Dev::Blog

As part of my ongoing “stop coding like it’s 1999″ regime, I managed to think my way out of some code in the following scenario:

My business object returns a phone number, but it happens to be a raw number, i.e. there’s no formatting: (416) 967-1111 comes back as 4169671111. I’ve got a repeater control in ASP.NET, and I want to pretty it up.

In the past, I’d:

1. Code a new property into the business object to give me a formatted string.
2. Add an ItemDataBound event handler to the repeater, which calls FindControl and fills in the value all pretty-like.
3. Ignore the issue and hope nobody notices.

The new and improved Luke does this in his <ItemTemplate> node:

<%# String.Format(
   ”{0:(###) ###-####},
   Convert.ToInt64(
      DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, “PhoneNumber”)))
%>

Not the prettiest thing in the world, but (after some thinking) the easiest, and it actually puts the presentation details at the right layer.

If I’m not careful, I might actually become productive.

Pop quiz: is there a cleaner way to do this?

Coding Horror: It looks like you’re writing a for loop!

Oh, if I had a nickel for every time I rubbed my belly this week alone…

Stolen shamelessly from some newsgroup archive:

[TestFixtureSetUp]
public void Setup()
{
    Trace.Listeners.Add(new TextWriterTraceListener(Console.Out));
}

NUnit is the new “make a quick test GUI app with one button to check stuff,” and Trace is the new printf. Life is good.

I made it to an MSDN “deep dive” event today on ASP.Net 2.0:

1. Microsoft has been getting some flack from some in the software community for their constantly shifting platform. I’m reminded of the late 90’s when I thought I’d teach myself some data access stuff, and I discovered ODBC, DAO, RDO, and OLEDB. I put those plans on hold and waited for the dust to settle. (I’m just now getting into ADO.NET.) Today’s summary of 2.0 gave me the impression that I was wise to wait this long, at least. There’s a lot of cool stuff available and they seem to have addressed a lot of the concerns from the earlier versions (I’m liking the little things, like the increased use of flow layout so the designer doesn’t wreck my HTML markup.)
2. Of course, with all the cool stuff we saw, it’s kind of silly to call the event a “deep dive.” The presentation was good and had lots of demos, but it really wasn’t any different from any other vendor presentation where they try to wow you with the cool gizmos but only scratch the surface of the underlying technologies. I’m fine with the format, but the name doesn’t provide much credibility.
3. Speaking of gizmos, the focus really seemed to be on reducing the amount of coding that developers have to do to make web pages. There once was a time that I wanted to do every line of code by hand. Oddly, it’s only since I started getting paid by the hour that I started seriously straying towards the land of wizards and code generators. I still need to understand what I’m pasting in so I can extend it, but my productivity with the new Microsoft tools has soared.
4. Bringing points 1 and 3 together, I suppose Microsoft’s long range plans are less important when it comes to small and medium scale web development. If a new technology comes along that requires changes to one of the application layers, that’s really all that gets obsoleted. I’m curious as to when we’ll see a point where DHTML pages get archived like COBOL programs.
5. Finally, I was confronted with a situation I never thought I’d experience as a man: at the break, the lineup for the men’s washroom was without exaggeration about 30 feet from the door. There wasn’t a lineup for the women’s washroom, since there were all of 5 women at the event, and 3 of them worked at the venue (OK, a mild exaggeration). If we want to make progress on the gender gap in IT, we should post job ads in the washrooms in bars…