A.D.D. In IT

Are you getting the dreaded "Could not load file or assembly" error in C#? Well there might be several causes of that, the most difficult to track down and fix is a missing assembly dependency.

We had to add XML Serialization functionality to a bunch of different classes. Here is a nice generic class for adding static methods for Serialization and Deserialization to any of your classes...

It is often the case that you need to re-throw an exception after handling it. The common problem with re-throwing exceptions is that you often lose stack trace information that can be extraordinarily useful for debugging purposes. I'll explain a technique that can be used to force the entire stack to be propagated when an exception is re-thrown.

In attempting to build source from an XML schema using the XSD command line tool, I kept getting an error about an element missing.

DataAnnotations is the Microsoft way of declaratively adding validation rules to a model. You simply add an attribute to a property and voila, it has validation! The concept of DataAnnotations should be familiar to anyone who has worked in Ruby on Rails and added validation rules inside the ActiveRecord model. I'm going to go over some of my findings and walk you through using DataAnnotations. Hopefully my pain, will be your gain.

Collections can be sorted using a variety of techniques. I'm giong to go over a few of the techniques for implementing sorting with Arrays. This is meant as a reference.

Kenny and I ran into an interesting debacle yesterday while attempting to fix a bug. This debacle dealt with the use of XML namespaces and XSL transforms. Even though both of us are proficient with XSL, we still found ourselves in a 2 hour bug fix over what eventually turned out to be a simple namespacing problem.

The rule is... if an XML document has a default namespace it must be matched in XSL by prefixing.

In rebuilding the Ramsay Corporation website, we changed a large number of URLs for categories and products. To retain backwards compatibilities and provide the proper redirection for users and search spiders, I decided to create an HttpModule to check the Request URL for redirection.

Have you ever wanted to create a SELECT element with the names and values of an enum Type? I'll readily admit, in my earlier programming days I used to create the control manually.

Thanks to the C# System.Enum class in .NET and its static helper methods, I can enumerate the Names and Values in an enum Type, increasing maintainability of my application.

RSS feeds are a great way to share data. We have a feed of product news that we wanted to embed in pages on our website. There are a variety of ways in which we could do this, but seeing how we like XSL and RSS is XML, it only seemed logical to use XSL to render feed links. This article focuses on loading the RSS feed on the server side and using XSL to transform the feed into HTML.