August 2004 - Posts
Thought for the holidays:
Two things that drive us, software development addicts: enthusiasm and laziness....
Just quoting
Scott Hanselman for this tip:
A day may come when you want to turn off the Debug dialog that appears when a .NET program has an unhandled exception.
Option 1: Registry key from Enabling JIT Debugging
For an application that includes managed code, the common language runtime will present a similar dialog to JIT-attach a debugger. The registry key that controls this option is called HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\.NETFramework\DbgJITDebugLaunchSetting.
- If value = 0, prompt the user by means of a message box. The choices are:
- Continue. This results in a stack dump and process termination.
- Attach a debugger. In this case, the runtime spawns the debugger listed in the DbgManagedDebugger registry key. If none, control is returned, and the process is terminated.
- If value = 1, simply return control. This results in a stack dump, after which the process is terminated. (No more dialog)
- If value = 2, spawn the debugger listed in the DbgManagedDebugger registry key.
Option 2: If you want to disable the JIT debug dialog, but still want an error dialog:
Visual Studio.NET|Tools|Options|Debugging|Just-In-Time and deselect "Common Language Runtime" and now you’ll get an OK/Cancel dialog instead of the select a Debugger Dialog. Note: The registry entry from Option 1 above will need to be 0 for the dialog to show up.
Thanks to Eric Deslauriers of Corillian QA for these tips!
This dialog can be useful in some cases (mainly in development), but annoying in most cases. But, what if I want to disable this dialog per application?
When I started
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Scott Mitchell created a WebControl named RoundedCorners. Its goal is to simplify the creation of rounded boxes in your dynamic web pages.
Let's quote Scott:
Creating a box with rounded corners isn't terribly difficult, and there's a myriad of ways for creating such design elements. Virtually all of the techniques, though, require using Photoshop or some other graphics editing program to create rounded corners of the appropriate color. For graphics designers, creating rounded corners must be extremely boring, and they likely hold as much interest in creating rounded corners as veteran ASP.NET developers do in creating a connection to a database. Been there, done that - thousands of times. But for non-graphics designers (like yours truly), creating these rounded corners can be frustratingly slow and annoying, especially if you're like me, and the only graphics editing program you have is Microsoft Paint.
To overcome this loathsome activity, I decided to create a custom ASP.NET server control that would utilize the dynamic image-creation capabilities of GDI+ to create the corner images for me. The result is an ASP.NET Web control, which I call RoundedCorners, that you can drop on an ASP.NET Web page, set a few properties, and be presented with a nifty box with rounded corners, as shown on the right.
The most up to date version of this control allows you to drag and drop controls into the control, just like with the standard Panel.
I recommand this control in case you want a simple rounded box. In cases where you want something more fancy and don't mind playing with a picture editor, you can use my old StyledPanel WebControl.
The source code is quite simple (one class, a few lines), and the control supports composition too, which means you can drag&drop controls from VS' ToolBox into the control.
Something you may want to do is upgrade this control to a templated one. This would let you specify separate content for the header of the control, and for the body, for example. Creating templated web controls is explained by Scott Mitchell himself.
How do you report spam? I use
SpamCop, and you, what is your preferred response to spam?
If you look at this post by SantoshZ of the C# team, you'll see code like this:
Connection conn = null;
try
{
conn = new Connection();
conn.Open();
}
catch
{
if (conn != null) conn.Close();
}
Well, this is quite a strange code snippet coming from the C# team, I must say! It demonstrates bad exception handling.
Here is what this code should look like in my opinion:
Connection conn = new Connection();
conn.Open();
try
{
...
}
finally
{
conn.Close();
}
Why is that?
- There is no need to call Close() if Open() was not previously executed.
- There is no need to call Close() if Open() failed.
- You probably want "finally" instead of "catch"
Too often do I see code all in a big try...catch block.
BTW, don't forget to use the using statement, which greatly simplifies code in a lot of cases.
Watch Anders giving an informal talk in front of a whiteboard. He talks about C# features, present and to come. You'll learn what he thinks about AOP, dynamic languages, mixins, closures, iterators, nullables, and so on.
Drew knows his thing. He was the one who gave the
right explaination for my quiz. I just copy it here:
DictionaryEntry is a structure and you're foreaching which means the instance is coming from IDictionaryEnumerator.Current therefore assigning to only the local copy. This would be a nasty problem if people forgot about the semantics of value types vs. ref. types, so the C# compiler prevents you from doing this.
However, I agree with
Eric Newton that the message from the compiler should be clearer! The current one is very confusing.
Now, if you want something even more confusing, you can try the following code:
IDictionary dictionary = new Hashtable();
dictionary["dummy"] = "dumb";
IEnumerator enumerator = dictionary.GetEnumerator();
while (enumerator.MoveNext())
{
DictionaryEntry entry;
entry = (DictionaryEntry) enumerator.Current;
entry.Value = 0; // no compiler error, but "error" nonetheless
}
Console.WriteLine(dictionary["dummy"]); This one compiles, but doesn't do what you'd expect at first. Guess what the output will be... So yes, the compiler message is useful (even if not easy to understand), but doesn't fire in all the cases...
I would like to apologize to readers: you'll notice that posting comments on most of the posts of this weblog is currently disabled. You'll see "Comments on this post are closed" instead. I'm sorry about this, and I can't change anything about it right now :-( This is a new site-wide (weblogs.asp.net) setting.
I hope we'll be able to reactivate the comments soon! I don't like that setting at all. I appreciate comments much, and I do not consider that previous posts as obsolete.
Scott, please do something! I you want this feature to be disabled too, please
say it.
In the spirit of language quizes, you can try to find why the following code does not compile:
DictionaryEntry entry1 = new DictionaryEntry();
entry1.Value = 0; // OK
IDictionary dictionary = new Hashtable();
dictionary["dummy"] = "dumb";
foreach (DictionaryEntry entry2 in dictionary)
entry2.Value = 0; // NOT OK : "The left-hand side of an assignment must be a variable, property or indexer"
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