When starting a project, I always recommend inheriting objects from a base object, regardless of whether you know you'll need it or not. Usually, they will contain common functionality like error handling, debugging or other common methods which you'll use over and over.

In WinForms, however, this can cause a problem if you make the base form an abstract class (another thing I recommend).  For example, take this simple form:

Now let's say I decide to derive this form from an abstract base class, which I will call BaseForm:

What this is telling you is that it can't render an abstract class BaseForm. So while you are creating the application, you might remove the abstract identifier from UI related base classes (with a note that they should be inherited from, not used, as well as a /TODO marker to make sure you mark it as abstract before deployment).

Doing this will allow you to inherit from a base class while at the same time edit the UI.

You can always grab the ToolTip control out of the toolbox, but I prefer to add a common function to a base form so I don't have to remember to add this control to the form. Then, any time I want to add a tooltip, I pass in the control and the text, and this simple snippet will take care of it for me. I remembered it as I needed to add some tooltips, which is something the existing application lacks.

I am getting settled in my new project, and it only took me a week to get rights to install anything on the laptop! A lot of people would say "Wow, a billable week with no work!" but personally, the days just drag by. I'd much rather be buried in code. I did make some good use of the time though, digging into what documentation I could find and creating a new Functional Specification Document. I did finally get my rights, so tomorrow will be spent installing things and looking into code again.

I did get some reading done though, and I saw that in VS2010 C# will have optional and named parameters. I know the VB crowd (of which I come from) will chuckle a little at that, as that feature has been around forever. Until now, it's required C# developers to overload functions. Nothing Earth-shattering about this feature, other than as part of it, C# will support named parameters and default values as well as part of the implementation (the default values are part of the defiinition of the function).

I posted about sp_findsp previously and decided to revisit it. I didn't write it (see previous post for credit/link) but I did add a bit to it. First, I cleaned it up a bit to make it easier to read, and second, I made it so that it is a system proc so I could access it from any db on my server. I may end up doing some cleanup on it's output, but that's all I had time for for now. So here goes, the new version!

USE master
GO

PRINT'Checking for the existence of this procedure'
IF (SELECTOBJECT_ID('sp_generate_inserts','P')) ISNOTNULL--means, the procedure already exists
BEGIN
PRINT'Procedure already exists. So, dropping it'
DROPPROC sp_findsp
END
GO


CREATEPROC sp_findsp @s varchar(255)
AS
BEGIN
    DECLARE @msg varchar(255) ,@ul varchar(255)
    SELECT @s='%' + @s + '%'
    
    SELECT'SP Name'=upper(o.name), Seq=colid ,'SP Line'=substring(text,patindex(@s,text)-5, 30)
    FROMsyscomments c , sysobjects o
    WHERE o.id=c.id
    andpatindex(@s,text) > 0
    ORDERBY [name]

    SELECT @msg='* Stored procedures containing string "' + @s + '=' + convert(varchar(8),@@rowcount) + ' *'

    SELECT @ul=replicate('*',datalength(@msg))
    PRINT' '
    PRINT @ul
    PRINT @msg
    PRINT @ul
END
GO

--Mark procedure as system object
EXEC sys.sp_MS_marksystemobject sp_findsp
GO

PRINT'Granting EXECUTE permission on sp_findsp to all users'
GRANTEXECON sp_findsp TOpublic

GO

When I go onto a client site, I usually don't have the luxury of designing everything from scratch. There are times (like on my current engagement) if I were given the choice, I'd say scrap it, but usually it doesn't happen that way. It is what it is... been saying that a lot lately!

So one of the tools I find useful is the ability to search for particular field names in the database. This is very similar to sp_findsp I use, which I have posted in the past off the net, but I have modified it so it gets registered as a system procedure.

So here's sp_findfields. It will return a fairly printable representation of the results of all fields which match the passed in string. It's registered as a system procedure in this script, so it is accessible to all databases.

Usage:

sp_findfields '%Contact%'

This will find all fields with the string 'Item' in it. Note you need to provide the wildcard characters.

Earlier today, I blogged an interview question about reflection. Earlier this year, as part of the interviewing process I was tasked to write a simple calculator. There would only be 2 integer inputs with a single operation. For example, if the invoked the program, and entered in 1 U 2 (U being the operation for addition), the program would output 3.

The assignment also mentioned they would want the possibility to expand the operations later. Instead of just commenting on it, I decided to implement that into the design.

I won't go into retrieving the data from command prompt, but I will provide the project at the end and you can see how that is accomplished. I made it robust by accounting for spaces, etc. As a programming concept, you should always program defensively and assume the work (and you'll be glad with the results).

First, I created a base class each operand would inherit from, so that each works similarly. The base class OperationBase looks like this:

Here's the sample code to look at and play with.. Enjoy!

Today has been an insanely busy day, but I have so much I want to blog about, and this one won't wait. A few days ago, as I was using some code I found on the net, I commented here about the over-use of the var keyword.

Seems I am not the only one who has an opinion on the matter. I subscribe to the CodeProject newsletter, and each issue features a survey. This week, the survey relates to the opinion of the var type in C#. You can see the survey results here. Make sure you click through to the "optional text answers" for some funny comments (and a few relevant ones as well).

The interesting thing to note from the survey is that the answers tend to skew towards the "never use that scenario" range. The two areas where it is most prevalent is with LINQ, and with anonymous types, which makes total sense.

Question: What's reflection, and how have you used it to solve a problem?

Answer: Reflection is a way to look at assembly metadata and look in and see what is contained. It also allows you to use late binding and call methods within those assembles.

For the second part, a simple explanation is all you need to show that you understand how it is used.

So what if you've enver used reflection? First, shame on you (kidding!). It DOES serve a very important purpose and allows for some great solutions, especially at an architectural level. If you've never used it, I recommend immediately trying it out, and you'll find many, many uses. Here's a tutorial I found that looks decent. That way, when asked this question (and I get this one a lot) you can answer how you *might* really use it. Honestly, you've probably used it and didn't realize it if you've added certain attributes to your code.

I have used reflection for everything from identifying certain classes and functions. For example, for a coding sample, I used LINQ for Reflection and attributes to identify classes which supported certain calculations. By doing this, I could add more functions dynamically and the UI would pick it without changing code. Since LINQ for Reflection is not discussed much, I'll post some about that later.

There are some costs associated with Reflection though. Speed! Late Binding is slower by it's nature, as well as all the processing looking for methods, so plan and use wisely!

As a full time developer, I search the web... a lot. If you are writing a lot of new code without at least searching to see what exists, you're either getting paid by the hour (or line of code), stubborn or a glutton for punishment. Even if I don't use it, I can get some guidance on what someone else tried, and how it worked out before I start coding. Granted, it usually requires a lot of refactoring the code to my standards or needs, but it's a great start.

As I was thinking of things I wanted to put on my site, I realized it would be nice to share my "favorites"...sort of. If I found something useful, I wanted to be able to show what it was, how I found it useful and where someone else can find it. In a way, I am also helping to promote someone else's hard work and improving their search engine visibility to return the favor of their sharing their work.

Out of this, I came up with an idea for a "Useful Links" section. I wanted to be able to add links and commentary, and also add it to my Activity Aggregator to show help show the content of the site has changed. Later, as I was using Bing, I got the idea to add some webthumbs to enhance the page graphically, so the reader would know what the site looked like before going there. I also needed to add an admin page for creating the useful links (and ultimately maintaining them -- which is on my TODO list). I'll also leave out the icon creation part, although I really need to farm out for a new cool looking icon, which is also on my list of things to do.

I'll skip the admin section, as it's just data entry fields. The process for creating the entries does change a bit, as I needed to do a few extra steps.

1. Save the UsefulLink class
2. Default the webthumb image to a default "safety" image in case we can't get a webthumb
3. Make a request to get a webthumb image of the target site
4. Once the image is retrieved, update the UsefulLink record to point to the new webthumb
5. Update the Activity Aggregator to show we have a new useful link.

Step 3 is where things get tricky. How in all getout do we get webthumb images? There are controls out there you can get, and they are reasonably priced as well. But I decided to keep searching so I could write this one on my own, as it seems like an interesting challenge.

My next thought was to create my own service to do this. There's plenty of code out there, but the easiest way to do this would require some WinForms programming. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE programming WinForms. The problem is I don't want to have to install it everywhere I am at, as I need a service. I could possibly create a Web and Windows service to do this as well, but that seemed overly complex. So I did a search, and I found this, which is a service which does it for you. What's even nicer is that they expose a nice API to use. As of now, the first 100 images a month are free, and after that, the fees are very reasonable. Even though I doubt I will go over 100 images per month, I am so impressed I may pay just to keep the service going.

I was also able to find some c# code to make learning the API fast. I did end up changing it some, but in general it worked very well. You can find it here.

So when the service returns with my image (I used the medium size), I save it to a thumbs directory (had to add write permissions to the directory, or I got an obscure GDI+ error), and call a method on my UsefulLink class to update the record with the thumbnail image. I name the image with the current date and time so that the names will be unique as well.

Finally, once I have downloaded the image and updated the UsefulLink record, I add a call to my Activity class which creates an entry for the Activity Aggregator. As I add more items to throw into the Activity Aggregator, I am considering refactoring things to do some delegate multicasting for all the updates, or perhaps creating a factory where you provide class (should be easy since my business objects share the same base class) or interface, and it knows how to create the activity record instead of making individual calls. That's on my list down the road. :)

Here's what the Activity Aggrgator looks like, with a special Useful Link icon():

And here's what the Useful Link section (which has the webthumbs) looks like. I will only be showing 10 at a time to save web page real estate. But I also don't want to lose older links off the page. I am debating now whether to use paging, or just have a smaller hyperlink-only section below the most recent links. I am leaning towards paging, as I have a very neat service I want to implement which makes paging and sorting incredibly fast and easy (more on that someday.. I need to upgrade it to user .Net 3.5 functionality before I post it).

Today, I was super-dad AND got a lot of coding done, and I managed to get my useful links controls done for my site here. It was actually a complex process to get things like the webthumbs integrated, update the activity aggregator, create an admin page. The end result needs some cleanup, but I think for a first run, it came out nice. Tomorrow I will blog on the details and some code on how I did everything in case someone decides they want something similar.

Tonight, I am tired. But as I was coding, I came across some code for accessing my webthumbs, and something struck me. In .Net 3.5, there's a new keyword "var" which allows for anonymous casting (sort of). When it compiles, the underlying code is cast to the correct type, and in using the var typed variable, it acts like the cast-type. It would definitely speed up development if you used it a lot. For those old-school VB fans, it really reminds me of the variant data type (which it is not). Read more about it here if you want some details.

However, as with all things, there is a cost. For me, it's readability. In English anyways, we read left to right. When I see a "var" vast variable, I have to keep reading to understand the type, then see how it is used. Not too difficult (unless it is coming out of a function or LINQ query), but it does take a little more time to figure it out. For example..

That being said, you can get around using it by declaring the variable to the expected type when you code it. I have some samples I will post later when I was using LINQ I forced myself to do this so I would fully understand what was happening in my LINQ. Here's someone else who is taking a similar take on it.

Anyone have any thoughts on that?

Here’s another question which is very basic, and is mandatory to be able to answer for C# developers:

Question: What are the various access modifiers in C#?

Answer: public, private, protected, internal, protected internal

Depending on how the person answers the question (e.g. if it’s obviously an easy question for them, I move on), I may follow up with “So what does the protected keyword mean?”

So here’s the answers to each… you absolutely need to know what each of these are!

Public – accessible to anything

Private – can only be access by code in the same class or struct

Internal – accessible only within the same assembly

Protected – accessible in the same class, or in a derived class

Go here for some more info if needed:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173121.aspx

I needed to use LINQ to XML to grab some RSS feed information into a BusinessObject I created to save to a database. Here's what I needed:

I have to get some landscape rock put out before my home owner's association has a cow, but I decided to do some more work on my activity aggregator. Today, I decided to integrate my blog feed into it, so when I post here, it will automatically update this activity on my home page (and soon to be in my developer's area).

Here's what the end result looks (for now).

Doing it was fairly easy with the design I implemented in my last post. My BlogFeed class inherits the BaseFeed class, which means I need to implement the ParseFeed() method. Since the RSS feed from my blog is XML, I was easily able to adapt the same code from my TwitterFeed class to work for this RSS feed (which should actually work for any RSS feed I pass in).

I also created another Extension method (for practice) to convert the RSS feed date time to a C# DateTime object. I will post that code as "Tip of the Day" but I have to give Dan Wahlin credit for it, as I adapted some sample code he provided.

Here's how the RSS feed (aka BlogFeed) uses LINQ to XML for creating my activity object.

Tonight was a very enjoyable night of coding. I created the first phase of my "activity aggregator". I actually had a more clever name for it, but being tired, it slips my mind right now.

Currently, I post several places.. short updates for on Twitter. Longer discussions end up on here, my blog. I have some other sources I plan on integrating over time, such as links I found useful (similar to Digg, but also where I can place why I found it useful). That means growth, and when it comes to design, it's best to design change into it up front.

The first thing I needed to do was create my table and business object to collect these activities. In my table, I store ActivityDate, what type of activity it was (foreign key to another table -- ActivityType), a brief summary of the activity text, and finally the url someone interested could click on to get more information. The internal members of my activity class look like this:

Tonight was a short night of development, as my folks were in town as my dad needed to go to the doctor. I did get some database work done, and my business objects done. I use a hybrid of Rockford Lhotka's CSLA. I don't need all the functionality (such as layers of undo) so I trimmed them back the amount of functionality I needed and created CodeSmith templates to generate my classes. Let me just say I can code really fast now. :) If you haven't taken a look at Lhotka's Business Objects book, I highly recommend taking a look at them. I began using his concepts in VB, and they have proven very reliable and scalable.

QDJ: Do you use ORM's, and if so, what flavor do you like?

I have to admit, I am not the biggest fan of the various ORMs I have tried. They do serve a purpose though, but I have found most inflexible. I am currently using nHibernate, and while they make themselves readily available to code generation, so far, it seems like a lot of code. See my previous comments about another ORM I tried. My brother uses it, and seems to be happy with it. I just thought the learning curve was very steep, and the documentation was very lacking. I took a beating for that opinion. :)

So tonight, I want to post a couple of links I used today. Soon there will be a control for this on the Rubicon Computing site, but until then, I will post them here.

First, I referred to this before, but here's a site with a lot of good links to various "cheat sheets". Some are really good and useful. You can find those here.

Next, I found some neat add-ins for Visual Studio 2008. The first is the Source Code Power Toy. It outlines your code in a treeview, which makes navigating your code, especially in complex classes, very easy. Best of all, it's free! It's available for VS2005 as well.

I also installed the Power Commands for the VS 2008 IDE. It has some useful right-click functionality, such as opening a command prompt, and opening the containing folder, and that's just a small glimpse of what it can do. It seems to be well documented, and I look forward to exploring all it's functionality. And best thing, this one is free too.

I'll probably post some useful CodeSmith templates I created. I love CodeSmith, but sometimes it's tough to find out exactly how to do things, so I will spare the world the trial-and-error where I can. In the current project I am working on, our team saved 1,100+ hours, and over $50,000 dollars last month alone by generating nHibernate code from the templates we created. Yeah, I earned my rate last month for sure. :)

Tonight I didn't get as much time to work on the site as I would have liked, so I focused on getting the admin pages up on the production server so I could do some "behind-the-scenes" work remotely. This required some security, which I started last night, but the data migration for that was a bit more daunting, so I needed to finish it tonight. While the authentication providers and controls do handle a LOT, it has an interesting learning-curve, and deployment can be a challenge as well. All-in-all, it sure beats writing all that code by myself.

I tried to use a lot of caching and cached settings to help improve the performance on certain pages, especially my client list. On my admin pages, I made sure to create a means to reset that cache without having to do a complete server reset. Actually, the same approach I took would work well for high availability sites, as the method I used to complete this would not require a server reset to re-load systems. When I was int he banking industry, high-availability was a huge issue, and simple config changes meant waiting for a scheduled system outage or worse, an emergency outage. When I redesigned that site, that was one of the top priorities I had.

It occurred to me how much time it takes to set up the infrastructure of a site: master pages, common libraries, configuration files, CSS, etc. Once those are done, if done properly, the rest of the site should go fast. One thing I have found to speed that up was the use of Visual Studio Project Templates. Combined with code generation like CodeSmith, you can really generate web sites extremely fast, and get on to coding the "fun" items. I will write about both of those in the future (CodeSmith and Project Templates) once the site is stabilized.

Tomorrow night may not have a lot of development, as my parents will be in town. Later this week, I will be coding my next control: the activity feed. When posts and feeds are made or read, this control will snag it, and place a brief "teaser" on the home page.

I finally managed to get my client list online today. From a technological standpoint, it was pretty straight forward. I store the information in the database, and use my CodeSmith templates to create a class for extracting the data, and then use a Repeater to present the information in a table format. I still need to make some changes to it, but all in all, it works well. Since the data won't be changing often, I did cache the data to make it come back faster.

I started working on security for my Administration pages. I need to get that set up before I can activate the admin pages, but I have run into some issues getting it all configured. I ran into this once before with the ASP.Net forms authentication security provider, but this time is a little different, as I only want to secure one folder. Certainly not too difficult to do, but not as easy as I would have hoped either.

Once I get the security and login page worked out, I'll begin working on my "links" page. The idea here is that when I blog, or post to twitter, or a few other ideas I have, it will update the dark blue control on the home page with a summary and hopefully someone will click through to get the rest of the details. This should be fairly straightforward to do. Since most of the services respond in XML, I'll just use a factory method to instantiate the proper object, which will know exactly what information I want to extract from the XML feed. As I add more items I want to track, I will simply have to implement the same interface and it will plug right in to my "updater". For the items which return XML (e.g. RSS or Twitter), I will use LINQ for XML to grab just want I want and populate the data right into my classes.

Which brings up a point...

I could probably do this almost as easy with XPath. When does it make sense to move to the more "sexier" technology as opposed something proven and works well? For example, a lot of times, when a new technology is rolled out, it tends to be buggy and some of them historically have not performed well (e.g. early XML for those who have been around a while). All things equal, when does it make sense? Just a rhetorical question, but one I got hit with recently.

I was in a technical interview for a job I wasn't planning on taking (drive was too far -- the company I was representing knew this as well, they just wanted me to be on their radar for the future). I was asked about a particular implementation of the new List object. Honestly, I know how to use the List object, and he was asking about some of the internals I really hadn't needed to know.

If I was having performance issues, I would want to know, and then I would look into it further. In this case, I was able to provide at least 4 other reasonable implementations based on the criteria I was given, yet, I still couldn't get the "sexy" answer he was looking for. At what point does it really matter? For my part, I didn't like NOT knowing, and I did look it up when I left, but in the big picture, when does it become relevant? In my book, the practical solution to a relevant problem always supercedes technical "sexiness".

I finally got around to updating my resume, and I pasted it temporarily on my home page at Rubicon Computing Solutions. That's my company, and it's been a great run of 13 years.  I say temporarily simply because it will better positioned later, but I realized I really should have it on there so it gets picked up by some search engines, recruiters and in general people looking for .Net development in the Phoenix area.

I am in some talks with some other very senior developers I have had the pleasure of working with over the past couple of years about banding our talent together. I've tried that before, but these developers have been on their own for a long time, so we have a very similar background and strong work ethic to build upon. I have always struggled in the past with partnering up with other developers, as I have very high expectations of any project I work on. In fact, this is why I have had trouble hiring help, as my standards of quality aren't met by most developers without substantial coaching. These developers already have that skill, along with maturity and experience, which makes this a very exciting opportunity. Interesting how this economy drags some people down, yet others, like myself see it as an opportunity.

One of the limiting factors I have always had was that I was limited on the size of projects I could take alone. This changes that dynamic dramatically.

So if you're looking for some quality application development (web or windows), I specialize in quality service and coding in a Microsoft environment. I can work alone, with a team, or build and lead teams. You can find more details about those skills here. Thanks!

Tonight's coding session went by WAY too fast. I integrated Yedda's Twitter API into my admin pages so I could post directly without having to use another client or browse to Twitter to do it. The next step will be to read my blog feed and Tweet automatically about the topic. That's for another night though, as tomorrow night is poker night, and yes, I still play. :)

One change I made to the Yedda library (ok, two.. I ran into an issue with an error code 471 being returned, but a quick Google search fixed that (sometimes I how effeciently we coded before Google). I wanted to use LINQ to XML to parse out my response code. So Instead of returning the XML Document, I convert it to an XDocument using the Parse method, and return that, like this:

As the main site is developed, I'll detail what decisions I used to create the site, then a high level overview of how I designed it. Just a warning though, some of the decisions will seem very arbitrary, as they were. I made them simply because working on your own site gives you a luxury of trying things you normally can't do with a client. In my case, a lot of my decisions will be over-engineered, because I may want to re-use them later.

Of course, the first thing I had to come up with was an overall site layout. I won't go into that here, as one thing I will never profess to be is a layout guru. I got a decent design, and I set them up as a master page so the rest of the site development will go easy. I used VS2008 and C#, and began implementing AJAX where it made sense. For example, there's a control which updates the current time every 30 seconds or so, so I could use the update panel and timer control.

The first real functionality I wanted to add was a link to this blog. So I created a user control, and placed it on the front page. However, I do plan on posting a lot more here, so I knew it wouldn't be feasible to show every post, so I decided to limit it to the latest three posts. I wanted to display the title, the date and the first bit of the post to hopefully catch a reader's attention.

But reading from a feed from sites at two different hosting providers can be tricky. Not from a security standpoint, as RSS feeds are open, but more from a performance standpoint. Anyone coming to my portal site should be able to see the latest posts, and quickly. The fastest way of doing this would be to create a Windows service which periodically reads the feed, and stores the information in a database. However, I am not sure I would be able to install a Windows service on my service provider's server. So......

What  I can do however is read the feed, and place it in cache. Periodically, I can expire the cache and re-load it, and unless you are the unlucky soul to have to wait while it loads, the majority of the users will have a quick response. For that poor soul who waits while cache is refreshed, I used Ajax and the UpdateProgress control to provide some visual feedback that the page is doing something.

The rest was pretty straightforward. I either request the XML from the RSS feed (or cache), and use XSLT to display it. It's been a while since I have used XSLT, but there is a lot of potential there, I expect I will be using a lot more of it in future controls. I created the class generically so that I could pull any RSS feed I wanted from it as well.

One great use I found for XSLT was on a high-availability web site which sent a lot of emails. We wanted to be able to change the email format frequently without bringing the site down. Using XSLT, we could change the email template files any time to create very nice HTML based email messages. I read a great article recently about calling C# functions in your XSLT templates using extension methods, which I plan to use extensively, as C# is my main domain. Maybe I will use them... I say that as I really would like to improve my XSLT skills, as I think the technology is highy underused in the .Net world.

So now I am playing with Twitter feeds and getting the rest of the site content set up. I also used the AJAX popup control to help prevent any 404 errors as I complete the functionality. If you've been putting off using the AJAX Control Toolkit for some reason.. STOP! The amount of functionality these controls offer is amazing, and you can't beat the price.

That's it for now! If you want more details on how I accomplished this or some sample code, just send me a comment. Upcoming posts will address the development of the rest of the site, along with some major wins recently using CodeSmith.

So it has been hit or miss posting here, but I am trying to correct it by bringing on some additional help. I set up a new blog, developernation.net, and begun getting some content on there. Likely I'll crosspost on here too (my content anyways) but likely most new entries are going to be there first. I figured if I could get someone else on there helping doing some content, it will have more regular posts. This blog will continue, just a lag a few days on the content of theother site, and contain more personal observations.

So swing on by and pop in. I've started off with a bang, and I am in the process of posting a web service design I created and tested which handles paging and sorting of data on the server, which my initial tests have shown to be highly efficient. I am walking through the entire design, and by the end of the weekend I hope to have the series done and the code posted. If not, you can wait a few days and I will post it all here as well.

Thanks!

I had a great need again for WinCV today, and was beginning to work out in my mind how I would rewrite it, as I posted earlier. However, it hit me that Lutz Roeder's Reflector for .Net might actually do what I needed. It does, it turns out. I did have to modify the .cfg file to look at the new assemblies for VS2005, but once I did that, the search functionality worked wonders. So, even though it would have proven to be a great learning experience, I am going to forego putting a rehash together, and stick with something that works very nicely..

I found some details on WinCV for VS2005 (or the lack thereof). As near as I can ascertain, if you have VS2005 only, and place WinCV on that system it will work for the .Net 2.0 libraries. I don't know how that works as it seems the information is hardcoded into WinCV.

So, it was such a great utility, and I think it lends itself to some great enhancements, so I think I am going to write a version which is VS2005+ compliant. Some features I want to add:

• Quick linking to the help topic for a class/method
• Ability to easily add external assemblies WITHOUT having to use the command line

I plan on keeping the same basic interface though, as it was simple and effective. Not sure how much I willl get to work on this, or how long it will take, but I will post it here and probably CodeProject when I get it finished.

A year ago, I completed my MCSD for .Net. One of the attractive
benefits of this certification (as well as the MCDBA) was a $500
discount on a one-year MSDN Universal subscription during the first
year of certification.

Although the MCSD benefits page still lists this benefit
( http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/mcsd/benefits.asp ), they
quietly removed it as of April 2005. The text on the page still
states the following:
Rebates or discounts on a one-year subscription to MSDN during the
first year of certification.

If you call or write to get the certificate as I did, you'll get the
terse response it's no longer available, and they just haven't
updated the site. I figured I would help them get the word out since
they didn't deem it important enough to change on their site or
announce. It would be a shame if anyone expected this benefit based
on the MS web site information.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Above is what I posted to our local .Net community group on Yahoo. Now I am going to add some personal comments. Once again, MS has dropped the ball in supporting the developer community. Earlier this year, MS announced the MSDN Universal would not include the new .Net Team Development system (or some name like that -- I am too lazy to go look it up). Fortunately, enough of an uproar went out that they reversed that decision. Their waning support of VB also caused a petition/uproar. Likely, since the MCSD/MCDBA community is a lot smaller, there isn't likely to be a huge outcry on this issue.

This is a HUGE mistake on MS's behalf. Someone that is likely to spend the extra time and money to get certifications are the ones MS should really cater to. There's always been a criticism that the certifications are worthless, and that benefit alone made it real easy to justify spending the money on books, training materials and exam costs for achieving the certification. I won't argue the merits of the certifications here, but I have a lot of them -- MCP, MCDBA, MCSD for VB, MCSD for .Net (C#), and MCAD. Will I continue? I may have to given I am an Independent Contractor and it helps to get me in the door. Will I recommend it to someone not in my position? Not likely.

Don't get me wrong, the MSDN Universal is still a great deal. My disgust over this situation is that the benefit is still listed, as well as no announcement in April 2005 when they made this decision (or if they did, I sure didn't see it). I have been one of the most stalwart supporters of Microsoft over the years, and I have personally been involved in projects which have generated millions in licensing revenues for Microsoft in the last 10 years. The past 1.5 years I have watched MS anger the core base of developers.

I think this is indicative of the internal problems at MS, and why Google is going to be a viable competitor to MS. In a paraphrase of the words of Stephen King, and the Dark Tower series, MS has forgotten the face of their father. One of the reasons MS dominated the market over Apple was that MS supported developers way beyond the norm. In the name of profit, I think we are seeing this slowly change.

Once again I have disappeared from blogging. Let's face it, I rarely get to do it. I also need to upgrade this DasBlog but I have been so busy I haven't been able to do that, even though someone kindly wrote me and told me it would solve my spam comment problem. Maybe this weekend...

But I wanted to blog because I found a weird problem, with a weirder solution. I wrote a Windows service in C# which periodically loads some data, based on the time since the last load. So dates are a bit important in this process.

First, the cryptic message: “Internal Query Processor Error: The query processor could not produce a query plan. Contact your primary support provider for more information”.  A Google search turned up several solutions, but most of them relied on a service patch. What's wierder is that the error was intermittant. The procs would run fine in Query Analyzer, but not from C#.

Finally, I tried the unlikely. Instead of passing in my parameters as  DateTime values, I passed them in as SqlDbType.Varchar, and in the proc made sure and converted them to DateTime values. Lo and behold, the problem went away.....Go figure!

Extremes in anything (IMHO) are typically not good. Extreme temperatures, religeons, attitudes -- you name it, likely there is a downside. In programming, it's no different. Now, while not a big fan of Extreme Programming, there's a couple of extremes from it that bother me. One is that you shouldn't include documentation. The other, which I suspect  was someone's personal preference, was not to use the “Region” directives in C# (or I guess VB.Net either). Here's a little history...

This guy was a former Java programmer working for a large chip manufacturer. He was supposed to be a XP guru, so he was transferred to the local site to help a team in it's transition to the XP methodology.

Strike 1 -- he knew the methodology well, but he was by no means an expert in the language of the group. Why was this a strike? I guess technological bias in that his preferences to his other language directed him to want to make the .Net environment the same as a java environment.

Strike 2 -- It was his way or the highway. The environment was such that one or two developers had 95% of the say on development decisions. Part of the reason for this is that wacky trend in which everyone is ranked from best to worst in terms of raises, options and promotion (for more info what I am talking about, read this article, which is the same process -- Saying Goodbye). No one would ever argue with the two for fear of getting a bad ranking for being considered a troublemaker.

Regardless, I digress, but I do think it's important to understand why sometimes these extremes come about in an environment. I was a contractor brought on to bring some quick wins for a project, and it was my first (and likely last) venture into the XP methodology. They needed code, and they needed it fast.

One problem I addressed was the lack of uniformity on the project. We had three developers, which meant three different styles of programming. Even with XP, that meant one of us was alone, and the other two would spend the pair time arguning over which style was a standard and best (even though standards existed -- they were just never used because of informal rules imposed by the 2 'chiefs'). I decided to create a template which would standardize (and speed up) our development. I organized the code within the controls into regions, and deployed them onto our machines with anticipation I easily saved our team15-20 minutes each time we created a new control.

Alas, it was scrapped instantly. Why? Well, it seems in my templates, I placed the code into logical “regions” -- e.g. Public Properties, Public Methods, Private Methods, etc. I was “informed” (even though I had been using regions for a couple of months now) that regions were not allowed, because all they did was hide bad code. WHAT???!! Well, I liked the contract, and knew the results if I stood up to them, so I bit my tongue and moved on. It has bothered me ever since, but I never took the time to formulate an argument as to why regions are actually a good idea.

Why bring this up today after a year has passed? Well, I was coding something, and the constructor was hidden by a region. I was thinking “Hmm, if we just left the constructors out of regions, it would be easy to read, because the regions would hide the internal implementations I don't care about, yet at a glance I can see how to instantiate the object” (hmm, I think they call that encapsulation) and use it. Now that right there justifies the use of regions alone.... I can actually think of a lot of reasons to use regions, and I do it religeously where my client has no opition about it.

Just a flashback from the past.... anyone got a counter opinion? Regardless, it just goes to show extreme anything typically isn't a good thing in my mind. You have to be flexible in your approach to life if you plan on growing...

Tentatively, my current project is set to end in October. No big deal there, as I have had absolutely no bench days in the past 10 years as an Independent Contractor. In fact, during most of those 10 years I have been working 55-80+ hours per week and having a great time doing it. I don't do the book thing or magazine article thing because quite frankly, I don't have time because I am busy doing billable work which pays a lot more. I havn't needed self-promotion thing either because almost all my business comes from referrals from current or past customers.

Then along come kids, and dang if you don't suddenly want to spend more time at home and improve their quality of life (and mine). My current project wants to bring me on full time, and we've had some preliminary discussions on it, and I am willing to take the pay cut in my pay for one simple thing: I want to work remotely and raise my kids in the country. Their attitude is like mine, which is that should be fine since I have a strong work ethic and can get things done, what does it matter where I work as long as I have a phone and internet connection. However, there are data security concerns and management concerns which would need to be overcome.

I have plenty of time, since barring disaster, the contract won't be over until October sometime. But I figure I will start self-promoting just in case someone from a company who doesn't mind remote employees stumbles on this blog. Towards October, I will go full bore trying to close something out, and in the meantime I plan on blogging much more so I can display what talents I can bring to the table.

If any companies out there that come up on this, and want a great employee (C#/VB developer with lots of SQL Server and architect/designer/coding and full-life cycle development) that brings a lot of experience, a great professional attitude and presence as well as the ability to code like the wind (and good code at that..), then drop me a line and let's talk.

Here's a resume just in case..

I bought CodeSmith back in v2, but I was so busy I never got a chance to do more than play around with it. So now v3 is released, and I was looking at the improvements (like Intellisense) and decided I would take a look at it again. Boy, was I glad I did..

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't putting it off because I think code generation and templates are bad. In fact, quite the opposite. When I first started my business, I had a few people working with me part-time, and then finally full time as the business grew. What I found was that in the end, I apparently hold my coding standards to a higher value than others and I would end up coding 90% of the application myself. I realized quickly there were a few huge advantages to automated code generation. Here's a few:

• Fewer errors (as long as you fix the templates as errors are encountered)
• One developer can do the work of 4-5 once you get a good architecture set up
• Standards enforcement is a no-brainer when you are all working off the same templates
• You can spend more time on UI usability and data structure because 90% of the infrastructure stuff is done automatically
• Changes are easy. Change the structure and regenerate the code, and you are off again.

I could go on and on about it. I had written a series of VB6 addins which I used based off Rocky Lhotka's BusinessObjects book for VB5. In hours I could generate almost all of my middle and data tier code. A tweak here and there, and I was doing the fun stuff like UI coding.

Along comes .Net, and my addins were irrelevant. I created a couple of quick and dirty addins, but I was so busy heads-down coding, I didn't have time to create new templates to reflect the impact of .Net. I did create some common libraries of functions which got me through a good chunk of redundant coding, so that was going to have to do the job for the time.  I had always intended on going back and re-coding some new templates, but it never happened.

I am currently working on a project and we are horribly understaffed, and there's no relief in sight. There are some huge deadlines coming up, and it's time to make the rubber hit the road. I already code fast (and tight), but I needed to clone myself a couple times over to make the deadlines. So when the announcement came this week of CodeSmith 3.0, I decided I would take a new serious look at it and see what it could do for me.

Holy crap! In a matter of hours I had some pretty solid templates up and running, which will save the team many, many hours of redundant coding tasks in building this application. I have so many ideas for new templates it's scary, and I have only scratched the surface for what the tool can do. If you haven't looked at it yet, I recommend immediately going to CodeSmith and downloading a trial.

If you are using DIME attachments, and you want to use them in a Windows client, this tip will save you some time. I created a File Upload/Download web service for a client I am currently working with, and until this week is was used solely on a web front end. However, there was a request for a Windows client, so I set out to create one using the same code.

All seemed well, until I went to compile. My Web Service is called FileService (for the purposes of this discussion), and in order the use DIME attachments after setting a web reference, you need to use the FileServiceWse version of the web reference (the wse class). The problem was, one wasn't generated in the proxy. I debated using the proxy for the web application, but then decided to try something a little different.

I removed the existing Web Reference, added a reference to System.Web to my project, then added the Web Reference again. Viola! My wse version was available now, and my code compiles! I decided to post this to save someone else a bit of time, as well as a reminder to myself in the future.

There's a lot of debate on the best type of error handling, where to log it (if at all), and when to do it. For example, here's a debate today:

http://weblogs.asp.net/alex_papadimoulis/archive/2005/03/29/396141.aspx

In this debate, the question is Return codes vs. Throwing an Exception. You can read the blog entry to see the debate. Here's my take, and why.

First, I always handle the exception where it happens, and rarely bubble it up. Why? First, what if the calling code doesn't handle the exception? Now you have an unhandled error, and it could cause an application to crash. On a recent project for a large chipmaking client, I got into this debate a few times with all levels of developers. It was always an interesting debate with senior developers because they at least adopted their belief into action and a bigger strategy. For example, they may trickle it up and handle it at the highest level, but if they forget to handle it, the best developers handle the uncaught errors at the thread level. The advantage is they have the error information and can use it to provide the user some feedback as to the nature of the problem.

But those are good developers, and I would say the top 10%. As an example, I had this debate with a mid-level developer who was convinced he was a senior level developer. Now, as I tell this story, let me mention I am a very good poker player. He adamantly felt errors should be bubbled up and handled at the UI. I countered him with the standard “What happens when the exception isn't handled?” He advised me he never forgets. Enter the poker player in me.

Being a consultant, you have to know when to shut up and let the “hand” play out. This was an XP project (never again), and as we paired, I watched him write some code, and I even reminded him about error handling. For the most part, with my diligence and because we had just had the discussion this guy was being fairly consistant in his exception handling at the UI level. However, I stopped reminding him (it's instinct for me to do it now), and sure enough, he forgot, and the application crashed a horrible death. The reason I wanted to have this discussion with him was because his code was causing about 80% of the crashes on the team, and I was trying to help him improve his skills (and our project). To finish the story, the guy's ego was so big he refused to accept responsibility for the crashes or even acknowledge that I had a valid point about forgetting error handling, and kept on his merry way.

Back to the point, IMHO error handling should be handled where the error occurs. This is especially true in multi-developer projects, as you cannot guarantee someone who calls your code is diligent enough to handle things when problems occur.

But that has a serious downside -- how do you let the user know there was a problem, and it was handled? The answer -- return values. OK, there's a little more to it than that. An error code is never enough information to provide feedback or to decide what to do when the caller receives notice an error occurred. Even worse, a number is useless in trying to relay relevant info to the end-user.

What I have adopted is this: I have a base class which my other classes inherit from. In that class, I have an ErrorMessage property (string) which is set where the error occurs, or in a central error handler. When a method encounters an error, it returns an integer value indicating failure. The calling routine (if desired) can check the ErrorMessage property and use that value for displaying a message or get details as to the nature of the problem.  It can also ignore it if it wants. The key thing though is that the error will never go unhandled and cause the application to crash.

I'll be happy to post up some examples if there is interest. This is just a very important topic to me, and one I think which separates the wheat from the chaff, as they say!

In the debate listed above, there's an argument over performance. There's a balance here: you need to perform well, but performance is killed when the application crashes. Find a solution which is robust but also performs. Not handling an exception is not an option for robustness.

I have a large ASP.Net project I am working on, and the solution contains about 6 projects. Periodically, it won't compile, but when I look in the Task List there are no errors listed. After a lot of trial and error, I finally found a solution which restores the missing error notations, so that I can fix the problem and move on.

Right-click in the “Task” screen, and select the “Show Tasks/Comments” option. Try compiling, and of course it will fail again. Then, right-click on the “Task” screen again, and select the “Build Errors” option, and they should appear. It seems to work fairly consistantly so I think this “workaround” may actually work.

As an alternative (although not as easy to work with), you can just look at the output window, and filter through the text output. Take your pick, you should be able to see what the problem is!

ADDENDUM: It happened again, and these steps didn't work exactly. To make it work, try to compile again between “right-clicks” and they should appear.

Sometimes as a developer you need to rename a file with a date time aspect so you can do something like guarantee uniqueness,  track submission information, etc. There's always a ton of ways to do this, but I decided to write a couple of routines to do this using the FileInfo class. First, the code:

First, the FormatUniqueFileName funtion takes a file name (like test.txt), and inserts the date time info (in the current format, it does this as fileprefix_mmddyyyy_hhmmss.fileextension, so in our example, we might get test_03162005_071525.txt.

Not a real complex function by any means, but one that's reused a lot in development, and I decided to get this out just in case some developer wanted to save 5 minutes!

Enjoy!

I am currently trying to go through a Code Review at a large bank to get our code approved for release on the internet. One thing that came up was in some situations, we are displaying the raw exception message which was listed as a no-no, which I disagree with. While it's not particularly informative to the user which is potentially an issue, I can't see where “Invalid use of null” is going to be particularly useful to a hacker, but to a developer, that tidbit may help identify the problem when the user calls for help (good application logging aside in this example). Ironically, when errors weren't handled because the developer forgot, this passed code review.

So my intent was to enumerate all the default error messages to determine if there are any which would be particularly helpful to a hacker. While I am still looking to find or create an application which will enumerate all the default messages that .New throws out, I did come across a great article which lists the various error handling philosophies, and tries to weigh out the pros and cons of each. Here's where to get this pearl of wisdom:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/exceptdotnet.asp

Here's another simple tip, but it does encapsulate some of the functionality needed to format a DateTime (or a string) to a particular string format. First, from the documentation, here's some examples of the DateTime formatting:

Column 1: Format String, Column 2: The format of the date
    ' d :08/17/2000
    ' D :Thursday, August 17, 2000
    ' f :Thursday, August 17, 2000 16:32
    ' F :Thursday, August 17, 2000 16:32:32
    ' g :08/17/2000 16:32
    ' G :08/17/2000 16:32:32
    ' m :August 17
    ' r :Thu, 17 Aug 2000 23:32:32 GMT
    ' s :2000-08-17T16:32:32
    ' t :16:32
    ' T :16:32:32
    ' u :2000-08-17 23:32:32Z
    ' U :Thursday, August 17, 2000 23:32:32
    ' y :August, 2000
    ' dddd, MMMM dd yyyy :Thursday, August 17 2000
    ' ddd, MMM d "'"yy :Thu, Aug 17 '00
    ' dddd, MMMM dd :Thursday, August 17
    ' M/yy :8/00
    ' dd-MM-yy :17-08-00

First, we'll need a function to verify the string we have is a valid date.

The ValidDate function takes a string, and returns true if the value is a valid date, or false if it isn't.

Next, here's the function for formatting the date:

valDate = the string to format

formatString = the format style as listed earlier

That's it for today!

Say what you will about VB, it does have some wrappers for some neat functions. One of my favorites is the Split function. Essentially, it takes a string, a parse character parameter, and returns a string array of the items. For example, it might look like string[] mystring = Split(myCommaDelimitedString,”,”);

So here's what the code looks like:

  /// <summary>
  /// Replacement in C# of the VB.Net split function
  /// </summary>
  /// <param name="baseString">string to parse</param>
  /// <param name="splitChar">chanracter to parse with </param>
  /// <returns></returns>
  public static string[] Split(string baseString, string splitChar)
  {
   char[] sep = {(splitChar.ToCharArray())[0]};
   return baseString.Split(sep);
  }

Now, I know you can use the string object's split functionality to do the same thing. However, those coming out of the VB world will appreciate the encapsulation, as well as never having to remember the syntax for pre-defining a character array.

One of the things I use this blog for is to keep track of tips which I may need while out at the client site. I have a fairly extensive CodeLib library I use, but for some reason, I didn't have this in my library.

If you're new to javascript, which I am definitely still in the learning stages of, at some point you are going to access the control which called a function. I did a few searches, and it turns out, unless you know what you are looking for, it's tough to do a search like “javascript determining control which called a function” and similar searches. So here goes, and hopefully this simple tip will save another developer a little time. It IS a basic function, I will be the first to admit, but it is also useful to know for an ASP.Net developer. And the code is:

document.activeElement

There you go! Simple, but for some reason, it's assumed you should know it, which to a degree, I agree with. But I would also have to say online there seems to be an assumption that everyone already knows the DOM!

Do you have a routine which you know works, and you don't want to have to step into when you're debugging? Granted, you could you the hotkeys to do it, but why bother? The System.Diagnostics namespace provides some neat functionality for helping you in your debugging process. Here's some examples:

//This attribute prevents the debugger from entering, as well as no breakpoints within

<System.Diagnostics.DebuggerStepThrough()>

private string MyRoutine()

{

//Don't step through this

}

I am actually not sure what the difference between that and the DebuggerHidden() attribute is though. The description in the help is the same. Anyone know?

Here's a quick tip for casting to a particular type if you have the name of the type. Once again, it may be obvious to some, but if you've never done it, it's tough to find a quick example of it, so here goes.

I was implementing a custom ViewState for an UserControl I was creating, and came across a situation where I needed to dynamically box a type, when all I know is the type which I have stored in a string. I am creating a special container control which can host any other type of control, and for restoring ViewState, I needed to cast it correctly when restored. Fortunately, I followed a hunch, and came across the answer -- System.Type.GetType.

string testType = “System.Int32“;

Type myType1 = Type.GetType(testType);

Not Earth shattering, but then again, you have to know where to look!

OK, so you're looking at some really obscure code, so it's time to step in and see exactly what it's doing, and the best way to do it is use the debugger. Actually, if I have to give you a reason to use the debugger, you probably shouldn't be reading this in the first place. You fire up the VS IDE, hit F5, and viola! You see the following scary message:

What the heck? “Error when typing to run project: Unable to start debugging on the web server. Catastrophic failure.”

Likely you won't see this unless you don't have Admin privledges on the box. Right now, I am doing a project for a large bank, and trying to get rights to do anything is like trying to pry a “Magic” card from a freshman engineering student. My rights are so messed up, I actually have to do the following steps at the start of every day I plan on debugging. If you see this message, here's the steps you can try to get rid of it and get on with your debugging.

First, you're going to need to change one of the local security policies. Open up your admin folder, and select Local Security Policies. You should see something similar to the image below. Next, select User Rights Assignment.

Locate Impersonate a client after authentication, and double click on it. You should get a dialog similar to the following. What you'll need to do is add the IWAM_ (and I add the ASP.Net worker thread just for good measure to the policy) like below. For the record, I believe only IWAM_ is required.

 OK, you've taken the first step to fixing the problem, but that's not it. You've got to get IIS and the rest of the system to recognize the new policy. So, first, open up the “Run “ command from the Start menu) or command prompt, and type the following:

Type

secedit /refreshpolicy machine_policy /enforce

This will refresh the security policy for the local machine. Next, type this command to restart IIS now that everything is set.

iisreset

That's it! Assuming the IIS application workspace is set to allow debugging, and everything else is good on the machine, hopefully you'll be debugging like the Orkin man!

-- Daryl

Someone on the project I am currently working on stumbled on some documentation for WinCV, and in that documentation, it tells you how to add Assemblies which aren't in the GAC. Here's the link from the MSDN, and then I will point out the interesting part:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cptools/html/cpconwindowsformsclassviewerwincvexe.asp

By using a response file, you can issue the necessary the parameters to look at one or more files. From the documentation:

The following code shows the contents of a response file myFile.rsp. Using a response file eliminates the need to individually type the commands at the command prompt.

          /r:myAssembly.dll /r:myOtherAssembly.dll
        

The following command reads the response file myFile.rsp and executes the commands specified in the file.

          wincv @myFile.rsp
        

          So,
you could set up a standard response file which holds all the names of assemblies
to search! 
        

Pretty neat!

Here's another tip which is a wrapper to retrieve the value from an enum by it's text and also to get the text of an enum based on a value.

            public
            static
            string RetrieveEnumTextByValue
(Type enumType, Object value)

{

            if (enumType.IsEnum)

    {

            if (System.Enum.GetName(enumType,value)
!= null)

            return System.Enum.GetName(enumType,
value);

    }

            return
            "";

}

            public
            static
            int RetrieveEnumValueByText(Type
enumType, string text)

{

            if (enumType.IsEnum)

    {

            if (System.Enum.Parse(enumType,text)
!= null)

            return Convert.ToInt32(System.Enum.Parse(enumType,
text));

    }

            return -1;

}

I'm a little lazy tonight, but maybe I will come in later and post usage. I'll make a better effort to do that in the future, but I have to be up in a few hours, and being tired tomorrow just won't do!

-- Daryl

Yet another tip of the day. I guess until I get an environment set up to go over my Filter Component I will be posting a lot of tips just so I keep the blog active. Be patient, it will be worth it when I get the project set up.

CHAR() was a useful function for taking an integer value and returning the Ascii equivalent from the value. There's a bit more to it in .Net, so here's a C# wrapper function to do the same. Once again, there's no error handling or validation, so if this is important to you (and it should be), caveat emptor.

            public
            static
            string Char(int asciiCode)

{

    Byte[] charBytes = {asciiCode};

            return System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetString(charBytes);

}

-- Daryl

This is a pretty simple tip (or set of tips) but one in which if you don't know, you're going to be glad to find them out.

First, depending on how your profile is set up in Visual Studio, you can type Ctrl-space to get the Intellisense to come up. If there's only one possible option, it will go ahead and type the rest out for you. For example, type “Sy” in the Code behind editor, and press Ctrl-space. You should see a ton of “System” options you can select from to complete the word.

OK, that was easy, right? Well, here's a little one which is often overlooked: creating an alias in your using statement.

Typically, you might set up your “includes” as follows (in C#).

using System.XML;

That works great if you are really familiar with the object model, and know what public method/member you want. Suppose you don't? You can do this:

using MyXML=System.XML;

Now, when you type MyXML, you can get the full Intellisense for the System.XML without having to type all that (or guess). Simple, but great for working with new workspaces.

Not sure where I got this, so my apologies to the original author, but it's been a pretty useful function. Of course, you might want to wrap this with some error handling and validation code, but here's a good start for you...

            private
            string GetRomanNumber(int number)

{

            string[]
ArabicNums = newstring[] {"1", "4", "5", "9", "10", "40", "50", "90", "100", "400", "500", "900", "1000"};

            string[]
RomanNums = newstring[] {"I","IV","V","IX","X","XL","L","XC","C","CD","D","CM","M"};

            int ArabicUpper
= ArabicNums.GetUpperBound(0);

            int ArabicLower
= ArabicNums.GetLowerBound(0);

            string Output
= "";

            for (int i
= ArabicUpper; i >= ArabicLower; i--)

    {

            while (number
>= Convert.ToInt32(ArabicNums[i]))

        {

            number -= Convert.ToInt32(ArabicNums[i]);

            Output += RomanNums[i];

        }

    }

            return Output;

}

Enjoy!