Scott's Blog

I can across a problem today where I had to attach a PDF file that is stored on a network share to an outgoing email using ASP.NET 2.0. This is pretty simple to do, except in my case the PDF filename on the share has an obfuscated name while its original name (file.pdf) is stored in a database lookup table. Looking at the System.Net.Mail.Attachment constructors, you'll see that three take a string filename and three take a System.IO.Stream object to represent the file. The string filename constructors do not possess the ability (as far as I could see) to give the attached file a "friendly name", although one of the Stream constructors does. So what I ended up doing was opening the file with a non-locking FileStream object and then passing it to the mail attachment object, careful to close the stream when I was done. Pretty simple, but I couldn't find any sources using this method so I thought I'd write it down here (minus error handling code for clarity):

I recently ran into a situation where I wanted to render the contents of a user control either directly to the current HTML stream or to a file format like MS Word. Fortunately .NET has the 'LoadControl' function that takes the virtual path of a User Control and returns a Control object. In order to get the rendered output of a user control into an HTML32TextWriter, you can use the following code:

Exporting a SQL Server Reporting Services 2005 (SSRS) Report Directly to PDF/Excel is a handy way of generating high quality reports without being stuck to using the ReportViewer interface. Sometimes the ReportViewer interface is an unnecessary step, but other times the ReportViewer won't render correctly even though the underlying report is correct. This is especially true when your audience might use Firefox or Safari (or anything other than IE), since the ReportViewer control almost never outputs a readable report. Of course it would be nice to just have a button on your page that generates a PDF or Excel file in any browser, and uses a SSRS back-end to do all of the report creating and heavy lifting.

When I was converting untyped data values from a SQL database into a custom Business class, I realized that I have to take a special precaution when casting possibly null values. If you try to cast DBNull to some type, you will get an InvalidCastException. When thinking about a solution, I remembered the as operator and decided to do some investigating. Consider the following example:

Creating a Custom Code Snippet is pretty easy to do -- you just fire up your favorite text editor, write some XML, and save the results in a *.snippet file. If you use Visual Studio as your text editor, you can even get some XML Intellisense, which is always nice. I am going to create a code snippet called rw.snippet, which will simply expand to Response.Write();, and leave your cursor inside the parenthesis (something I use far too often, along with Trace.Write(), for debugging).

There is a little used function of Visual Studio that will save you a lot of coding time: Code Snippets. Code Snippets are handy key shortcuts that expand into commonly used .NET constructs such as regions, constructor, loops (do/while/for/foreach), and try/catch blocks. To use a code snippet you can type in its 'shortcut' and in Intellisense you will see a little piece of paper next to the word indicating that it is indeed a code snippet. Then you press TAB twice, and the code snippet is expanded into the full construct, and depending on the snippet you may be directed to enter some pertinent information.

My development environment involves working on code that is not stored locally on my machine, but on a centralized development server on our network. I like working this way because it allows me to decouple my computer from IIS, and running the remote debugger (comes on the Visual Studio 2005 DVD) is really simple.

If you use BLL objects with ObjectDataSources to populate your GridViews, DropDownLists, etc, the ObjectDataSource tries to instantiate your BLL object using a parameterless constructor. If you don't have a parameterless constructor (I usually don't) available, you'll get and error like: