Joel Holder's Select Field Notes

Consider scenarios where you have pages composed of parts that are combined at runtime.  If the many authors of those parts have external script references sprinkeled throughout, there is the chance that author2 might over write author1’s reference of JQuery or some other script dependency.  The consequences of doing this are usually breakage.  I wrote this little script to…

Lately, I’ve been trying out some of the new .NET 4.0 language features.  Specifically, I’ve been looking into ways to trivially combine late dispatch and late binding in order to build general purpose convenience objects.   In this case, I wanted an expando object that I could program against with some of the techniques we use in javascript to programmatically build up a…

The scenario:  We have an ASP.NET CheckListBox from which we want to ensure at least one option has been selected before allowing the user to click a button.  Sounds simple enough, but we’re going to use JQuery to do all of this work on the client.    ASP.NET MARKUP:   Simple and straightforward..  Now lets…

One of the main advantages of JSON is that, like XML, it can represent an object graph of any shape.  JSON allows for the natural structure of entity Types to be expressed in the form of nested and aggregated object literals.  The simplicity and small footprint of this format has made it a popular choice…

Enterprise Library’s Logger is powerful and convenient.  It’s default TextFormatter provides a suitable human readable format, and it also allows you to implement custom formatters to suite your needs.  I think that being able to work with log data without having to manually parse strings, can really simplify the development of tools for mining logs.   To this end,…

In my last article, I demonstrated how to use .NET serialization to dehydrate and rehydrate objects with helpers that drive XmlSerializer, DataContractSerializer, SoapFormatter, and BinaryFormatter.  This is part 2, where I expand upon these concepts demonstrating how to use the DESCryptoServiceProvider to securely save off your objects for later consumption.   For this, I created a few…

Being able to snapshot an object graph at runtime can be a valuable capability.  I have had occasion to capture objects during a run for the purpose of analyzing and debugging problems that require comparison across multiple runs.  Additionally, the power to dehydrate objects and store them in a disk based cache, can also prove…

I wrote the DotNetCryptoCOM (DNCC) library because I  wanted to be able to generate and reverse cypher text between .NET and COM applications using a single .dll.  It allows developers to drive the builtin .NET Cryptographic Service Providers with a simple API.  I’ve used this lib in VB, Managed C++, and of course C# applications.  Some of…

I wanted to share this sample to demonstrate a simple way to implement a configuration based approach to switching out pluggable dependencies.  The example here uses reflection to dynamically load an assembly and then instantiate the targeted class contained therein.  The idea with this approach is that you may have different implementations of an interface contained…

  Simple C# function to generate random passwords:   Random randomizer = new Random(); public string CreateTemporaryPassword(int length) {     string letters = “0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz”;     var chars = new char[length];     for (int i = 0; i < length; i++)         chars[i] = letters[randomizer.Next(0, letters.Length)];     return new string(chars); }