Ray Jezek’s Blog

Thanks Andrew for posting the links to Luca’s sample code from his PDC presentation. This is good stuff!

.NET, Misc

I must say I am pretty hesitant to spend much time learning much about XAML right now since I think we are going to have a lot of options to develop XAML apps visually in the future. The most interesting buzz that I have heard is about Microsoft’s Sparkle. There was a recent article in eweek about this new “Flash killer” that reinforces my feeling that we will paint XAML more than we will write it. So call me lazy, but I’ll wait for painters before I get into Avalon too much.
There isn’t much out there, but here are a few links about Sparkle stuff:

• Microsoft’s Sparkle is more than vaporware
• New Longhorn Graphics Tool Called “Flashkiller”
• Microsoft to Automate ‘Avalon’ Coding With ‘Sparkle’
  

.NET

At work we use a fair amount of enumerators in our code to define the values for lookup tables in the database. This a great way to implement these values because it avoids magic numbers and is easier to read and to maintain. But as much as I like working with enumerators, I’ve always struggled with the fact that I couldn’t bind them to list controls in the UI. Essentially there are 2 options you have to accomplish this:

1) Hard code the enumerated values into the list control – this is obviously a bad idea.
2) Just get the values from the DB since they are synchronized anyway – This idea actually works pretty well especially if you have a good caching mechanism in place

Even though #2 isn’t a terrible solution, it still bothered me to have to go to the DB to get values I already have defined in code. So I took a little time yesterday and wrote a method to populate a list control with the values of an enumerated type. Here is the code, note the last parameter will break apart your enumerator for better display – eg. ThisIsAnEnum will become This Is An Enum in the list control:

    /// 

    /// Populates a list based on the values of an enumerator

    /// 

    /// Web control to populate

    /// An enumeration type

    /// If true will break enum value with spaces on case change

    public static void PopListFromEnum(ListControl list, System.Type enumType, bool spaceOnCase)

    {

        list.Items.Clear();

        Array vals = Enum.GetValues( enumType);

        for(int i = 0; i < vals.Length; i++)

        {

            string val = vals.GetValue(i).ToString();

            string text = val;

            if (spaceOnCase)

            {

                char[] cars = text.ToCharArray( 1, text.Length - 1 );

                int offset = 1; // count the fact we are startng at position 1 to start with

                for(int x = 0; x < cars.Length; x++)

                {

                    if (Char.IsUpper( cars[x] ))

                    {

                        text = text.Insert( x + offset, " " );

                        offset += 1;

                    }

                }

            }

            list.Items.Add( new ListItem( text, val ) );

        }

    }

Once you have the list populated to assign the selected value back out you can do something like this:

object.SomeEnum = (SomeEnum)Enum.Parse(typeof(SomeEnum), ListControl.SelectedValue);

.NET, Programming Bind, C#, Enumerator