Posts Tagged ‘c#’

Inversion of Control (IOC) frameworks have become quite the rage as the software craftmanship movement has gathered steam. IOC makes it much easier to break complex multi-part programs into distict, and more importantly testable, components so that they can then be glued back together at run time. There are lots of nifty frameworks that can make this happen but at the moment I’m playing with Ninject.

Ninject is a very minimalistic IOC framework which focuses on what it calls a “fluent interface” that leverages the compiler and IDE rather than a huge XML file to map dependencies. Overall it’s very fast, very light weight, and very powerful. I’ve picked it up quickly and found it to meet almost all of my IOC needs.

Save one. And this is apparently a big problem for a lot of people. Ninject doesn’t like overloaded constructors. (more…)

User controls are the source of a lot of headaches in C#. They have two major issues that tend to drive programmers a little mad. The first is that they don’t play nicely with the ViewState. Particularly once users start to nest and reorder user controls, the ViewState model (much of which is based on position within the page) starts to break down. In many cases programmers circumvent this little nightmare by simply disabling the ViewState on some controls.

The second issue is that user controls are in their own scope and don’t have immediate access to the rest of the page. That is both a blessing and a curse; good control design means that the controls should be fairly independent of each other but a more pragmatic developer will also note that user controls exist primarily so that numerous copies of the same thing can be easily created and that making entirely self contained controls leads to a lot of unnecessary duplication.

Fortunately there are workarounds for both of these issues. (more…)

Not this kind of XML

VirPack has me working on an application that needs a user administered list of options for people to choose from. It’s a fairly simple thing that doesn’t require relational tables so I thought I’d toss it into XML.

Now, C# deals with XML really well. Almost everything, if you just ask nicely, will be quickly and easily packed off into XML the framework with just a few lines of code.

(more…)

Image Credit: PixelPlacebo via Flickr and Creative Commons

Unit testing is good; test driven development is better.  As Knuth once famously quipped “Beware of the above code. I have only proven it correct, not tested it.” There really is no substitution for good, solid testing.

Unfortunately, at least in C#, webpages don’t like to be unit tested.  I approach this post with an uncomfortable realization that I am about to lay out the issues and problems I’ve had while the solution I am presently using is far from satisfactory. (more…)

My “learn C# project” at work has centered around creating a drag-and-drop portlet style system for the display of custom widgets.  I’ve been using JQuery UI for the javascript functionality but the backend has been all custom C# work.

People familiar with C# know that C# supports the inclusion of user defined controls called WebControls.  These are more or less very simple C# programs which can be man-handled by another bit of C# code.  They’re handy for making your code modular: you might design a web-control that takes and validates a credit card number, for example.

But WebControls are notoriously tricky beasts and over the course of the last few weeks I’ve come to understand that one of the reasons for this is that they don’t behave quite the way you might expect them to when they are serialized and deserialized. (more…)