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...

I’m currently creating a movie review website in PHP an SQLite. I’m taking a very object orientated approach. For example, all database access goes through an object. Adding a review is as simple as calling a function with the proper data. Here is the function header: addReview($assocArrayReviewData, $assocArrayReviewBlockData) Each parameter is an associative array that corresponds to fields in the database. While I don’t want to get into too much detail, the second variable is actually an array of arrays, where each one holds a block of review information (eg: “What the box says”, “funny quotes”, “My thoughts”). The best thing about is is that once I create the administration interface I can just call that one function with the correct parameters and bam, a new review. The class also has a built-in search function (that could be used on the internal or external site). My next class that I created for primarily for the administration area. It’s an html tag class object. You might...

I’ve been modifying Drupal (drupal.org) for a neighborhood organization website. It took a little research as, like most similar open-source projects, the documentation leaves something to be desired. I now have the site to a point where I want to put it up on the Internet. I have some hosting, so I got the domain… and bam, it’s on the web right? Well no. I feel it is necessary to make a general process overview as it took a good deal of research and tweaking to get it working: -I have “reseller hosting.” That means I can host multiple domains with the space/bandwidth that comes with the yearly fee. I bought the neighborhood domain, added a special hosting plan (defines storage, bandwidth, and other properties), and tried configuring the dns information -Seeing as I have not done too much with the whole domainname-dns-nameserver-whatever configuration process I had some trouble figuring it out. What I ended up doing was having my domain name registrar create 2 name servers from ...

Thanks to the new functionality I am able to use the free blogger.com blogs as a website. It’s all thinks to functionally they added after Google acquired them. For example I created a custom template for my sister’s graphic/fashion/photography design website. In this post I’ll go over the basics that allow this to work. Google allows custom domain names. This means the whole website can have a professional look and feel because all links connected to the site will look like www.nameofsite.com/revrefvrv/dfvdfvd… etc. The use of labels, conditional statements, and the database data that blogger allows to be accessed through the template system. To make a standard website I started with the simplest of the pre-created templates modifying it to suit my needs. I removed a lot of the functionality like comments, backlinks, and whatever else. For a basic website you first need some links to blocks of site content. I generally hard code them into the template. Now if you’ve used the ne...

As I mentioned in the previous post I had my custom CMS site reasonably functional. From that time as I worked with the director, I found out that they were using a CMS system already. No point in trying to reinvent the wheel as it’s said. It’s called Sohoadmin and it works pretty well all things considered. I would not call it that user friendly, but seeing as I am doing volunteer work I don’t want to spend 2-3 months creating my own thing that I would also then have to provide technical support to in the future. It’s been an interesting process so far getting them where they need to be. The person who they were working with before isn’t very motivated to help them and it was showing (he hosts the server too). I wanted to get Sohoadmin upgraded to the newest version, but when he tried to do that it did not work correctly resulting in me sticking some band aids on the site to get it somewhat functional again. Now we are to the point that we bought our...

1149 lines of code so far. That’s not including and database file initialization code or other things such as the css for the public site. Completed (“somewhat tested”): Add/edit main page links Add/edit/delete main page basic html content blocks Visual template system and the final visual look of the site. Public index.php looks “done” visually. The main links work and display all basic – content blocks when clicked (ordered by ‘zorder’). It’s just lacking sub links (articles and galleries). To Be Completed: Delete main page links (I haven’t decided if I want it to do a recursive deletion of all content associated with it or not). Add/edit/delete articles (aka. multipage basic html content blocks). Add/edit/delete image galleries. Make the admin pages secure. Testing, testing, and more testing! I’ve been thinking of not bothering with an image gallery aspect. The multi page articles would have similar abilities to a photo gallery. The only difference is that it could not support ...