One of the cool new tricks we are able to perform in ASP.NET that we were not able to use in ASP is the ability to have ASP.NET redirect file requests in the same way that mod_rewrite does under the Apache webserver.

For example, we could have the browser ask for an image file that doesn’t exist on the file system and have ASP.NET serve up the file from the database.

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I saw a question on Channel 9 that I’ve heard before. My guess is that there are enough people who have the same question that it’s worth addressing.

I know there’s probably a really good reason for this, but I can’t think of what it is, and it keeps bugging me. Why can’t you do int x = 10; string y = (string)x; in C#? I mean, you could simply use x.ToString(), but why doesn’t the explicit cast do the same?

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I’ve been thinking about the state of the programmers coming into our industry recently.  It seems to me that many of the college students who graduate today understand the syntax, but few know how to apply true object oriented principles to the real world.

I recently had a discussion with a friend who confirmed my observations.  Simply put, most people do not think in object oriented terms.

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Judging from the comments I received yesterday, it looks like we need to review  serialization in .NET.

The Easy Way

There are two ways of making an object serializable.  The first, and easiest way is by applying the Serializable attribute to the class.  Once you’ve done this all of the member variables in the class will get stored into the stream unless you’ve attributed one of the variables with NonSerialized.

This method is useful for objects you want to be able to store temporarily.  For example, you might use this to transfer objects using Web Services or if you wanted to store the object in a session variable when your sessions are being stored in a session server.  You would never use this to store the object to a file that you want to be able to retrieve some time in the future after restarting your application.  That is, you would never use this method to implement the Registry solution I mentioned yesterday.

The Reliable Way

What you need instead is the Serializable Interface, or more correctly, you want to implement ISerializable on your class.  Using the ISerializable interface gives you a lot more control.  Used correctly, you can store an object to a file system, shut down your application, install an upgrade to the application with additional information (or less information) in the class, and still successfully load the object from the file system.  So, let’s illustrate with a simple class:

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class Demo {
    private int m_intVar;
    public Demo()
    {
    }
}

The Basics

This is a pretty simple class.  It has one member variable that we will use to save some sort of state information and will need to get stored to the stream when we save the object instance.  To implement the interface, we need to change the class to look like this:

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[Serializable]
class Demo : ISerializable {
    private int m_intVar;
    public Demo()
    {
    }

    public Demo(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context)
    {
        m_intVar = info.GetInt32("m_intVar");
    }

    public void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info,
        StreamingContext context)
    {
        info.AddValue("m_intVar", m_intVar);
    }
}

The thing to watch out for here is that you need a constructor that takes SerializationInfo and StreamingContext as parameters.  Since the interface can’t remember this, you’ll have to remember it.

You’ll notice that we’ve taken control of storing and retrieving the data by using the AddValue and GetInt32 calls inside of the new, required, constructor and the GetObjectData method.  GetObjectData is called when the data is being saved.  The constructor gets called when the data is being loaded.

Protecting For The Future

If we leave the code as it is above, we are no better off than if we had simply implemented the Serializable attribute.  What we need to add to this code is some way of versioning the object.  This is easy to do by adding a few more lines of code: When we initially create the object, all we need to do is add one line of code to our GetObjectData method

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public void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info,
    StreamingContext context)
{
    info.AddValue("VERSION", 1);
    info.AddValue("m_intVar", m_intVar);
}

The Future

Some time later, we decide to add another variable to our class:

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private int m_intVar;
private string m_stringVar;

And save it as part of GetObjectData.  Because we’ve added another variable, we need to increment the version number.  So, GetObjectData now looks like:

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public void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context)
{
    info.AddValue("VERSION", 2);
    info.AddValue("m_intVar", m_intVar);
    info.AddValue("m_stringVar", m_stringVar);
}

and our constructor now looks like:

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public Demo(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context)
{
    int VERSION = info.GetInt32("VERSION");
    m_intVar = info.GetInt32("m_intVar");
    if (VERSION > 1)
        m_stringVar = info.GetString("m_stringVar");
    else m_stringVar = "default string";
}

By incrementing the version number every time we make a change to the class and testing for the appropriate version number when we load the object, we can avoid having our application crash simply because the class has changed between the time we save the object and the time we loaded the object from the stream.

I think the VB.NET Ternary Operator may be the last operator that I really miss in VB.NET from my curly brace language experience.  Although, I have to admit, I wouldn’t have missed it all that much if they never added it.  There just isn’t a whole lot of use for it.

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Yesterday we looked at the new var keyword in CSharp.  This makes CSharp variable declaration similar to VB.  After all, they’ve had the DIM keyword for years which essentially does the same thing.

Today, we’re going to look at object initializers, which have been added to both CSharp and VB.

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There have been several new features added to the CSharp language that will significantly reduce the amount of code that ends up in our source files.  It will not significantly reduce the amount of code that we have to write. One of those language features is the ability to create properties, which we looked at last week. Another of those features is the new var keyword. So, instead of writing:

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It’s such a little thing.  But, how much of our CSharp code looks something like this:

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private string _propertyName;

public string PropertyName
{
    get { return _propertyName; }
    set { _propertyName = value; }
}

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I saw this question and immediately thought, “You can’t!  An Enum is an Integer that has been restricted to the values it can accept.”

And I was basically right.  But, I forgot that even with an integer you can do the following in CSharp:

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I just saw a question about this yesterday and realized that while I know how to do this, not everyone does.  So, here we go…

Here’s the problem.  You want to be able to edit all the rows in the gridview at once instead of having to switch to edit mode and save one row at the time.  Normally, you’d want to do this when only a couple of items need to be changed per row and not the entire row’s worth of data.

Photo credit: tico_24 via VisualHunt.com / CC BY

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