I've been a lot of time without writing here. I'm specially busy with other issues than blogging but this time is an special time. I'm proud to annouce the next session of the Madrid .Net User Group.

We'll explore some common problems in software development and their consecuences with some examples. And then we'll continue with five basic design rules in software development.

Event details:

Event Name: Retaking control, Agile Design Principles (Translated from Spanish title)
Speaker: León Welicki
Where: Microsoft Iberica Offices (Madrid)
When: November 15th from 19:00PM to 21:00PM
Registration: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032359440&Culture=es-ES

The Lazy Load Pattern is a very simple and useful pattern. This pattern is usually used when a property of an object is not always accessed during the usage of the object instance. For example, image that you have a Customer object. This object has a property that contains a collection of all orders placed by the customer. In the UI you have a general view of the customer object where you only show it name and surname. For this view of the customer object you don't use the Ordes property, so it can be loaded only when neccesary, for example in a detailed view of the customer object.



In a classical implementation of the Customer class, the Orders property use to be as follow, and is filled in the business layer when the instance of the Customer class is created.

class Customer
{
    #region Private members

    private int m_id;
    private string m_name;
    private string m_surname;
    private OrdersCollection m_orders;

    #endregion

    #region Public properties

    public int Id
    {
        get { return m_id; }
        set { m_id = value; }
    }

    public string Name
    {
        get { return m_name; }
        set { m_name = value; }
    }

    public string Surname
    {
        get { return m_surname; }
        set { m_surname = value; }
    }

    public OrdersCollection Orders
    {
        get { return m_orders; }
        set { m_orders = value; }
    }

    #endregion
}

A better performace approach is to defer the loading of the Orders property to the moment that it's accessed. If the property is accessed and the private member is null means that the property has not been initialized so you can load it value in that moment.

public OrdersCollection GetOrders()
{
    return new OrdersCollection(this.m_id);
}

I know that in the last months I haven't posted anything here, but the post of the other day. If you read the title of this post I'm sure that you're thinking that there's a mistake, but this is what I want to write "ilitialize()"

Today I've started working for ilitia technologies and I'm very happy. Some of the bloggers of clearscreen.com already belongs to it, and very happy to join the team. For those who didn't know about ilitia, it's a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner company based in Madrid (Spain). They usually use to collaborate in community events with Microsoft Iberica, what means that there are people with high technical level. I hope to learn a lot.

At the moment I don't have much more to say, I'll write more soon. I'm doing a personal project that I don't know if it will be useful but I'm sure it will be funny.

Doolwind's Game Coding Site is riding a Programmer Personality Test. This test is based on the Myers-Briggs Personality Test and has been modified to relate to your programmer personality type. It's a 12 question test so it's easy to fill out.

It says that I'm a DLTB (Doer, Low Level, Team, liBeral) programmer type.

What kind of programmer are you?

This morning while reading some posts I found a very nice method to apply TitleCase format to strings in .Net. TitleCase format consist of split a string by using the space char as delimiter and then change the first letter of each item of the string array to it Upper case equivalent. Applying TitleCase to the sentence "this is a title case example sentence" we get a string like this "This Is A Title Case Example Sentence".

I supose that I'm not the only one that has write a method like the shown below to format strings in C#:

/// <summary>
/// Applies title case format to the input string
/// </summary>
/// <param name="strIn">Input string tobe formatted</param>
/// <returns>Title case formatted string</returns>
public string ToTitleCase(string strIn)
{
    //check if is null
    if( strIn == null )
        return string.Empty;
    
    //split the input string using space char as delimiter
    string [] words = strIn.Split(' ');
    string retValue = string.Empty;
    
    //apply upper case format to each string and append it to the output string
    foreach(string word in words)
    {
        retValue += String.Format("{0}{1} ", word[0].ToString().ToUpper(), word.Substring(1));
    }
    
    //return the formatted string
    return retValue;
}

string sentence = "this is a title case example sentence";
string formattedSentence = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.TextInfo.ToTitleCase(sentence);

string sentence = "this is a title case EXAMPLE sentence";
string example1 = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.TextInfo.ToTitleCase(sentence.ToLower());
string example2 = ToTitleCase(sentence.ToLower());

Console.WriteLine(String.Format("Original sentence: {0}", sentence));
Console.WriteLine(String.Format(".Net Framework formatting: {0}", example1));
Console.WriteLine(String.Format("Custom made formatting: {0}", example2));

Console.ReadLine();

I know that I've stayed off for a long time, and probably I'll stay some time more. I've a lot things to do and the blogsphere isn't one of my principal purposes. Reading that you'll think "And.. Why is he posting now???" My reply to this question is that Resharper 2.0 is now out.. I've just read it at jetbrain's web and I got excited..

For those who didn't know what Resharper is, it's a Visual Studio Addin that increases  your productivity by adding a lot of features to Visual Studio. Error Highlighting and Quick-Fixes, Advanced Coding Assistance, Numerous Refeactorings, Navigation And Search, Unit Testing, ASP.Net Editing, NAnt and MS Build Scripts Editing...

I'm going to test Resharper 2.0 VS2003 version and I'll write here my  opinion in few days.

Remember: Resharper Homepage

Patterns & Pratices has very good Security How Tos articles most of them rated 9 of 9. The topics of this articles applies to a lot of  issues that surely got crazy many of you (and me). Take a look at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnpag2/html/SecurityHowTosIndex.asp?frame=true

Overview.

The first post of this category will cover how to embed a Windows Media Player control in HTML documents.

Sometimes we need or we want to have media contents in our HTML documents. This kind of contents can be in a secondary plain in our HTML documents, for example we can have an mp3/wma file playing in the background to give the user a pleasant experience when he/she is browsing our Web Site. In other situations the media content can be the main content of our Web Site, for example if our Web Site is an Online Radio Station or an Online Video Store platform our Web Site lacks of sense without media content.

Embedding Windows Media Player control in HTML documents.

In order to view or listen the media contents the client must have installed Windows Media Player ActiveX control. To add media contents to our Web Site we need to create an OBJECT tag in our HTML code. It's recommended to place this tag inside the BODY tag, placing it into HEAD tag may result in unexpected behavior.

To get this work we need set up some attributes, parameters and properties in the OBJECT tag. This tag have a large list of attributes, parameters and properties but now I'll only focus on the more important ones.

OBJECT attributes

* To get more info about PARAMS click here. (MSDN page)

Code sample

View Sample

Conclusion

As you can see adding static media content to our Web Sites it’s quite easy. In the next post I’ll explain how to create a custom interface for managing the media content.

Hope this helps!

Windows Media #1