I was about to write a method that checked to see if a character was a hexadecimal value when it occurred to me that I should google for it. I was going to name it IsHexDigit, and googling for that revealed this link. I’m not sure why it’s in the System.Uri class, but it’s less code for me to write.
Tag: .net
.NET Utility Classes
I just came across this great post on overlooked .NET utility classes. I prefer to buy functionality or use open source rather than build from scratch, so it’s ideal when there’s already something in the .NET framework I can use.
App_Offline.htm
I came across a couple of useful posts from Scott Guthrie about App_Offline.htm. This page appears and disappears automatically when the “Publish Web Site” option is used. What I didn’t know is that it’s part of the .NET framework (not the IDE). This means the page can be added and removed manually. This will be especially useful in my current environment, where we depend on network engineers to deploy web applications to test and production sites.
Here are the posts:
App_Offline.htm and IE Friendly Errors
ASP.NET Configuration File Handling
One of things I like the least about working with multiple development, QA, and production environments is messing around with configuration files to make sure the different versions point at the right databases. Add the use of the Enterprise Library, and there are even more files to manage.
In my last year at Ciena, I worked in a group where they’d put together some code that detected what environment it was in (development, QA, or production) and retrieved the correct settings from web.config. It was similar to the solution Mike Gunderloy describes in this article on ASP.NET 2.0 productivity.
When I was poking around for more information on config file handling, I came across another article that references Gunderloy’s that talks about a file attribute for the appSettings tag. I hadn’t come across the existence of that attribute anywhere else before. I’ll definitely use this on my next project.
Finally, this article provides another option for dealing with configuration files in multiple environments. The code and examples are well-explained. My group at Lockheed Martin should integrate something like this into the custom library we’ve been building.
“Free” Project Management Software
I was looking for information on the right way to modify the ASP.NET Issue Tracker starter kit to handle Windows Authentication. One of the things Google search returned was an app called Gemini that does a similar thing. Up to 10 people can use the version they offer for download before they start asking for money. Considering the way the current IssueTracker installation is behaving right now, I’m beginning to wish I’d found Gemini earlier.