlFilename);
//display the output in the screen
Console.WriteLine(fileContent);
}
else
{
//notify that the file was not found
Console.WriteLine("File not found!");
}
//pause and wait for the user.
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}
[VB.NET Version] Imports System
Imports System.IO
Namespace KeithRull.ReadMyFile
Class Program
Private Shared Sub Main(ByVal args As String())
'the filename of the file to read
Dim xmlFilename As String = "Symbols.xml"
'validate if the file exist
If File.Exists(xmlFilename) Then
'read the contents of the file
Dim fileContent As String = File.ReadAllText(xmlFilename)
'display the output in the screen
Console.WriteLine(fileContent)
Else
'notify that the file was not found
Console.WriteLine("File not found!")
End If
'pause and wait for the user.
Console.ReadLine()
End Sub
End Class
End Namespace
Sample demonstrates how to use the File.ReadAllLines technique
[C# Version] using System;
using System.IO;
namespace KeithRull.ReadMyFile
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
//the filename of the file to read
string xmlFilename = "Symbols.xml";
//validate if the file exist
if (File.Exists(xmlFilename))
{
//read the contents of the file
string[] fileContent = File.ReadAllLines(xmlFilename);
//iterate for each line item in our file
foreach (string lineItem in fileContent)
{
//display the output in the screen
Console.WriteLine(lineItem);
}
}
else
{
//notify that the file was not found
Console.WriteLine("File not found!");
}
//pause and wait for the user.
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}
[VB.NET Version]
Imports System
Imports System.IO
Namespace KeithRull.ReadMyFile
Class Program
Private Shared Sub Main(ByVal args As String())
'the filename of the file to read
Dim xmlFilename As String = "Symbols.xml"
'validate if the file exist
If File.Exists(xmlFilename) Then
'read the contents of the file
Dim fileContent As String() = File.ReadAllLines(xmlFilename)
'iterate for each line item in our file
For Each lineItem As String In fileContent
'display the output in the screen
Console.WriteLine(lineItem)
Next
Else
'notify that the file was not found
Console.WriteLine("File not found!")
End If
'pause and wait for the user.
Console.ReadLine()
End Sub
End Class
End Namespace
Sample 1 demonstrates how to use the StreamReader technique when reading the contents of a file
[C# Version] using System;
using System.IO;
namespace KeithRull.ReadMyFile
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
//the filename of the file to read
string xmlFilename = "Symbols.xml";
//validate if the file exist
if (File.Exists(xmlFilename))
{
//create a new StreamReader object tha would read the file
using (StreamReader sReader = new StreamReader(xmlFilename))
{
//create a string object that would hold the
//value of each line in our file
string line = String.Empty;
//iterate for each line item in our file
while ((line = sReader.ReadLine()) != null)
{
//display the output in the screen
Console.WriteLine(line);
}
}
}
else
{
//notify that the file was not found
Console.WriteLine("File not found!");
}
//pause and wait for the user.
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}
[VB.NET Version] Imports System
Imports System.IO
Namespace KeithRull.ReadMyFile
Class Program
Private Shared Sub Main(ByVal args As String())
'the filename of the file to read
Dim xmlFilename As String = "Symbols.xml"
'validate if the file exist
If File.Exists(xmlFilename) Then
'create a new StreamReader object tha would read the file
Using sReader As New StreamReader(xmlFilename)
'create a string object that would hold the
'value of each line in our file
Dim line As String = [String].Empty
'iterate for each line item in our file
While (line = sReader.ReadLine()) IsNot Nothing
'display the output in the screen
Console.WriteLine(line)
End While
End Using
Else
'notify that the file was not found
Console.WriteLine("File not found!")
End If
'pause and wait for the user.
Console.ReadLine()
End Sub
End Class
End Namespace
I've gotten this question 3 times in different flavors since last week and I've decided that it's time to post the solution in my blog. I've added comments on the code to explain what every line is doing.
The code below will demonstrate how you can read the assembly information in both C# and VB.NET.
[------------------ C# ------------------] using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Reflection;
using System.IO;
namespace KeithRull.ReadingAssemblyInformation
{
/// <summary>
/// A sample program that demonstrates how to get the
/// Assembly information. This is useful when you want
/// to see the version of your class library.
/// </summary>
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
//create a new assembly object that would signify
//the current running assembly
Assembly currentAssembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
//create the dictionary object that would contain
//all the information about our assembly
Dictionary<string, string> dictionaryOfProperties
= GetAssemblyInfoDictionary(currentAssembly);
//iterate thru each key in the dictionary
foreach (string key in dictionaryOfProperties.Keys)
{
//print the key and its value
Console.WriteLine("{0}: {1}", key, dictionaryOfProperties[key]);
}
//pause
Console.ReadLine();
}
/// <summary>
/// A method that returns a Dictionary of Assembly properties
/// </summary>
/// <param name="selectedAssembly">The assembly to inspect</param>
/// <returns>The dictrionary containing the assembly information</returns>
public static Dictionary<string, string> GetAssemblyInfoDictionary(Assembly selectedAssembly)
{
//Create the dictionary
Dictionary<string, string> dictionaryOfProperties
= new Dictionary<string, string>();
//get the location of the assembly
string assemblyPath = selectedAssembly.Location;
//add the assembly location to out dictionary
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("AssemblyLocation", assemblyPath);
//create the AssemblyName object based on our Assembly
//this will enable us to get the version information
//and other properties related to our assembly
AssemblyName assemblyName = selectedAssembly.GetName();
//add the FullName of out assembly
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("AssemblyFullName", assemblyName.FullName);
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("AssemblyName", assemblyName.FullName);
//add the assembly version information
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("Version", assemblyName.Version.ToString());
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("Version.Major", assemblyName.Version.Major.ToString());
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("Version.Minor", assemblyName.Version.Minor.ToString());
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("Version.Build", assemblyName.Version.Build.ToString());
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("Version.Revision", assemblyName.Version.Revision.ToString());
//add the creation time
DateTime creationTime = File.GetCreationTime(assemblyPath);
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("CreationTime", creationTime.ToString());
//add the last write time
DateTime lastWriteTime = File.GetLastWriteTime(assemblyPath);
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("LastWriteTime", creationTime.ToString());
//return our dictionary obeject
return dictionaryOfProperties;
}
}
}
[------------------ VB.NET ------------------] Imports System
Imports System.Collections.Generic
Imports System.Text
Imports System.Reflection
Imports System.IO
Namespace KeithRull.ReadingAssemblyInformation
''' <summary>
''' A sample program that demonstrates how to get the
''' Assembly information. This is useful when you want
''' to see the version of your class library.
''' </summary>
Module Program
Sub Main(ByVal args As String())
'create a new assembly object that would signify
'the current running assembly
Dim currentAssembly As Assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly()
'create the dictionary object that would contain
'all the information about our assembly
Dim dictionaryOfProperties As Dictionary(Of String, String) = GetAssemblyInfoDictionary(currentAssembly)
'iterate thru each key in the dictionary
For Each key As String In dictionaryOfProperties.Keys
'print the key and its value
Console.WriteLine("{0}: {1}", key, dictionaryOfProperties(key))
Next
'pause
Console.ReadLine()
End Sub
''' <summary>
''' A method that returns a Dictionary of Assembly properties
''' </summary>
''' <param name="selectedAssembly">The assembly to inspect</param>
''' <returns>The dictrionary containing the assembly information</returns>
Public Function GetAssemblyInfoDictionary(ByVal selectedAssembly As Assembly) As Dictionary(Of String, String)
'Create the dictionary
Dim dictionaryOfProperties As New Dictionary(Of String, String)()
'get the location of the assembly
Dim assemblyPath As String = selectedAssembly.Location
'add the assembly location to out dictionary
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("AssemblyLocation", assemblyPath)
'create the AssemblyName object based on our Assembly
'this will enable us to get the version information
'and other properties related to our assembly
Dim assemblyName As AssemblyName = selectedAssembly.GetName()
'add the FullName of our assembly
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("AssemblyFullName", assemblyName.FullName)
'add the Name of the assembly
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("AssemblyName", assemblyName.Name)
'add the assembly version information
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("Version", assemblyName.Version.ToString())
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("Version.Major", assemblyName.Version.Major.ToString())
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("Version.Minor", assemblyName.Version.Minor.ToString())
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("Version.Build", assemblyName.Version.Build.ToString())
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("Version.Revision", assemblyName.Version.Revision.ToString())
'add the creation time
Dim creationTime As DateTime = File.GetCreationTime(assemblyPath)
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("CreationTime", creationTime.ToString())
'add the last write time
Dim lastWriteTime As DateTime = File.GetLastWriteTime(assemblyPath)
dictionaryOfProperties.Add("LastWriteTime", creationTime.ToString())
'return our dictionary obeject
Return dictionaryOfProperties
End Function
End Module
End Namespace
HTH ;)
I've been working on ASP.NET AJAX eversince it's beta days and the UpdateProgress and UpdatePanel has been my bestfriend since day one. I've learned a few tricks while using ASP.NET and today I'd like to share with you several ways to customize the look and feel of you UpdateProgress control with this sample solution. I have created a sample application that would demonstrate different ways to position your UpdateProgress control in the web browser.
The samples included in the solution is as follows:
- Sample 1
The usual ASP.NET AJAX UpdateProgress control usage. This demonstrates the typical use of the UpdateProgress control in an application
- Sample 2
An ASP.NET AJAX UpdateProgress control positioned in the top right of the browser. (GMAIL like behavior)
- Sample 3
An ASP.NET AJAX UpdateProgress control positioned in the top right of the browser with a transparent gray background. (GMAIL like behavior)
- Sample 4
An ASP.NET AJAX UpdateProgress control positioned in the top right of the browser with a transparent gray background and the notification following the scrollbar position (fixed position).
- Sample 5
An ASP.NET AJAX UpdateProgress control positioned in the middle of the browser with a transparent gray background.
- Sample 6
An ASP.NET AJAX UpdateProgress control positioned in the middle of the browser with a transparent gray background and the notification following the scrollbar position (fixed position).
- Sample 7
An ASP.NET AJAX UpdateProgress control that uses the AlwaysVisibleControlExtender trick to place the progress notification at the top right of the browser.
- Sample 8
An ASP.NET AJAX UpdateProgress control that uses the AlwaysVisibleControlExtender trick to place the progress notification at the middle of the browser.
The project includes all aspx files, images and stylesheets that demonstrates effective UpdateProgress notifications. You can checkout the running sample of this ASP.NET AJAX project at the DevPinoy.org demo site.
I hope what I shared with you can be useful in your daily life as a .NET developer. If you are interested you can download the source code for the whole project here: KeithRull.BuildingABetterAJAXLoadingNotification.zip (191.48 KB)
Here's a small trick i use alot.
Question: What's the easiest way to get the distict rows of data in a DataTable and DataView in .NET 2.0?
Answer: The easiest way to get distinct DataRows in a DataTable or DataView is by using the DataView.ToTable() method.
Here is a demonstration
It's funny, just after posting this post in response to an article that N@rds posted that I realized that I have been preaching about extension methods and his problem was a great example on when to make use of this excellent feature.
I wrote an article about this topic a few months ago but I wanted to explain it a little further in this article by showing real-world scenarios on when and how to use this feature.
So what does Extension Method mean? According to MSDN:
"Extension methods enable you to "add" methods to existing types without creating a new derived type, recompiling, or otherwise modifying the original type. Extension methods are a special kind of static method, but they are called as if they were instance methods on the extended type."
Now that we have that settled lets look at a good scenario that depicts a great time when to use an Extension Method.
Woohoo! That was a great Code Camp. Thanks to Woody and the gang for making this event happen. It was a fun and knowledge-filled event. I even got swags (a few books, a shirt, a small bag and a gym cup from Avanade)...
Me and my wife will be at the Code Camp in Fullerton tommorow and we are excited. Code Camp is a great time to get together, learn new things about technology and network with people with the same mindset about technology and that is passion for learning and enriching knowledged. We are driving tonight to Fullerton so that we can be early tommorow.
There are already a few sessions that I am eyeing to go to. One of them is the session of John Bowen regarding WPF DataBinding and WPF controls. I met John Bowen 3 years ago in the .NET Rocks roadshow bus. I think this session is going to be awesome. I've been playing with alot of WPF lately and I'm interested in seeing and learning cool things about this technology.
Another session I'd love to see is the topic "Branching and Merging Guidance for VSTS 2008 and Team Foundation Server" presented by Mickey Williams. I haven't done anything with VSTS before but I know its going to be a great primer for me because merging and branching is one of the things that happens alot when you are in a team development environment.
Oh boy! This is going to be a great Code Camp. Time to go home and get ready for this event. See you there!
I encountered a problem today with one of my projects. The problem was about a third-party application choking when it encounters files greater than 20MB. I have a Windows Service that creates PDFs of KPIs for around 150 users and each of the file that I generate is around 25MB each. I can compress the PDF file to lower resolution format but the management decided that we shouldn't trade quality over speed so I was stuck thinking of a different solution.
Then it came to me that I can zip the files so that I get a smaller file.
I started evaluating C# zip libraries and ended up choosing #ZipLib from the creators of SharpDevelop because of it's simplicity and robustness. The only thing I didn't like was the fact that I wasn't find a great documentation about the library. I ended up fiddling with it. It wasn't hard but you need to play with it alot to understand whats happening in the background.
Ok, now lets start by identifying what we need to create a zip file with SharpZipLib. The first thing that you need to do is download the binaries from the #ZipLib website and reference that DLL in your project.
Now that is done you need to add the ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib namespace in you source file to be able to start creating zip files using the #ZipLib library.
To start creating a zip file, all you need to do is to initialize a ZipFile object.
//initialize the file so that it can accept updates
ZipFile z = ZipFile.Create(filename);
The code above creates a new zip file with the specified filename. Next we need to call the BeginUpdate method of the ZipFile object to tell it that we are going to do some modifications to that file.
//initialize the file so that it can accept updates
z.BeginUpdate();
At this stage we can now add files to our zip file.
//add your file e.g "c:\reports\gummywhammyyummy.pdf"
z.Add(<Your file to add including it's path>);
Once you are done you need to commit your changes and close the file.
//commit the update once we are done
z.CommitUpdate();
//close the file
z.Close();
Done. Now you have created your first zip file using #ZipLib. Neat! Below is the complete code listing of what we did above
/// <summary>
/// A method that creates a zip file
/// </summary>
/// <param name="zipFileStoragePath">the storage location</param>
/// <param name="zipFileName">the zip file name</param>
/// <param name="fileToCompress">the file to compress</param>
private void CreateZipFile(string zipFileStoragePath
, string zipFileName
, string fileToCompress)
{
//create our zip file
ZipFile z = ZipFile.Create(zipFileStoragePath + zipFileName);
//initialize the file so that it can accept updates
z.BeginUpdate();
//add the file to the zip file
z.Add(fileToCompress);
//commit the update once we are done
z.CommitUpdate();
//close the file
z.Close();
}
But what if you want to add a directory to your zip file? The ZipFile object provides a method called AddDirectory() that accepts a parameter directoryName. The problem with this method is that it doesn't add the files inside the specified directory but instead just creates a directory inside the zip file. To make this work, you need to get the files inside that directory by looping thru all objects in that directory and adding them one at a time. I was able to accomplish this task by creating a recursive function that drills through the whole directory structure of the folder you want to zip. Below is a snippet of the function.
/// <summary>
/// Creates a zip file
/// </summary>
/// <param name="zipFileStoragePath">where to store the zip file</param>
/// <param name="zipFileName">the zip file filename</param>
/// <param name="fileToZip">the file to zip</param>
/// <returns>indicates whether the file was created successfully</returns>
private bool CreateZipFile(string zipFileStoragePath
, string zipFileName
, FileInfo fileToZip)
{
return CreateZipFile( zipFileStoragePath
, zipFileName
, (FileSystemInfo)fileToZip);
}
/// <summary>
/// Creates a zip file
/// </summary>
/// <param name="zipFileStoragePath">where to store the zip file</param>
/// <param name="zipFileName">the zip file filename</param>
/// <param name="directoryToZip">the directory to zip</param>
/// <returns>indicates whether the file was created successfully</returns>
private bool CreateZipFile(string zipFileStoragePath
, string zipFileName
, DirectoryInfo directoryToZip)
{
return CreateZipFile( zipFileStoragePath
, zipFileName
, (FileSystemInfo)directoryToZip);
}
/// <summary>
/// Creates a zip file
/// </summary>
/// <param name="zipFileStoragePath">where to store the zip file</param>
/// <param name="zipFileName">the zip file filename</param>
/// <param name="fileSystemInfoToZip">the directory/file to zip</param>
/// <returns>indicates whether the file was created successfully</returns>
private bool CreateZipFile(string zipFileStoragePath
, string zipFileName
, FileSystemInfo fileSystemInfoToZip)
{
return CreateZipFile( zipFileStoragePath
, zipFileName
, new FileSystemInfo[]
{
fileSystemInfoToZip
});
}
/// <summary>
/// A function that creates a zip file
/// </summary>
/// <param name="zipFileStoragePath">location where the file should be created</param>
/// <param name="zipFileName">the filename of the zip file</param>
/// <param name="fileSystemInfosToZip">an array of filesysteminfos that needs to be added to the file</param>
/// <returns>a bool value that indicates whether the file was created</returns>
private bool CreateZipFile(string zipFileStoragePath
, string zipFileName
, FileSystemInfo[] fileSystemInfosToZip)
{
// a bool variable that says whether or not the file was created
bool isCreated = false;
try
{
//create our zip file
ZipFile z = ZipFile.Create(zipFileStoragePath + zipFileName);
//initialize the file so that it can accept updates
z.BeginUpdate();
//get all the files and directory to zip
GetFilesToZip(fileSystemInfosToZip, z);
//commit the update once we are done
z.CommitUpdate();
//close the file
z.Close();
//success!
isCreated = true;
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
//failed
isCreated = false;
//lets throw our error
throw ex;
}
//return the creation status
return isCreated;
}
/// <summary>
/// Iterate thru all the filesysteminfo objects and add it to our zip file
/// </summary>
/// <param name="fileSystemInfosToZip">a collection of files/directores</param>
/// <param name="z">our existing ZipFile object</param>
private void GetFilesToZip(FileSystemInfo[] fileSystemInfosToZip, ZipFile z)
{
//check whether the objects are null
if (fileSystemInfosToZip != null && z != null)
{
//iterate thru all the filesystem info objects
foreach (FileSystemInfo fi in fileSystemInfosToZip)
{
//check if it is a directory
if (fi is DirectoryInfo)
{
DirectoryInfo di = (DirectoryInfo)fi;
//add the directory
z.AddDirectory(di.FullName);
//drill thru the directory to get all
//the files and folders inside it.
GetFilesToZip(di.GetFileSystemInfos(), z);
}
else
{
//add it
z.Add(fi.FullName);
}
}
}
}
A sample usage of this function would be like this:
//sample usage for zipping a file
private void zipItButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string fileToZip = fileToZipTextBox.Text;
string zipFilename = Guid.NewGuid() + ".zip";
//zip a file
bool isCreated = CreateZipFile(
CONST_ZIP_FILE_STORAGE
, zipFilename
, new FileInfo(fileToZip) );
if (isCreated) {
MessageBox.Show(zipFilename);
}
else {
MessageBox.Show("Failed");
}
}
//sample usage for zipping a directory
private void zipFolderButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string directoryToZip = whereToZipTextBox.Text;
string zipFilename = Guid.NewGuid() + ".zip";
//zip a directory
bool isCreated = CreateZipFile(
CONST_ZIP_FILE_STORAGE
, zipFilename
, new DirectoryInfo(directoryToZip) );
if (isCreated){
MessageBox.Show("Created " + zipFilename);
}
else{
MessageBox.Show("Failed");
}
}
And that's it. I hope i was able to shed light on you can create zip files in few easy steps with C#. If you are interested you can checkout this sample application that I built to demonstrate how to create zip files with C# and SharpZipLib.
Download the source code here. KeithRull.CreatingZipFiles.zip (19.15 KB)
Yesterday I wrote an article explaning what var means in .NET 3.x. Today lets talk about Anonymous Types.
Anonymous Types as describe by the C# 3.0 specification are tuple types automatically inferred and created from object initializers. Anonymous Types allows the new operator to be used with an anonymous object initializer to create an object at compile time. The format for an anonymous type declaration is a follows
var v = new { p1 = e1 , p2 = e2 , ... px = ex }
where v is the var variable, px denotes the property name and ex is equaivalent value.
Enough with the theory and lets look at some actual code. Lets assume that I have a class called Person with the following properties:
public class Person
{
private string _name;
private int _age;
private bool _believesInJesus;
public string Name
{
get { return _name; }
set { _name = value; }
}
public int Age
{
get { return _age; }
set { _age = value; }
}
public bool BelievesInJesus
{
get { return _believesInJesus; }
set { _believesInJesus = value; }
}
}
Let's say that I want to create an Anonymous Type that has a similar structure from what we have above, all I need to do is make this call:
var human = new { Name = "Keith", Age = 25, BelievesInJesus = true };
What happens in compile time is that the .NET compiler generates a class that represents the structure of your Anonymous Type.
public class __Anonymous1
{
private string _name;
private int _age;
private bool _believesInJesus;
public string Name { get { return _name; } set { _name = value; } }
public int Age { get { return _age; } set { _age = value; } }
public bool BelievesInJesus { get { return _believesInJesus; } set { _believesInJesus = value; } }
}
It's an "Anonymous Type" because it a nameless class, it's generated by the compiler for you and it directly inherits from object.
To prove this let's look at this example:
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
var person = new { Name = "Keith", Age = 25, BelievesInJesus = true };
Console.WriteLine(person.Name);
Console.WriteLine(person.GetType());
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
Hovering at the person variable would give us some information about it's type:
The code above will have this output:
As you can see, the compiler created an Anonymous Type Called <>f__AnonymousType0`3. One thing to note about Anonymous Types is that the compiler is smart enough to figure out if an Anonynous Type has already been declared that meets the schema requirement of your new Anonymous Type. class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
var person1 = new { Name = "Keith", Age = 25, BelievesInJesus = true };
var person2 = new { Name = "Charissa", Age = 23, BelievesInJesus = true };
var person3 = new { Name = "Peter", Age = 23};
Console.WriteLine(person1.Name);
Console.WriteLine(person1.GetType());
Console.WriteLine(person2.Name);
Console.WriteLine(person2.GetType());
Console.WriteLine(person3.Name);
Console.WriteLine(person3.GetType());
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
The result would be:
I hope I was able to show you what Anonymous Types are in C#. Next up is Extension Methods.
Finally i'm back after a month of crazyness due to my webhost not performing up to its promise of 99.9% uptime.
Enough with the rant and on with the article, today i'm going to talk about how to list databases in a SQL Server by just using T-SQL and then showing you how to truncate the logs on those databases in different ways.
First, let's look at the 5 different approaches that you can use to list down databases in SQL Server by just using plain old T-SQL.
The stored procedure approach ( sp_databases, sp_helpdb ) :
USE master;
-- Lists databases that either reside in an instance of the SQL Server
-- 2005 Database Engine or are accessible through a database gateway.
EXEC sp_databases
-- Reports information about a specified database or all databases.
EXEC sp_helpdb
The sys tables approach ( sys.databases, sys.sysdatabases ):
USE master;
-- [SQL Server 2000/2005] Contains one row for each database in an instance of
-- Microsoft SQL Server 2005. When SQL Server is first installed, sysdatabases
-- contains entries for the master, model, msdb, and tempdb databases.
SELECT NAME FROM sysdatabases
-- [SQL Server 2005] Contains one row per database in the instance of Microsoft SQL Server.
SELECT NAME FROM sys.sysdatabases
The using the undocumented stored procedure sp_MsForEachDatabase approach
USE master;
-- Undocumented SQL Server stored procedure
EXEC sp_msForEachDB 'PRINT ''?''';
Simple huh? Now that we know how to list databases let's go back to the problem of truncating all of them in one query (in fact it's just one line!). Some people would suggest writing cursors that would loop thru all the rows returned by our sysdatabases query to do this task. Their solution might be similar to the one listed below:
[SOLUTION 1]
USE master;
DECLARE
DBNames CURSOR
FOR
SELECT
NAME
FROM sysdatabases
OPEN DBNames
DECLARE @Name varchar(50)
FETCH NEXT FROM DBNames
INTO @Name
WHILE (@@FETCH_STATUS <> -1)
BEGIN
DBCC SHRINKDATABASE( @Name , 0)
FETCH NEXT FROM DBNames
INTO @Name
END
CLOSE DBNames
DEALLOCATE DBNames
Others would suggest a more primitive approach which is building a simple query first that would list the names of the database appended with the DBCC SHRINKDATABASE command:
[SOLUTION 2]
USE master;
SELECT
'DBCC SHRINKDATABASE(' + NAME + ', 0)'
FROM sysdatabases
Then they would change the output option of the query into "Results to Text", copy the result to a new query window and execute the query from there. Pretty primitive. Alot of steps. Same results.
My suggested solution is using the sp_MSForEachDatabase procedure in conjunction with the DBCC SHRINKDATABASE function. This would result into a 1 line query. Less code with less steps to do that creates the same results.
[MY RECOMMENDED SOLUTION]
USE master;
-- truncates all the logs of all database in the server
EXEC sp_msForEachDB 'DBCC SHRINKDATABASE( ''?'', 0)'
Simple and straight to the point.
I hope you learned something from our article today. You can also do this programmatically by using C# and VB.NET. I wrote two articles about that topic here and here. Interested in truncating tables using sp_MsForEachTable? You can checkout this post.
Thanks!
One of the cool feature (if used correctly) added to .NET 3.x is Extension Methods which enables you to extend an specific type by adding your own methods to it. It's useful in cases where you want to extend a library that you dont have access to the source.
Just in case you are interested... Microsoft is giving away Free E-Books of 3 great books
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
Introducing Microsoft LINQ
by Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo
ISBN: 9780735623910 |
Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX
by Dino Esposito
ISBN: 9780735624139 |
Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 1.0
by Laurence Moroney
ISBN: 9780735625396
|
Get them here!
I was working on a .NET application that integrates with Gravatar today because I needed a quickway to fetch someone's photo based on their email address. One requirement when doing this type of integration with Gravatar is that the email should be encrypted into an MD5 hash. Luckily, .NET already has a library that can do this for me by just calling a few methods:
[C# Version]
public static string ToMD5(string stringToConvert)
{
//create an instance of the MD5CryptoServiceProvider
MD5CryptoServiceProvider md5Provider = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider();
//convert our string into byte array
byte[] byteArray = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(stringToConvert);
//get the hashed values created by our MD5CryptoServiceProvider
byte[] hashedByteArray = md5Provider.ComputeHash(byteArray);
//create a StringBuilder object
StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
//loop to each each byte
foreach (byte b in hashedByteArray)
{
//append it to our StringBuilder
stringBuilder.Append(b.ToString("x2").ToLower());
}
//return the hashed value
return stringBuilder.ToString();
}
[VB.NET Version]
Public Shared Function ToMD5(ByVal stringToConvert As String) As String
'create an instance of the MD5CryptoServiceProvider
Dim md5Provider As New MD5CryptoServiceProvider()
'convert our string into byte array
Dim byteArray As Byte() = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(stringToConvert)
'get the hashed values created by our MD5CryptoServiceProvider
Dim hashedByteArray As Byte() = md5Provider.ComputeHash(byteArray)
'create a StringBuilder object
Dim stringBuilder As New StringBuilder()
'loop to each each byte
For Each b As Byte In hashedByteArray
'append it to our StringBuilder
stringBuilder.Append(b.ToString("x2").ToLower())
Next
'return the hashed value
Return stringBuilder.ToString()
End Function
Now all I need to do is get the result of my function and pass it to the avatar page in the Gravatar website and it should return me my Gravatar image.
[C# Version]
string gravatarUrl = "http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id";
string gravatarID = Utilities.Strings.ToMD5("keith.rull@gmail.com");
Image1.ImageUrl = String.Format("{0}={1}",gravatarUrl,gravatarID);
[VB.NET Version]
Dim gravatarUrl As String = "http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id"
Dim gravatarID As String = Utilities.Strings.ToMD5("keith.rull@gmail.com")
Image1.ImageUrl = [String].Format("{0}={1}", gravatarUrl, gravatarID)
http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=d7ae6b890f16ad7541732e0f38adcbf2
Awesome!
I've been banging .NET 3.5 lately and this rendezvouz with LINQ (Language Integrated Query) has been making my brain smile alot. I mean, how can you not like something so easy and well defined and makes your life as developer alot easier.
Anyhow, I just wanted to post my LINQ cheat sheet. It's not much and it's not even complete yet (I call this part 1.1). It consist of a few snippets that you might commonly do when doing LINQ processing. I'm planning to update this and hopefully I could find time this week to add some more piece of code that would demonstrate the other LINQ topics that I missed.
Anyway, here's some LINQ snippets:
//create our PersonService object
PersonService ps = new PersonService();
//get the list of person
PersonList listOfPerson = ps.GetPersonList();
//get a list of people with Gender set to Male
var maleOnlyList =
from l
in listOfPerson
where l.Gender == Gender.Male
select l;
//get a list of people with Gender set to female
//and declaring the returned fields
var femaleOnlyList =
from l
in listOfPerson
where l.Gender == Gender.Female
select new {
l.PersonID,
l.FirstName,
l.MiddleName,
l.LastName,
l.Email,
l.BirthDate,
l.Gender,
l.DateCreated };
//specify age
int selectedAge = 25;
//get a list of people with age greater than 25
var ageIsGreaterThan25 =
from l
in listOfPerson
where l.BirthDate >= DateTime.Now.AddYears(-selectedAge)
select l;
//get a list of people with a birthdate between a specified range
var birthdateBetweenRange =
from l
in listOfPerson
where
l.BirthDate >= DateTime.Parse("1/1/1980")
&& l.BirthDate <= DateTime.Parse("1/1/1981")
select l;
//order the result by lastname
var orderByLastNameSimple =
from l
in listOfPerson
orderby l.LastName
select l;
//order the list by birthdate and lastname
var orderByMultiple =
from l
in listOfPerson
orderby l.BirthDate descending, l.LastName ascending
select l;
//take three records
var takeThree = listOfPerson.Take(3);
//go to the 10th record and then take 3 records from there
var skipTenTakeThree = listOfPerson.Skip(10).Take(3);
//skip up until the Lastname is not equal to Thornton
var skipWhile = listOfPerson.SkipWhile(n => n.LastName != "Thornton");
P.S: There's more LINQ examples at the MSDN website.
Wow, NBA.com is now joining the silverlight bandwagon.
NEW YORK — Dec. 10, 2007 — The National Basketball Association (NBA) will employ Microsoft Silverlight on NBA.com to further enhance the online video experience for NBA fans around the world. Microsoft Silverlight, a cross-browser, multiplatform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web, will also be utilized on WNBA.com and NBADevelopmentLeague.com.
NBA.com will feature a full-screen NBA photo gallery, offer video highlights and deliver additional interactive applications throughout the site using Microsoft Silverlight. Through the use of Microsoft Corp.’s new application, the NBA will be able to provide further access to its extensive digital video library, integrate the video experience seamlessly into the site, and ultimately provide fans with access to more online video features.
Read the full article here...
I'm a big NBA fan and i frequently visit the site (atleast 4 times a day). Basketball is one of the most popular sports in the world and this partnership I think would greatly boost the adoption of Silverlight in the mainstream.
One more reason why i should kick my gears up another notch with silverlight.
I wrote an article a few years ago using SQL SMO and just realized today that I can also list SQL Severs without importing an additional assembly to my project(Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo) by using the SqlDataSourceEnumerator class. SqlDataSourceEnumerator is a class that provides a mechanism for enumerating all intances of SQL Server in a given network. SqlDataSourceEnumerator exposes a method called GetDataSources() that returns a DataTable containing the list of SQL Servers and some basic information about the server
I'm still a big fan of VB.NET even if I haven't touched a single VB.NET code in a year and one the biggest VB.NET fanboy I know has just started a website all about the good things you can do with VB.NET. Chris Williams (VB.NET MVP) has just started a website called ILoveVB.NET. The idea is to build a community that would champion the cause of VB.NET(which is to make the world known that VB.NET is a first class programming language and not a code kiddies toy anymore).
Here's the official message from Chris Williams:
This is the place where we show off all the amazingly cool stuff you can do with VB.NET.
If you're passionate about VB.NET, or you have an interesting project or maybe you're providing community support to a technology that doesn't currently have language parity, then you've come to the right place. We will gladly host your project and blog(s).
If you're looking for answers, you may find them here as well. If you're tired of looking everywhere for code samples and only finding C#, keep checking back here. We're making contact with the product teams and working towards getting the samples and SDKs you want.
Once again, thank you for stopping by. If you need anything, feel free to ask.
Chris Williams
Man, I bet you Paul, Carl, Bill and the VB.NET MVPs are going to be excited about this!
Somebody sent me an email today asking me about an article I wrote a few years ago detailing how to generate random strings and numbers in C# and VB.NET. He asked me if I could add function to the code that creates a random character set to be used as a base for the allowed characters in the random string. I went on and hammered the solution and this what I built for him. I don't have enough time to explain the whole thing but I hope the code comments I added would be good enough to understand what I did with the code.
[----------------- C# Version -----------------]
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
namespace KeithRull.ConsoleCentral
{
class RandomStrings
{
//our default string size
private const int CONST_MaxStringLenght = 10;
//our default character string set
private const string CONST_AllowedCharacterLiterals
= "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890";
//our randomizer
Random randomNumber = new Random();
/// <summary>
/// Generate a random string using the default options
/// </summary>
/// <returns>the random string</returns>
public string GenerateRandomString()
{
return GenerateRandomString(CONST_MaxStringLenght);
}
/// <summary>
/// Create a random string based on a specified lenght
/// </summary>
/// <param name="lenght">the lenght of the desired lenght of the random string</param>
/// <returns>the randomized string</returns>
public string GenerateRandomString(int lenght)
{
return GenerateRandomString(lenght, CreateRandomStringSet());
}
/// <summary>
/// Creates a random string based on a specific lenght and character set
/// </summary>
/// <param name="lenght">the lenght of the desired lenght of the random string</param>
/// <param name="charsToUse">character set to use</param>
/// <param name="randomizeSourceSet">defines whether the source set should be scrambled</param>
/// <returns>the random string</returns>
public string GenerateRandomString(int lenght, string charsToUse, bool randomizeSourceSet)
{
string randomString = String.Empty;
if (randomizeSourceSet) {
//scramble and jumble it
randomString = GenerateRandomString(lenght, CreateRandomStringSet(charsToUse));
}
else {
//use the default charset
randomString = GenerateRandomString(lenght, charsToUse);
}
return randomString;
}
/// <summary>
/// Creates a random string based on a specific lenght and character set
/// </summary>
/// <param name="lenght">the lenght of the desired lenght of the random string</param>
/// <param name="charsToUse">character set to use</param>
/// <returns>the random string</returns>
public string GenerateRandomString(int lenght, string charsToUse)
{
//Create a new StringBuilder that would hold the random string.
StringBuilder randomString = new StringBuilder();
//Create a variable to hold the generated charater.
char appendedChar;
//Create a loop that would iterate from 0 to the specified value of intLenghtOfString
for (int i = 0; i <= lenght; ++i)
{
int characterIndex = Convert.ToInt32(randomNumber.Next(i, charsToUse.Length - i));
//Generate the char and assign it to appendedChar
appendedChar = charsToUse[characterIndex];
//Append appendedChar to randomString
randomString.Append(appendedChar);
}
//Convert randomString to String and return the result.
return randomString.ToString();
}
/// <summary>
/// Returns a random set of characters based on the default literal set
/// </summary>
/// <returns>the random string</returns>
private string CreateRandomStringSet()
{
//just use the default character set
return CreateRandomStringSet(CONST_AllowedCharacterLiterals);
}
/// <summary>
/// A function that returns a new set of characters based on an input set
/// </summary>
/// <param name="allowedCharacters">the source set</param>
/// <returns>the new collection of characters</returns>
private string CreateRandomStringSet(string allowedCharacters)
{
string randomizedString = String.Empty;
//get a random string set size
int randomSetLenght = allowedCharacters.Length * randomNumber.Next(1, CONST_MaxStringLenght);
//while lenght of the random set is not the same as the source string lenght
while (randomizedString.Length != randomSetLenght)
{
//add a new character
randomizedString += GetRandomCharFromString(allowedCharacters);
}
//return our random string
return randomizedString;
}
/// <summary>
/// Gets a character from the the input string
/// </summary>
/// <param name="allowedCharacters">source string</param>
/// <returns>a random character</returns>
private char GetRandomCharFromString(string allowedCharacters)
{
return allowedCharacters[randomNumber.Next(allowedCharacters.Length - 1)];
}
}
}
[----------------- C# Usage -----------------]
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
namespace KeithRull.ConsoleCentral
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
RandomStrings r = new RandomStrings();
Console.WriteLine(r.GenerateRandomString());
Console.WriteLine(r.GenerateRandomString(10));
Console.WriteLine(r.GenerateRandomString(10, "qwerttyuioplkjhgfdsazxcvbnm1234567890QWERTYUIOPLKJHGFDSAZXCVBNM"));
Console.WriteLine(r.GenerateRandomString(10, "[]{}<>!@#$%^&*()qwerttyuioplkjhgfdsazxcvbnm1234567890", true));
Console.WriteLine(r.GenerateRandomString(10, "qwerttyuioplkjhgfdsazxcvbnm1234567890QWERTYUIOPLKJHGFDSAZXCVBNM", false));
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}
[----------------- VB.NET Version -----------------]
Imports System
Imports System.Collections.Generic
Imports System.Text
Namespace KeithRull.ConsoleCentral
Class RandomStrings
Private Const CONST_MaxStringLenght As Integer = 10
Private Const CONST_AllowedCharacterLiterals As String = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890"
Private randomNumber As New Random()
''' <summary>
''' Generate a random string using the default options
''' </summary>
''' <returns>the random string</returns>
Public Function GenerateRandomString() As String
Return GenerateRandomString(CONST_MaxStringLenght)
End Function
''' <summary>
''' Create a random string based on a specified lenght
''' </summary>
''' <param name="lenght">the lenght of the desired lenght of the random string</param>
''' <returns>a random string</returns>
Public Function GenerateRandomString(ByVal lenght As Integer) As String
Return GenerateRandomString(lenght, CreateRandomStringSet())
End Function
''' <summary>
''' Creates a random string based on a specific lenght and character set
''' </summary>
''' <param name="lenght">the lenght of the desired lenght of the random string</param>
''' <param name="charsToUse">character set to use</param>
''' <param name="randomizeSourceSet">defines whether the source set should be scrambled</param>
''' <returns></returns>
Public Function GenerateRandomString(ByVal lenght As Integer, ByVal charsToUse As String, ByVal randomizeSourceSet As Boolean) As String
Dim randomString As String = [String].Empty
If randomizeSourceSet Then
'scramble and jumble it
randomString = GenerateRandomString(lenght, CreateRandomStringSet(charsToUse))
Else
'use the default charset
randomString = GenerateRandomString(lenght, charsToUse)
End If
Return randomString
End Function
Public Function GenerateRandomString(ByVal lenght As Integer, ByVal charsToUse As String) As String
'Create a new StringBuilder that would hold the random string.
Dim randomString As New StringBuilder()
'Create a variable to hold the generated charater.
Dim appendedChar As Char
For i As Integer = 0 To lenght
'Create a loop that would iterate from 0 to the specified value of intLenghtOfString
Dim characterIndex As Integer = Convert.ToInt32(randomNumber.[Next](i, charsToUse.Length - i))
'Generate the char and assign it to appendedChar
appendedChar = charsToUse(characterIndex)
'Append appendedChar to randomString
randomString.Append(appendedChar)
Next
'Convert randomString to String and return the result.
Return randomString.ToString()
End Function
''' <summary>
''' Returns a random set of characters based on the default literal set
''' </summary>
''' <returns></returns>
Private Function CreateRandomStringSet() As String
Return CreateRandomStringSet(CONST_AllowedCharacterLiterals)
End Function
''' <summary>
''' A function that returns a new set of characters based on an input set
''' </summary>
''' <param name="allowedCharacters">the source set</param>
''' <returns>the new collection of characters</returns>
Private Function CreateRandomStringSet(ByVal allowedCharacters As String) As String
Dim randomizedString As String = [String].Empty
'get a random string set size
Dim randomSetLenght As Integer = allowedCharacters.Length * randomNumber.[Next](1, CONST_MaxStringLenght)
'while lenght of the random set is not the same as the source string lenght
While randomizedString.Length <> randomSetLenght
'add a new character
randomizedString += GetRandomCharFromString(allowedCharacters)
End While
'return our random string
Return randomizedString
End Function
''' <summary>
''' Gets a character from the the input string
''' </summary>
''' <param name="allowedCharacters">source string</param>
''' <returns>a random character</returns>
Private Function GetRandomCharFromString(ByVal allowedCharacters As String) As Char
Return allowedCharacters(randomNumber.[Next](allowedCharacters.Length - 1))
End Function
End Class
End Namespace
[----------------- VB.NET Usage -----------------]
Imports System
Imports System.Collections.Generic
Imports System.Text
Namespace KeithRull.ConsoleCentral
Class Program
Private Shared Sub Main(ByVal args As String())
Dim r As RandomStrings = New RandomStrings()
Console.WriteLine(r.GenerateRandomString())
Console.WriteLine(r.GenerateRandomString(10))
Console.WriteLine(r.GenerateRandomString(10, "qwerttyuioplkjhgfdsazxcvbnm1234567890QWERTYUIOPLKJHGFDSAZXCVBNM"))
Console.WriteLine(r.GenerateRandomString(10, "[]{}<>!@#$%^&*()qwerttyuioplkjhgfdsazxcvbnm1234567890", True))
Console.WriteLine(r.GenerateRandomString(10, "qwerttyuioplkjhgfdsazxcvbnm1234567890QWERTYUIOPLKJHGFDSAZXCVBNM", False))
Console.ReadLine()
End Sub
End Class
End Namespace
[----------------- Screenshot -----------------]
And that's how you create random strings in C# and VB.NET. Interested in the source code? You can download them here. RandomStrings.cs (4.61 KB) | RandomStrings.vb (5 KB)
I've just finished downloading Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 bits last night and I think I'm about ready to install it on my VPC (yup, I don't want to install it yet on my real machine.). I'm really excited about this new release since it looks really really promising. I've seen blogs giving it high praise and some not giving it a nod of acceptance(a few I should say) but for me it's the best Visual Studio to come out yet. I've been playing with the beta version since last year and really happy with this new release from the VS Team.
I know there are several things to consider before you install this version and I'm really glad that Jon made this list to keep as sane when installing/upgrading to Visual studio 2008. Great job Jon!
Now I'm ready to rock!
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