P3.NET

Adding Dates to C#

23 December 2013
6 Comments
Categories: .NET, C#

UPDATE: A bug was recently found when determining the difference between 2 dates across a year boundary. A corrected version has been uploaded to the site.

In .NET the DateTime type represents both a date and a time. .NET doesn’t really have a pure date type. Ironically it does have a pure time type in the form of TimeSpan. In general this isn’t an issue but when you really just need a date (i.e. the end of a grading period) then you have to be aware of the time. For example when comparing 2 date/time values the time is included in the comparison even if it does not matter. To eliminate time from the comparison you would need to set both to the same value (i.e. 00:00:00). Another example is conversion to a string. A date/time value will include the time so you have to use a format string to eliminate it. Yet another issue is that creating specific dates using DateTime isn’t exactly readable (i.e. July 4th, 2000 is new DateTime(2000, 4, 4)).

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Language Friendly Type Names

29 September 2013
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Categories: .NET, C#

.NET uses Type everywhere to represent type information.Not surprisingly Type is language-agnostic. In many cases it is useful to get the friendly (aka language-specific) name for a Type object. .NET does not provide this easily. There are several different approaches but none of them work really well if you want the name that would have been used in your favorite language. This post will discuss some of the options available and then provide a more general solution to the problem that doesn’t actually require much effort.

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Environmental Transforms/AppSettings Transforms for Visual Studio 2013 Preview

29 July 2013
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Categories: C#, T4, VS2013

In a recent series of articles I discussed how to create an environmental tranform template that could be run on each build.  I also posted a series of articles on how to generate a template to generate a strongly typed class to back appsettings in a configuration file.  Alas shortly thereafter VS2013 Preview was released and changes to VS have broken the code.  This post will discuss the minor changes that need to be made to get everything to work.

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Environmental Config Transforms, Part 2

23 June 2013
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Categories: C#, T4, Visual Studio

In the previous article we updated the build process to support environmental config transforms in projects and to have the transforms run on any build. In this article we are going to package up the implementation to make it very easy to add to any project. There are a couple of things we want to wrap up.

  • Place the .targets file into a shared location
  • Add an import into the current project to the .targets file
  • Add environmental config transforms into the project
  • Remove the default config transforms generated by Visual Studio
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Environmental Config Transforms, Part 1

17 June 2013
8 Comments
Categories: C#, T4, Visual Studio

Configuration file transforms have been around for quite a while and most companies use them to generate different config files for each environment but Visual Studio does not really support the functionality most companies need.In this article I’m going to talk about why the existing Visual Studio implementation is flawed and how to fix it so that you can have true environmental transforms that are actually useful.

For purposes of this article we will assume a simple web application (although it applies to any application) that will be deployed to 2 different environments – test and production. We will also assume that developers debug the application on their local machine and therefore should not have to do any special tasks to debug the application locally. As such we’ll have a 3th, default, environment – debug.

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Using T4 to Create an AppSettings Wrapper, Part 7

28 April 2013
14 Comments
Categories: C#, T4

In this final article in the series we’re finishing up the deployment projects started last time. When we’re complete we’ll have a set up projects that can be used to build and deploy T4 templates where needed. The projects will be able to support any number of templates so maintenance will be simple even as more templates are added. In the previous article we moved the core template functionality into a library that we can expand upon. We also set up an item template project to store the root T4 template that someone would use. In this article we’re going to create the project to store the nested templates (we’ll discuss why later) along with the Visual Studio Extension (vsix) file that will be used to install everything.

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Using T4 to Create an AppSettings Wrapper

21 April 2013
2 Comments
Categories: C#, T4

Update 28 Aug 2016: Refer to this link for updated code supporting Visual Studio 2015.

This is the table of contents for the series on using T4 to create an AppSettings wrapper for use in any code.

  1. Creating a static T4 Template for AppSettings
  2. Creating a dynamic T4 Template for AppSettings
  3. Reading Settings from the Configuration File
  4. Separating Customizable Parts from Static Parts
  5. >Customizing the Template
  6. Creating a Deployment Package (Part 1)
  7. Creating a Deployment Package (Part 2)

Using T4 to Create an AppSettings Wrapper, Part 6

21 April 2013
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Categories: C#, T4

In this (almost) final post in the series on creating an AppSettings wrapper in T4 we’re going to package all the work we’ve done into an easily deployable and reusable package that we can extend to include other templates.  We’ll also make sure that adding the template to a project is as easy as Add New Item.

Here’s the list of things we’ll accomplish

  • Create a custom base class and move all the shared template functionality to it.
  • Create a VS extension (VSIX) to install the parts of our template.
  • Install the shared template components into a centralized directory so projects only need to include the core template.
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Using T4 to Create an AppSettings Wrapper, Part 5

7 April 2013
2 Comments
Categories: C#, T4

In the last article we broke out the template into 2 separate template files: main and nested. A developer adds the main template to their project but it includes the nested template where the actual work is done. In this article we’re going to update the included template to allow a developer to alter the generated code without having to touch the nested template.

In the original article we listed 6 requirements for the template. At this point we have met half of them. By adding customization we will meet the final three. They are:

  • Exclude some settings
  • Change the type of a setting
  • Use the configuration file of a different project
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Using T4 to Create an AppSettings Wrapper, Part 4

24 March 2013
16 Comments
Categories: C#, T4

In the previous article we finished the basic appsettings template that allowed us to generate a strongly typed class from the settings in a configuration file. We now want to expand the template to allow it to be customized depending upon the needs of the project, a later article. Before we get there though it is time to refactor the code to make it more reusable and easier to maintain. That is the focus of this article.

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