Patrick Stuart.com

Category: C#

  • Windows Phone 7 Mango

    Well, I got a Samsung Focus S to play around with this weekend and test the windows phone 7 OS out.  Overall, I liked it, but I can’t switch from iOS just yet.

    UI

    The “Metro” UI is actually quite nice, I found it easy to use and find everything.  My biggest gripe is lack of customization beyond just the basic moving around of things.  I can’t find the battery percentage at the top, have to dig fifteen menus deep to get at it.

    Email

    I love the email app, finally someone gives me a way to see only unread emails, only flagged emails, only important (!) emails in my exchange outlook.  The linked inboxes are cool too, even though I finally got that on iOS.

    Social

    The phone is clearly aimed at social media users, and the integration is really good.  Of course its lacking any Google+ integration.  Not a big deal, but its easy to set up and easy to use.  Can easy send pictures to multiple social media sites. Only biggest issue is you can’t easily switch between multiple users on different sites.

    Issues

    Have to use the Zune software on my computer to load music.  I hate the zune software, why can’t I just copy my music over, or why can’t I download music from my skydrive?

    No VPN???  Really Microsoft? Really?  I can’t believe you released a mobile OS without any VPN support!  This is absurd!

    App prices are off the chart.  Sure I get xbox live integration, but nothing too impressive here.

    No Hulu? Again, Really?  This isn’t rocket science, get hulu on your OS!

     

    Development

    I’m a native visual studio user, so I found creating apps using XAML very familar, but no sockets connections!  This means any non web based connections are out of the question.  I wanted to write a simple app to query my Control4 system.  Already had a cool C# desktop app, figured it would be easy… Nope.  The SDK lacks a lot of core .NET features.

     

    Overall

    I want to like this OS, but I can’t.  I like the phone, despite bad battery life.  The camera is good, the screen is ok, a bit gray in the whites for me.  Ultimately, it will be another version or two before they win me over again.  For now, I’m going back to my iPhone 4, I miss my iPhone 4.

  • How to Show Your Meta Description and Keywords on an ASP Master Page

    So today’s challenge was to display the Title, Meta description and meta tags on a site I am currently working on for troubleshooting and SEO reasons.

    The solution I came up with was to place the following code in the code behind of the masterpage.

    
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
HtmlHead headTag = (HtmlHead)Page.Header;
            Response.Write("Title of Page: " + headTag.Title + "");

            foreach (var control in Page.Header.Controls)
            {
                var test = control.GetType();
                if (test.Name == "HtmlMeta")
                {
                    if ((control as HtmlMeta).Name == "Description")
                    {
                        Response.Write("MetaDescription : " + (control as HtmlMeta).Content + "");
                    }
                    if ((control as HtmlMeta).Name == "Keywords")
                    {
                        Response.Write("MetaKeywords : " + (control as HtmlMeta).Content + "");
                    }
                }
            }
}

    The HeadTag.Title gives us the Title of the current page.
    The foreach loop jumps through each control in the header section of the current page.
    Since there can be different types of controls in the header section, we need to check for the type of HtmlMeta.
    Then we need to check to see if it is the Description or Keywords and return the content values.

    I am sure there are other ways, but this is a really simple way to display the 3 main SEO elements, Page Title, Page MetaTag Description and Page MetaTag Keywords for all the ASP.NET pages that use this master page (or you can place it on each page code behind) without having to view the source code.

    Just remember to remove this code before you launch your site 🙂

  • WPF Dynamically Added Controls and Getting Values

    Today’s challenge was fun.

    I had added a bunch of textboxes and labels to a Grid with 2 StackPanel in my code behind.

    
StackPanel sp1 = new StackPanel();
StackPanel sp2 = new StackPanel();
Grid g = new Grid();
                ColumnDefinition colDef1 = new ColumnDefinition {Width = new GridLength(50)};
                ColumnDefinition colDef2 = new ColumnDefinition();
                g.ColumnDefinitions.Add(colDef1);
                g.ColumnDefinitions.Add(colDef2);
gb.Content = g;
                Grid.SetColumn(sp1,0);
                g.Children.Add(sp1);
                Grid.SetColumn(sp2, 1);
                g.Children.Add(sp2);

for (int i = 1, i < = 4, i++)
{
                Label lbl = new Label {Content = "Name", Margin = new Thickness(0)};
                Grid.SetColumn(lbl, 0);
                sp1.Children.Add(lbl);
                TextBox fieldname = new TextBox {Text = "", Name = "fieldname" + i, Margin = new Thickness(0,5,0,0)};
                Grid.SetColumn(fieldname, 1);
                sp2.Children.Add(fieldname);
}

    So I then wanted to get the results of what someone types into these TextBoxs.

    But wait, I can’t just access them like this:

    
string t = fieldname1.Text;

    Why? Only Microsoft knows, but apparently, dynamically added controls can’t be accessed this way since they don’t exist in the XAML code.

    So, how does one access them then? Well, that’s where this cool LogicalTreeHelper function to find the control by name we use the FindLogicalNode option of the LogicalTreeHelper function

    So to loop through the number of fields you added you can do the following:

    
List test = new List;
for (int i = 1; i < = 4; i++)
{
test.Add((LogicalTreeHelper.FindLogicalNode(Fields1, "fieldname" + i) as TextBox).Text);
}

    So there you have it, a simple way to access dynamically added controls using LogicalTreeHelper and FindLogicalNode just remember to name your controls you add.

  • Microsoft C#, LINQ, XML, WPF and the Lack of Good Examples

    Ok,

    My rant for the day is about trying to use Microsoft C# and LINQ and XML and WPF. I spend more time trying to figure out simple stuff, because nothing exists as solid examples of how to do what I need to do.
    I spend so much of my time trying to find decent examples of how to do stuff on the net, and find nearly nothing.
    Why?
    I know people are doing this stuff, is it because its a closed source system and sharing the code just isn’t “cool” by the users?
    I am sick of it, and I am going to try to lead by example and post my minor victories in trying to do things using this great platform.

    Why?
    Well, couple of reasons…
    1. Code should be free. Not as in not get paid for it, but how to do something should be shared, knowledge isn’t worth anything unless you share it.
    2. Selfish reasons, I can find different things I find much easier and watch my progression through the products
    3. Cause I haven’t really found a good reason to keep posting regularly on my blog, and this just might be a good excuse.

    So, there you have it, my rant for the day and my promise to share my code examples of what I am trying to do.

  • Writing Out LINQ to XML Documents to CSV Text Files

    This may sound stupid, but I wanted to store some text parsing I was doing for some VDP projects in LINQ to XML XDocuments.

    So, I created the following:

    XDocument recs = new XDocument();
    XElement records1 = new XElement("Records");
    XElement record1 = new XElement("Record");
    record1.Add(new XElement("id", "1"),
    new XElement("Name","Test"),
    new XElement("Address","123 Anywhere")
    );
    records1.Add(record1);
    recs.Add(records1);

    which should create an xml document looking like this:

    <Records>
    <Record>
    <id>1</id>
    <Name>Test</Name>
    <Address>123 Anywhere</Address>
    </Record>
    </Records>

    So, I want to write this out to a CSV file. But I want to assume that my XML Nodes might change (but at least stay consistent throughout the XML Document) by datasource and I want to systematically write out the names of the nodes and then loop through and write out the values.

    So the hard part:

    var list2 = from el2 in recs.Elements("Record")
    select el2;
    //Build Header Line
    StringBuilder csvlist = new StringBuilder();
    var headers = (list2.First().Nodes().ToList());
    int cc = 1;
    foreach (var node in headers)
    {
    csvlist.Append((node as XElement).Name);
    if (cc != headers.Count)
    {
    csvlist.Append(",");
    }
    cc++;
    }
    csvlist.AppendLine();
    foreach (var t in list2)
    {
    for (int i = 0; i < t.Nodes().Count(); i++)
    {
    csvlist.Append((t.Nodes().ToList()[i] as XElement).Value);
    if (i != (t.Nodes().Count() - 1))
    {
    csvlist.Append(",");
    }
    }
    csvlist.AppendLine();
    }

    So at the end of all this, csvlist contains the headers and data as comma separated.

    There are lots we could add or fix in this, but it allows us great flexibility in outputting xml data as delimited text.

    DISCLAIMER: I am not a professional coder, I do this as a passion. The above code has no warranty or ability to actually do what I say it does. Use at your own risk, fix, add or change if you are willing.