Taking a break from posting for a while

Got a baby coming in a few days as I’m going be a Dad for the first time. I’ll be taking a break from posting for while as I get accustomed to the new life as a Father.

Most useful random BlackBerry app of the day – Autolock (keypad lock after X seconds)

As I was upgrading the wife’s Blackberry to the latest OS, I happened across this nice little app. It adds the functionality to be able to lock your keypad X number of seconds/minutes after the screen dims (from a lack of use). Awesome app to prevent “booty” calls when you stick your Blackberry in your pocket without locking the keypad.

http://www.geekandproud.net/blackberry-software

Note: His link to the ALX/COD install is down and only has an OTA install. I did some further googling around and found this link to the ALX/COD install files – http://www.geekandproud.net/blackberry/autolock/autolock.zip

Brought over the Projects section populated with my nice little Create Delimited Text File SQL2005 stored procedure

It only took 3 months but I finally brought over the projects section from my old blog. Right now, this only consists of the SQL stored procedure that I wrote a year ago and have maintained with fairly regular updates which allows you to create a delimited text file from a SQL table, SQL view, Access Database, Excel file, or DBASE file. It’s a great little script that is very, very fast. I had a few comments about it on my previous blog where it helped out a handful of folks so hopefully it’ll continue to be of aid. Here’s the link to it but you can also just click on the new Projects section at the top of the page to get to it as well.

Tired of FirstOrDefault returning NULL when working with custom objects and LINQ? Then write your own!

So I finally got to work with LINQ in our current .NET 3.5 project as I haven’t had a chance to use it yet in business projects, just personal projects which usually resulted from curiosity. I know, I know, it’s newness has worn off since it’s been around since .NET 3.0 but hey, whattyagonnado? Anywho, I began working with LINQ centered around some custom classes and collections we had written.

As I being working with this, I specifically came across a few use-case scenarios for FirstOrDefault(). I could use this function with a conditional clause and knock out a lot of clunk codeblocks that I used in different parts of the application. Then I quickly found the pitfall of using this with my custom object… it returned NULL if not found. This required me to write 2 more lines of code to checks for NULLs which I felt was a bit wasteful so I was steered by Google to http://blog.dynamicprogrammer.com/2009/05/28/FirstOrNullObjectExtensionMethodForIEnumerableAndFirstOrNew.aspx which taught me to write my own FirstOrDefault type of function which allows me to define the default value that is returned if a value is not found. If you want actual information about it, please read his post above. I’m just providing the code I wrote as a result of reading his excellent post.

Here is my LINQHelper class I came up with. These extension methods give me the ability to prevent the returning of a NULL object with my custom classes which reduces the amount of code I have to write in the long run. I also went ahead and extended the LastOrDefault methods as well.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace BusinessLogic
{
    public static class LINQHelper
    {

        public static T FirstOrNullObject<T>(this IEnumerable<T> enumerable, Func<T, bool> func, T nullObject)
        {
            var val = enumerable.FirstOrDefault<T>(func);
            if (val == null)
            {
                val = nullObject;
            }

            return val;
        }

        public static T FirstOrNullObject<T>(this IEnumerable<T> enumerable, T nullObject)
        {
            var val = enumerable.FirstOrDefault<T>();
            if (val == null)
            {
                val = nullObject;
            }
            return val;
        }

        public static T FirstOrNew<T>(this IEnumerable<T> enumerable, Func<T, bool> func, T newObject)
        {
            return enumerable.FirstOrNullObject<T>(func, newObject);
        }

        public static T FirstOrNew<T>(this IEnumerable<T> enumerable, T newObject)
        {
            return enumerable.FirstOrNullObject<T>(newObject);
        }

        public static T FirstOrDefault<T>(this IEnumerable<T> enumerable, Func<T, bool> func, T defaultObject)
        {
            return enumerable.FirstOrNullObject<T>(func, defaultObject);
        }

        public static T FirstOrDefault<T>(this IEnumerable<T> enumerable, T defaultObject)
        {
            return enumerable.FirstOrNullObject<T>(defaultObject);
        }

        public static T LastOrNullObject<T>(this IEnumerable<T> enumerable, Func<T, bool> func, T nullObject)
        {
            var val = enumerable.LastOrDefault<T>(func);
            if (val == null)
            {
                val = nullObject;
            }

            return val;
        }

        public static T LastOrNullObject<T>(this IEnumerable<T> enumerable, T nullObject)
        {
            var val = enumerable.LastOrDefault<T>();
            if (val == null)
            {
                val = nullObject;
            }
            return val;
        }

        public static T LastOrNew<T>(this IEnumerable<T> enumerable, Func<T, bool> func, T newObject)
        {
            return enumerable.LastOrNullObject<T>(func, newObject);
        }

        public static T LastOrNew<T>(this IEnumerable<T> enumerable, T newObject)
        {
            return enumerable.LastOrNullObject<T>(newObject);
        }

        public static T LastOrDefault<T>(this IEnumerable<T> enumerable, Func<T, bool> func, T defaultObject)
        {
            return enumerable.LastOrNullObject<T>(func, defaultObject);
        }

        public static T LastOrDefault<T>(this IEnumerable<T> enumerable, T defaultObject)
        {
            return enumerable.LastOrNullObject<T>(defaultObject);
        }

    }
}

Once again, this information was gathered from Mr. Garcia’s blog at http://blog.dynamicprogrammer.com. I give him full credit for this information laid out in a very explanatory blog post.