Honest Illusion

Peter recently caused a bit of a stir with his article “Sometimes an enum is not the best idea”.  In it, he had a very specific problem: When an enum is passed to a method as an Object, and that method converts it to a usable value by calling ToString(), you get that enum’s name and not it’s value.  And he gave a gave very specific solution to ...

In our last episode, we discussed the PortableAreaController base class, which makes it simple to create a portable area using Monorail.  In this installment, we put that class to use. For the purposes of this example, the controller isn’t going to do anything useful – I’m not even going to bother with code in the actions.  The different ...

Recently I had read a blogger comparing Castle Monorail with ASP.NET MVC.  He chose ASP.NET mainly because it supported Portable Areas while Monorail did not.  As a supporter of Monorail, I was very offended by this, and decided to correct the problem.  The first step… finding out exactly what a “portable area” was. A Portable Area is a ...

In my daily web-surfing, I often stumble upon snippets of C# code posted by people.  Usually, I can tweak  it a bit. Sometimes, I can tweak it a lot.  I usually post a quick comment to the site offering it.  Today, I came upon some code that was so bad --- which the author said was from his forthcoming book! --- more drastic measures must be ...

This was intended to be a two-part article.  It was just after I published the original article, I noticed that I’d left out a large part of ViewComponentEx. We continue….. protected bool RenderOptionalSection(string section) protected bool RenderOptionalSection(string section, string defaultText) Renders the named ...

I’ve been rewriting my website, njtheater.com, (very slowly) as a Castle MonoRail application.  Along the way, I’ve written a number of ViewComponent and other elements.  Many of these were of general use, so I’ve added them to the CastleContib project, and documented them in the using.castleproject.org wiki. Two problem there: First, some of ...

(Me + you) && (you + me) var nomatter = dice.toss(); assert (it != null) me.Only1(you); assert(you == me.Only1()); (Me + you).happy = so;   (more on the meme here)    

Over on CodeProject, I spotted an article by Mahdi Yousefi called '' Creating an ASP.NET captcha using jQuery and s3capcha”. public static List<int> shuffle(List<int> input) { List<int> output = new List<int>(); Random rnd = new Random(); int FIndex; while (input.Count > 0) { ...

You may have noticed that I don’t write on this blog much.  But the thing is I do write a lot on the inter-webs about technical matters --- I just don’t to it here.  Usually, I find something interesting on someone else’s blog, and then write an improvement in the comments.  So, my work goes to helping other people’s pagerank.  I figure this ...

The folks at Dev102.com are offering weekly programming challenges, where they offer questions, and let bloggers post about them.  I meant to write an answer for last week, but never got around to it.  Just as well -- my answer would have been wrong.  SO, let's move on to this week's: How would you implement the following method: Foo(7) == ...