Control.Find<T>(string id) Extension Method

For my current project, I am constantly using FindControl to dynamically locate a child control within a parent control. Instead of constantly typing this:

   1: DropDownList dropDownList = employeeListView.FindControl("regionDropDownList") as DropDownList;

I created an extention method to prettify my code:

   1: public static class ControlExtensions

   2: {

   3:     public static T Find<T>(this Control control, string id) where T : Control

   4:     {

   5:         return (T) control.FindControl(id);

   6:     }

   7: }

So now I can type this:

   1: employeeListView.Find<DropDownList>("regionDropDownList");

Enjoy!

VS2010 Tip: Quickly Move Text to another file.

You can quickly move text from one file to another by selecting the text you want to move and drag it onto the tab of the destination file.

Fixing the Display of Variable Width Select Lists in IE7

I recently helped a client with an ASP.NET website that targeted the IE7 browser. We weren’t doing anything specific that required IE7, but we knew that 99% of the users would be using IE7 as this was the standard installation for the internal users who would be given access to the system.

Several of the pages had select lists in the header of tables that would act as column filters. Unfortunately, IE7 has an incredibly annoying method of rendering select lists. It will shrink the input so that it is contained with its parent element, but when you click the pull-down to expand the selection list, the list does not expand to the width of the select list item. In our case, with narrow columns this resulted in some select lists where the user could only see the first few letters of each option, which is obviously useless.

Read more at Thycotic’s blog.

Unit Testing an ASP.NET Website

If you are accustomed to building ASP.NET Web Applications using TDD, you might find yourself perplexed when you sit down to work on a client’s ASP.NET Website project and try to run your first test.

In my case I hit the key command I have mapped to ReSharper’s test runner expecting to promptly see a window showing me a nice red test. After watching an icon spin for a minute I did what every awesome developer does, I blamed Studio, killed devenv.exe and tried it all over again. Same results.

It finally occurred to me that issue was that an ASP.NET Website has no DLL output for NUnit to load and run against. Whatever is a TDD fanatic to do without testing first? After typical developer style complaints about “having to work under these conditions,” I hacked together a page where I could give it a list of types representing each test fixture classes and have it render an HTML page somewhat representing the output I have come to expect from the GUI test runner.

Now I could simply navigate to http://localhost:1234/Website/UnitTests.aspx and run my tests. I recently reworked it to dynamically load the test fixtures from the assembly and thought I would post a sample solution.

Remember not to deploy the NUnit Framework DLL or the App_Code/UnitTests directory to your production site.

I have uploaded the source to my GitHub repository.

Working with JSON Values that are C# Reserve Words.

While playing around with GitHub’s API for Gists, I discovered I couldn’t simply deserialize into an object because the API used the C# reserve word “public” as a property name. Luckily, the DataMember attribute has a “Name” property that allows to you explicitly map a JSON property to your object’s property of a different name:

   1:  namespace MyGistClient

   2:  {

   3:      [DataContract]

   4:      public class GistsResult

   5:      {

   6:          ...

   7:   

   8:          [DataMember(Name = "public")]

   9:          public bool IsPublic { get; set; }

  10:   

  11:          ...

  12:      }

  13:  }

While C# will let me make a property named “Public”, I decided to use “IsPublic” instead so I don’t have any issues if my object gets consumed by another .NET language that isn’t case sensitive.