04 Feb 13 My favorite extention

Apart from linq, this extension saves me more time than any other syntactic sugar.

public static class Extension
    {  
        public static bool Like(this string str, string str1)
        {
            if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(str) || String.IsNullOrEmpty(str1 ))
                return (String.IsNullOrEmpty(str) && String.IsNullOrEmpty(str1));
            else
                return str.Equals(str1, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase);
        } 
    }

Usage is simple.

instead of having to write:

if (str.Equals(str1, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase))

you can write

if (str.like(str1))

And not have to worry about null exceptions.

Enjoy!

16 Jan 12 Razor DropDownList With Descriptions From An Enum Using Extentions, Generics, and Reflection.

A good test of a web framework is to see how it handles select boxes.  It requires managing the list, the selected item across several states,  be easily styled, be easily ajax-ed, and connect to a data store.

I like using Enums for static data, but they are a bit limited without a description value, you end up with select options labeled “ItemName ” instead of  ”Human Friendly Item Name”.

Binding an enum to a dropdown is well documented. Adding descriptions to enums is also well documented.  Here is a way to have enums with descriptions into a dropdown.

Your Enum

The Razor

This function will turn your enum into an IEnumerable<SelectListItem>

Of course shortly after finishing this I found a great post on StackOverflow about making html helpers which results in an even prettier finish in razor, but requires a few extra helpers.

05 Jan 12 Obscure Tags

Ever used the definition list tag?  Me neither, yet it’s fully supported in all the browsers.

turns into this:

From w3schools: “ The <dl> tag defines a definition list. The <dl> tag is used in conjunction with <dt> (defines the item in the list) and <dd> (describes the item in the list).”

Well now i’ve used it.

05 Jan 12 Cross Domain Resource Sharing

CORS was really part of the inspiration for ServerCyde.  AJAX is cool, it lets you make the web more responsive, but it only connects to the site that you built.  If you wanted to consume the services of a third party then you would have to proxy it over your server or compromise on the functionality that you can offer.  As more and more digital services get turned into API services (life graphs, url minification, image manipulation,  data storage…) browsers will evolve to allow greater interconnectedness without sacrificing security. Right now each browsing is either trying their own implementation out (is it netscape vs IE all over again) or at some stage op implementing CORS standards, or web sockets. In the mean time I wanted a solution that worked now and supported all of the HTTP verbs so I had to implement one myself.

What it came down to was simple enough. Hidden iFrames and window.href polling. You see, when you open a site in an iframe the parent can only read the URL if the domains match. So what i did was have my server redirect back to your domain with a token in the URL that you could use to make a plain JSONP request for the data.  This model, works in every browser, lets you POST with cookies, and even allows a connection to stay open for a COMET implementation.

You can check it out in action here: http://servercyde.com/Developers/

Get the code from GitHub here: https://github.com/easymovet/ServerCyde/wiki

And see a presentation of it’s implementation, that I delivered to JavascriptMN at Refactr in November.