Code
LINQ Audit Trail v2 – DoddleAudit
Dec 30th
This looked like a link that was fairly re-post worthy. This is practically a must for any .NET + LINQ + MSSQL developer out there. Very neat way of doing audit trails in MSSQL with LINQ and C#.
A couple months ago I wrote a basic set of extension methods to handle automatic auditing in LINQ to SQL. Well I have received a large number of emails regarding this particular project so I have decided to focus on cleaning up my v2 API and releasing it on CodePlex. There was a lot of room for improvement from version 1 and today I am going to post the all new LINQ Audit Trail code. This new version is significantly enhanced in the previous version.
Gripes about Torque Game Engine on Windows 7
Dec 6th
So for my Bachelors degree, we’re using the Torque Game Engine to learn how to create assets and write basic scripts for a game engine… effectively creating a whole game. I’ve used Torque lightly in the past, on Windows XP but never on Vista. Now that I’ve gone Windows 7 I’ve had nothing but problems with Torque. So far, just today, in the last 4 hours, it crashed on me 6 times. No pattern to it either, it usually happens when I just simply try to do something. In one case it crashed when I removed a dynamic property, another case it crashed when I placed an entity inside of a sim group. I’ve also experienced crashes in map2dif.exe as well. So far the Torque Constructor has been fairly solid, though I don’t like the interface at all, but the Torque engine itself has been absolutely terrible.
I really wish my college would use Unity or even UDK for teaching game development, Torque seems like an absolute joke. Of course, they haven’t tried out the new Torque 3D engine yet… they’re still on the archaic “Torque Game Engine” which is probably part of the problem.
Anyway, just felt like bitching there for a second about my Torque woes… its been a total nightmare trying to get this assignment done before the end of the 7th week of class (which is next week).
A few handy Javascript Methods
Nov 6th
So I’ve been doing a LOT of Javascript programming in the last few days and I ran into a few limitations of the language or constructs within the language. For example, certain versions of IE do not support the Array.indexOf() method. Another problem I ran into is that the Javascript language does not contain a method for performing deep copies on objects. So after some Googling I found a few ways around the aforementioned problems. The first one (indexOf) is as follows:
Array.prototype.findObject = (
!Array.indexOf ? function (o) {
var l = this.length + 1;
while (l–) {
if (this[l - 1] === o) return l – 1;
}
return -1;
} : function (o) { return (this.indexOf(o) !== -1); }
);
!Array.indexOf ? function (o) {
var l = this.length + 1;
while (l–) {
if (this[l - 1] === o) return l – 1;
}
return -1;
} : function (o) { return (this.indexOf(o) !== -1); }
);
The above code will add the ‘findObject’ method to your Array objects. Then you can use that instead of indexOf() and be guaranteed that it will work regardless if the browser supports indexOf or not.
The second one (deep copying) can be circumvented by creating a helper method which will perform the copy for you:
var ObjectHandler = {
//public method
getCloneOfObject: function(oldObject) {
var tempClone = {};
//public method
getCloneOfObject: function(oldObject) {
var tempClone = {};
if (typeof(oldObject) == "object")
for (prop in oldObject)
// for array use private method getCloneOfArray
if ((typeof(oldObject[prop]) == "object") &&
(oldObject[prop]).__isArray)
tempClone[prop] = this.getCloneOfArray(oldObject[prop]);
// for object make recursive call to getCloneOfObject
else if (typeof(oldObject[prop]) == "object")
tempClone[prop] = this.getCloneOfObject(oldObject[prop]);
// normal (non-object type) members
else
tempClone[prop] = oldObject[prop];
return tempClone;
},
//private method (to copy array of objects) – getCloneOfObject will use this internally
getCloneOfArray: function(oldArray) {
var tempClone = [];
for (var arrIndex = 0; arrIndex <= oldArray.length; arrIndex++)
if (typeof(oldArray[arrIndex]) == "object")
tempClone.push(this.getCloneOfObject(oldArray[arrIndex]));
else
tempClone.push(oldArray[arrIndex]);
return tempClone;
}
};
Just thought I’d share those with everyone. Credit for the majority of the deep copy code goes to http://blog.pramatiservices.com/deep-copy-in-javascript/ and credit for the findObject code goes to someone other than me, but I didn’t bookmark the link so I can’t find it again. Sorry 
FIX: When you undock some windows or change the window layout in the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 IDE, the IDE crashes
Oct 27th
I just thought I re-post this incase anybody stumbled upon my blog before they landed on the Microsoft page that had the fix for IDE crashes. I experienced this only one time when I was moving/undocking windows.
Enjoy.
Helpful Extension Methods to the System.String Class in C#
Oct 26th
I’ve been doing a decent amount of string manipulation lately and decided to combine that with my newfound knowledge about .NET extension methods. If you don’t know what extension methods are, they’re basically a way to extend a class without needing the source code to that particular class–hence why I can extend the System.String type by simply writing another class. The key is with the parameters of your methods. Here’s the basic gist of it:
public static {Your Return Type} {Your Method Name} ( this {Type/Class you want to extend} {Parameter Name} )
{
/* Your method body */
}
{
/* Your method body */
}
So the key here is the “this” keyword before the type identifier in the parameter list of the method.
I’ve wrapped all of my extension methods into a single class simply called “ExtensionMethods” and added it to my project. The namespace doesn’t matter, so I haven’t included it in this example. You can either use the global namespace (though I don’t recommend it) or just create your own namespace called whatever you want.
Without further adue, here’s the code:
public static class ExtensionMethods
{
/// <summary>
/// Includes the trailing path delimiter.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="InputPath">The input path.</param>
/// <returns>The input path including a trailing path delimiter if it doesn't have one</returns>
public static string IncludeTrailingPathDelimiter(this string InputPath)
{
if (!InputPath.EndsWith(Path.DirectorySeparatorChar.ToString()) &&
!InputPath.EndsWith(Path.AltDirectorySeparatorChar.ToString()))
return InputPath + Path.DirectorySeparatorChar;
return InputPath;
}
{
/// <summary>
/// Includes the trailing path delimiter.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="InputPath">The input path.</param>
/// <returns>The input path including a trailing path delimiter if it doesn't have one</returns>
public static string IncludeTrailingPathDelimiter(this string InputPath)
{
if (!InputPath.EndsWith(Path.DirectorySeparatorChar.ToString()) &&
!InputPath.EndsWith(Path.AltDirectorySeparatorChar.ToString()))
return InputPath + Path.DirectorySeparatorChar;
return InputPath;
}
/// <summary>
/// Asserts the trailing path delimiter.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="InputPath">The input path.</param>
public static void AssertTrailingPathDelimiter(this string InputPath)
{
InputPath = InputPath.IncludeTrailingPathDelimiter();
}
/// <summary>
/// Trims the extension from a file name.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="InputFile">The input file.</param>
public static void TrimExtension(this string InputFile)
{
int start, count;
if ((start = InputFile.LastIndexOf(".")) > 0)
{
count = InputFile.Length – start;
InputFile = InputFile.Remove(start, count);
}
}
/// <summary>
/// Gets a file extension of a filename.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="InputFile">The input file.</param>
/// <returns>The file extension</returns>
public static string FileExtension(this string InputFile)
{
int start, count;
if ((start = InputFile.LastIndexOf(".")) > 0)
{
count = InputFile.Length – start;
return InputFile.Substring(start, count);
}
return string.Empty;
}
}
Now whenever you use a System.String object, you’ll be able to simply call these methods as if they were part of the System.String class. IE: string MyFileExtension = MyFilePath.FileExtension();
I’m sure I’ll add on to this as I go along.
