Several years ago, long before the community was actively talking about Test Driven Development, I worked for a short time at a company as a “bug fixer.”  That was my role.  They had hired me because they had some software that was “basically done” but “had some issues.”  It should only take a few weeks.

The first thing they needed me to fix was that the website was supposed to send out email.  It turns out it was a configuration problem.  But they were so impressed (“the last guy we had in here spent two weeks on that problem and still hadn’t solved the problem.”) that they gave me more and more bugs.

This Is The Job That Never Ends

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On Monday 2/17/14 I gave a presentation at the CT .NET User’s Group on using Selenium and NUnit to test your web application.  The following is a list of resources from that presentation:

• The demo code.
• The Selenium IDE Plugin for FireFox and the IE Driver Server
• NUnit 
• Selenium CSharp API Documentation
• Selenium Users Manual

The IF statement we looked at on Tuesday was pretty tame compared to the WHILE construct. Actually, the main thing you need to keep in mind is that WHILE is all you have.  There is no such thing as a FOR loop or a DO WHILE loop.  So, you have to force WHILE to do those for you. The basic syntax of WHILE looks like this:

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SQL has long had the ability to specify that a value is NULL even if it is a primitive type, but the only way you could have a NULL value in VB.NET is if you were dealing with an object. That is, until .NET 2.0

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Yesterday, I spent the bulk of the day converting a DataList to a ListView.  I thought I’d spend a little time relating the process for those of you who might be interested in doing the same.

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Several weeks ago I presented jQuery at the DotNet User’s Group in Connecticut.  As part of that presentation, I mentioned that I handle errors from my WebServices in a slightly different way than what most authors teach.

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Many times in our queries, we aren’t looking for an exact match.  We are looking for one string that exists in another.  There are a couple statements available to us that will allow us to do this. The first of these is the LIKE statement, and if you are familiar with DOS or the Linux equivalent, this should look familiar to you. The most common usage of LIKE looks like this:

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A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I had built a tooltip using jQuery.  We focused mostly on the positioning of the tooltip at the time because, historically, that’s where most of the work has been. But there are other time-saving features that also make the tooltip code I wrote a lot more flexible. For example, in the past, the javascript code we wrote for tooltips often required us to place the HTML for the tooltip in the HTML page we wanted the tooltip on.  This has two drawbacks. First, if you need the tooltip on multiple pages, you need to include the HTML on multiple pages.  You could, of course, use master pages in ASP.NET or includes of some sort in other web development languages to get around this, but the fact remains that you still need to do this. Second, the HTML is not as modular as it might be.  This isn’t as big of an issue, since we could argue that most of our HTML is not as modular as it might be, but when I show you how you can overcome this with jQuery, I think you will recognize the improvement. When I sat down to develop this tooltip, I created an HTML page that has the HTML for the tooltip, and nothing else, in it.  This allowed me to concentrate on the HTML and forget about all the javascript issues.  Once I had the tooltip looking the way I wanted, I copied out the HTML fragment that represented the tooltip, leaving out the HTML that had the head tag, body tag, and other code I needed to make the HTML page an HTML page.  I pasted this code into another HTML file, but this time the HTML file ONLY has the fragment. The other thing you’ll want to do is to dynamically create the positional DIV that you will use to hold the tooltip.  This is another place where we typically had to put the content in our HTML page.  Instead we will put this information in the jQuery script.  While I could have included this in the fragment, doing it this way actually makes coding the tooltip easier:

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As well as being able to change the class associated with an element or a set of elements on a screen, jQuery also allows you to fire events.  You might want to do this, for example, if you want to simulate the clicking of a button. Of course, if you are going to fire an event, you’ll probably need some sort of event listener setup to handle that. We will address firing events first since it has the least amount of code needed. All you need to do is select the element or elements using the selectors we’ve already discussed and then call the method trigger(‘eventname’). So, to click a button, your code might look something like this:

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A couple of weeks ago we looked at ASP.NET MVC routing in the MVC framework.  The routing controls which method in which controller gets called.

The obvious next question is, how do we get from the controller to the view?

First, we need to look at the general layout of our Views.

If you open up the sample project that we created, you’ll see that there are a few directories that have been created.  The one we want to take a look at today is the View directory.

You’ll see that under each View directory is a directory that has the same name as each of the controllers in the Controller directory as well as a directory named ‘Shared’ that has nothing to do with MVC directly.  Don’t worry about figuring that one out right now.

Under each of the directories that map to the controller, you’ll see that there is an ASPX file that maps to each of the methods in the controllers, or is otherwise called from those controllers.

The easiest way to get from the Controller action to the View it corresponds to is to return View() from that action, as in:

public ActionResult About()
{
return View();
}

This would then call ~/Home/About

But what if the new page needs to have data sent along to it?

In this case, you can assign the data to the ViewData property.  The ViewData property works a lot like a Session object in that it is keyed.

So, to pass data you would use

ViewData[“Key”] = objectData;

You can see that the sample project does this in the HomeController.Index method.

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public ActionResult Index()
{
    ViewData["Message"] = "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!";
    return View();
}

And you can see that the Index.aspx file picks it up later:

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<h2><%= Html.Encode(ViewData["Message"])%></h2>
<p> To learn more about ASP.NET MVC visit
    <a href="http://asp.net/mvc" title="ASP.NET MVC Website">
      http://asp.net/mvc</a>.
</p>

Returning View() is not the only way of specifying the View we want to display from the Controller.  You can also return Redirect(), RedirectAction(), RedirectToRoute().