TheWayOfCoding.com

Figuring out a variable’s type has become more important since now variables can be boxed by their parent class(s) (Where all can be “Object”). It’s nice because it allows for one generalized function to work with many types that perform an action on a common attribute, or first figure out what the object is and then perform the action. That is one of the instances where figuring out a variables type is important. .NET has a built-in function called GetType() which figures out what type a variable is. //loop through the controls in the panel and figure out  //which of the checkboxes are checked  foreach (Control panelControl in newCheckListQuestionPanel.Controls) {       //only continue if this control is a checkbox      if(panelControl.GetType().ToString()      .Equals("System.Windows.Forms.CheckBox") == true)      {           if (((CheckBox)panelControl).Checked == true)  ...

Take not that Microsoft will discontinue support for System.Data.OracleClient in .NET 4.0. This method should still work, but it will be depreciated… Please view this post for a better way to connect to Oracle. Ugh, I spent a good 6 hours figuring out how to do this! Hopefully this post can save someone some time. Connecting to an Oracle database requires driver files from Oracle. This is true no matter what you use in Visual Studio, it true for System.Data.ODBC or whatever else. This little factoid took me a while to figure out, as I didn’t want to believe that I had to install a 200mb piece of software from Oracle just to connect to one of their databases. Well thankfully I didn’t have to install their standard client. They offer an “instant client” that is quite a bit smaller. They even offer a lite version of the instant client, which is the one I decided to use. The bad thing about it is even that is around 20mb in size. You can download it here: http://www.oracle.com/tec...

The program I am writing at work’s primary functionality is a checklist. One of the requested features is the ability to record what actions a user performs on the checklist. So there needs to be some additional code that updates a history table whenever a user makes any changes to the checklist. Let’s define when a history event should fire off: When the user makes a new checklist. When the user updates any property of the checklist. When a user archives a checklist (eg: discard in so many words). Making a history entry when the user makes a new checklist or archives a checklist is easy. There would generally be only one function for each, so just before or after adding or archiving the checklist from the database, the history process is called. What about when the user updates a single field in a checklist? It is important to track those changes, because a single little change is generally the most important (he said, she said situation). In my program checklistprocessor, checkli...

Ahh, some if you may notice that the mouse scroll wheel doesn’t work by default with FlowLayoutPanels. Yeah, this little thing has frustrated me for a while. I usually check the Internet for solutions to problems I have been having. Most likely someone has posted on a message board about the same problem and the problem was solved. Sadly, this method of finding information can lead to numerous dead ends as people don’t post the solution (eg: “Hey I figured it out!”) and fail to say what they did. Or the solution they figure out isn’t “good.” Of course, programming blogs are also a good resource with generally higher quality information, but they don’t seem to be as prevalent in search engines for some reason. Maybe blogs are generally lower traffic? Like I said before, one such issue I was having was with FlowLayoutPanels and the mouse scroll wheel not scrolling them when the panels had scroll bars. Doing a search on the internet came up with close to nothing. Most “solutions” ...

I’ve been doing C# programming at my job lately. Throughout the process I’ve hit a few little walls that were difficult to find answers for and thought writing down the solutions here would be good for myself any anyone who happens to find this by-way-of search engine. So as I come upon these little bits of useful harder-to-find information, I’ll write something here about it. Creating windows form controls programmatically and passing data between class instances was one such issue. I did a number of searches on Google and didn’t really find much help. The main suggestion was to create an EventArgs class that passes events or some such thing. That was a really involved process that didn’t seem like it was worth the effort to implement. I then created my own static global event class where anything in the program could pass an unlimited number of parameters. Once the parameters were accessed, they were deleted from the static Dictionary that stored everything. Well actually it wa...