Friday, July 24, 2015

Setting a Default Value for Enums in C#

Enums can be very useful in cases like where you want to maintain a set of named constants. Imagine you have following values, “Daily, Weekly, SemiMonthly etc” and you want to display these inside a drop down list. And for the dropdown you need to set up a default value. You can easily use enum for this. Of course I am sure all of you must be aware of how to use enums and from this post let’s see how we can set up a default value for an enum and how to get that default value.

So I have the following enum and please note the DefaultValueAttribute which I used to decorate my enum "Period" with.
[DefaultValue(Monthly)]
public enum Period
{
    Daily,
    Weekly,
    SemiMonthly,
    Monthly,
    Quarterly,
    SemiAnnually,
    Annually
}
So only by decorating the enum with DefaultValueAttribute and setting the default value, now my enum "Period" has a default value which is “Monthly”. Now let’s see how I can retrieve it.
public static T GetEnumDefaultValue<T>() where T : struct
{
    DefaultValueAttribute[] attributes = typeof(T).GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DefaultValueAttribute), false) as DefaultValueAttribute[];

    if (attributes != null && attributes.Length > 0)
    {
        return (T)attributes[0].Value;
    }
    return default(T);
}
Here I have a generic method, I have applied a constraint on the type argument where T : struct and that’s because enums are of value types. Then after getting the type of type argument, I am getting the list of attributes applied to it. Since the only attribute applied is a DefaultValueAttribute, I can cast the result set into an array of DefaultValueAttribute. Then if the result is not null and if it is elements, I am getting the value of first element. Else I am returning the enum which has the value 0 which is the default by nature of course.

Now let’s see how we can call this method. It's pretty simple.
static void Main(string[] args)
{
   Period period = GetEnumDefaultValue<Period>();
   Console.WriteLine(period.ToString());
}
And the output is as expected.
image
Result
Happy Coding.

Regards,
Jaliya

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Visual Studio 2015 : Live Visual Tree and Live Property Explorer for XAML Debugging

One of the nicest features introduced with Visual Studio 2015 is Live Visual Tree and Live Property Explorer windows. These two windows can be quite handy when you are debugging WPF applications and mainly on UI aspect.

To show you how these two can be tremendously helpful, let me create a WPF application and that’s using Visual Studio 2015 and add a text block inside a StackPanel.
image
Basic UI Structure
<Grid>
    <StackPanel HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center">
        <TextBlock x:Name="textBlock" Text="Hello World" FontSize="20"/>
    </StackPanel>
</Grid>

Now let’s run the application. While running the application from Live Visual Tree window, enable selection in the running application by clicking the below highlighted icon.
image
Live Visual Tree : Enable Selection in the Running Application
If you can’t find the Live Visual Tree window, go to Debug->Windows and click on Live Visual Tree.
image
Adding Live Visual Tree
Now from the running application when you move your mouse over the UI controls, they will be highlighted in Red color and you should be able to select the element just like you are Inspecting elements from the browser on web applications.

image
Selecting Elements on Running Application
Now when you click on a particular item, here in the example, “Hello World” text block, you can see that Live Visual Tree gets expanded and you will be landed directly on that particular TextBlock control. No matter how many controls you have this will work like a charm. Now let’s right click on the TextBlock and select Show Properties.

image
Live Visual Tree : Show Properties
Now Live Property Explorer window will be opened. Here from these properties you can change values of any of the properties, and those changes will be applied real time on the already running application.
image
Live Property Explorer
To see that in action, let’s change the value of FontSize property to 40.
image
Live Property Explorer
Do a quick save and from the Live Visual Tree, click back on the TextBlock. Now you can see that TextBlock containing the text “Hello World” has increased font size.

image
Increased Font Size
So Isn’t this great or what. Actually this feature is initially introduced with Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 and Microsoft has mentioned that this feature will be available in Universal Windows Platform applications as well in the future.

And for that we will have to wait till 29th this month, till Windows 10 is out.

Happy Coding.

Regards,
Jaliya

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio 2013 Update 5, .NET 4.6, ASP.NET 4.6 and C# 6 is Now Officially Released

20th July 2015 was a big day I believe for all the developers who are on Microsoft stack out there, as Microsoft has released the newest version of Visual Studio which is Visual Studio 2015. Along with Visual Studio 2015, .NET 4.6, ASP.NET 4.6C# 6, VB 14, F# 4, and one of my new favorites TypeScript 1.5 was released as well.

One significant change with the release of Visual Studio 2015 is, now there is no more Visual Studio 2015 Ultimate or Premium product line. Those two got merged into Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise and basically for Visual Studio 2015 mainly only three product offerings are available.
  • Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise with MSDN
  • Visual Studio 2015 Professional with MSDN
  • Visual Studio 2015 Community
Additionally Visual Studio 2015 Express editions, Test Professional edition and Team Foundation Server edition are available. For more information about Visual Studio 2015 Product Offerings, please visit the following link.
For Visual Studio 2013 product family, the newest release is Visual Studio 2013 Update 5. It has fixed number of bugs reported on Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 and you can find more information about bugs fixed and known issues from following knowledge base article.

Now it's time to start using these great set of tools.

Happy Coding.

Regards,
Jaliya

Monday, July 20, 2015

Visual C# Technical Guru - June 2015

Another month as a judge in Microsoft TechNet Guru Awards under Visual C# category.

The TechNet Guru Awards celebrate the technical articles on Microsoft TechNet.

Post in WikiNinjas Official Blog,
image
Visual C# Technical Guru - June 2015
Happy Coding.

Regards,
Jaliya

Friday, July 17, 2015

AngularJS ng-options Filter by Custom Function

In AngularJS when you are using ng-options, you can filter out the options by calling  a custom function you have in the controller.

Let’s say you have following set of employees and when you display all these employees inside HTML select using ng-options, you can see all the employees in a dropdown.
$scope.employees = [
    {
        name: "Jaliya Udagedara",
        department: "VS",
    },
    {
        name: "John Smith",
        department: "VS",
    },
    {
        name: "Jane Smith",
        department: "SQL",
    }
];
image
Result without Filter
And now let's say, you only need employees whose department is “VS”.

For that I am filtering the employees where department equals “VS” and that’s by calling a custom function. (here for this simple requirement I really don’t need to write a custom filter function, I can supply the filter even inline, but for the demonstration purposes, let’s call a custom function.)
<select ng-options="employee.name for employee in employees | filter:filterEmployeesByDepartment()"
        ng-model="selectedEmployee">
</select>
So here is the filter function inside the controller.
$scope.filterEmployeesByDepartment = function () {
    return function (item) {
        if (item.department == 'VS')
        {
            return true;
        }
        return false;
    };
};
Here the item is an employee inside my employees collection. If the employees’ department is “VS”, I should include it in the dropdown else I shouldn’t.

And this is my filtered employees.
image
Result with Filter
Even I can pass parameters to filterEmployeesByDepartment function.
<select ng-options="employee.name for employee in employees | filter:filterEmployeesByDepartment('Hello World')"
        ng-model="selectedEmployee">
</select>
And if I change the function accordingly,
$scope.filterEmployeesByDepartment = function (param) {
    return function (item) {
        console.log(param); // param->Hello World
    
        if (item.department == 'VS') {
            return true;
        }
        return false;
    };
};
Here, param will have the value “Hello World”.

Happy Coding.

Regards,
Jaliya

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Wrote a TNWiki Article Spotlight at Official Blog of TechNet Wiki

In this week’s TNWiki Article Spotlight, I wrote a post highlighting an article that won the TechNet Guru Awards for month of May, 2015, and that’s under Universal Windows Apps Category, an article from Emiliano Musso titled Geolocalize a device and store coordinates on Webserver.

image
TNWiki Article Spotlight - Geolocalize a device and store coordinates on Webserver

Happy Coding.

Regards,
Jaliya