Reflections on Software Development

I have been working on creating some .NET dlls at work which would commonly be utilized by our web applications. And, one of the requirements was getting the connection string information from web.config file. Simply making the call by using the ConfigurationManager class wouldn’t work since it was giving some kind of compile time error when you try to build the dll. So, I needed to find a workaround to retrieve the connection string from either connectionStrings or appSettings elements. Here is the solution that I have figured out so far.

Necessary namespaces:

Generic function that grabs the information based on your connection string name:

Sample usage:

To understand the ConnectionStringSettingsCollection and NameValueCollection classes, followings links would be helpful:

- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.configuration.connectionstringsettingscollection.aspx
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.collections.specialized.namevaluecollection.aspx

There are tones of programming practices that I have been doing while developing an online application without even knowing or thinking about the technical reasons behind them; such as placing stylesheets at the top between the head tags, preferring CSS sprites to create menu items, utilizing <link> instead of @import, putting or linking the heavy JavaScript code at the bottom, etc.. This list can easily get longer.

While googling a solution to fix an issue in one of my development projects, I just found a very useful article from Yahoo Developer Network which explains all the things that I mentioned above along with some other cool practices.

Click here to read it, and then print and bookmark it.

Here are two introductory presentations by David Chou about Azure. They both give a great overview of Microsoft’s Cloud Computing platform.

While I was reading my feed aggregator at the weekend, I was paid attention to the recent post from Encosia because of its title. Validating a username asynchronously would be a great functionality in almost every types of online registration scenarios. Right after reading the post, I downloaded the binary file from CodePlex and created a very simple demo in about half an hour. That was really easy to implement.

Implementation

Before starting to code, be sure that the dll that is downloaded from CodePlex is in the Bin directory:

My sample (yes, very simple) registration form is:

As it can be seen, the trick is with the ServicePath and ServiceMethod attributes. ServicePath is the path to the webservice housing the ServiceMethod, and ServiceMethod is the method checking the availability of a username. My sample (yes, again very simple) webservice is:

Details of other attributes of the control can be read via its Discussions page at CodePlex.

Finally, here is how the form looks like after all these implemenations:

Download

You can download this sample registration form from here.

Issue Tracker

I would encourage to write your comments to here if you face any issues about the control.

When the July 2008 CTP of Live Tools were released a few weeks ago, I was kind of impressed with the Map control. I finally had a chance yesterday to read more about it and develop my own simple testing page. You may need to download this CTP release first before reading the rest of this post.

Implementation

Here is the 5 steps to implement this control into any ASP.NET page:

1. When you create a new website, select “ASP.NET Windows Live Web Site” as a template:

2. Be sure that “Microsoft.Live.ServerControls.VE.dll” is in the Bin directory:

3. Be sure that “Virtual Earth” tab is in the Toolbox:

4. Drag the “Map” control and drop it into the ASP.NET page, and play around with some of the attributes in it:

Note: Latitude and longitude of any location can be found in Terraserver. This sample demonstrates the aerial view of a mall that is very near to my house.

5. Press the magic key (F5) to build and view the sample page:

Download

This sample can be downloaded via here.