Cameron McKay

If you’ve ever used the .NET Framework version 3.5 of later, you’ll probably have encountered extension methods. Microsoft describes extension methods as:

Extension methods enable you to “add” methods to existing types without creating a new derived type, recompiling, or otherwise modifying the original type. Extension methods are a special kind of static method, but they are called as if they were instance methods on the extended type. For client code written in C# and Visual Basic, there is no apparent difference between calling an extension method and the methods that are actually defined in a type.

In this article, I will show you how to write a base class that will allow you to add methods to any PHP class that inherits from it at runtime. You will be able to call these methods transparently, without any special syntax.

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jQTouch is a pretty nifty little jQuery plugin for making websites look like native iPhone apps. Unfortunately, beyond a bunch of examples included with the distribution, there’s not a whole lot of online documentation written for jQTouch. Having started to use jQTouch for a professional project, I thought I’d help remedy this deficiency by posting what I learned along the way.

We’ll start with something fairly straightforward by making a jQTouch app that makes an AJAX call to a PHP script to search a database. It then displays the results of that search in the jQTouch app. This article is split up into two parts. The first part deals with the jQTouch UI and the second part deals with the PHP script and the supporting JavaScript.

This is part 1 of a two part series.

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Channel 9 has posted a great talk by Anders Hejlsberg, the original author of Turbo Pascal, the chief architect of Delphi, and the lead architect of C#.

History lesson: Anders was lured away from Borland by Microsoft with a hefty offer of a $1.5 million signing bonus, a base salary of up to $200,000, and options to buy 75,000 shares of Microsoft stock.

Looks like it was worth it, as each C# release has added many interesting and powerful features, while maintaining a fine balance between complexity and simplicity.

Sometimes we want to remove whitespace from the ends of our strings. In fact, this task is so common on the web that the ubiquitous jQuery library includes a utility method for that purpose.

What about in ActionScript 3? Well, not so much. The String class in AS3 is, in my opinion, a bit lacking compared to languages like C# and Scala. What’s worse, you can’t augment prototypes easily like you can in JavaScript to add missing methods (see update at the end for more information on this).

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While working on Flash sidescroller stuff I noticed that there was no easy way (that I could find) to create multiple sprites from a single bitmap (something you’d do when doing a tile-based graphics layout).

Sooo… I made my own simple library called SpriteFactory.

Here’s some example usage:

var factory:SpriteFactory = new SpriteFactory("assets/sprites");
factory.loadBitmap("grass", "block-grass.png");
var grass1:Sprite = factory.newSprite("grass");
var grass2:Sprite = factory.newSprite("grass");

Check out the project page for more information.

If you’ve ever needed to do more complex animations than fades and slides, then you’ve probably encountered the jQuery animate function. The animate function allows you quite a bit more flexibility than just using fadeOut or slideDown. In fact, the oft-used fades and slides simply wrap calls to animate.

If you’ve ever looked at the jQuery animate docs at api.jquery.com you might have noticed that one of the optional arguments you can define is step which is defined as:

A function to be called after each step of the animation.

…and that’s it. If you search for “step” on the page, you won’t see another mention of it.

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During a recent project of mine, I had to do a lot of enum manipulation using the .NET Enum class and I have to say I wasn’t impressed. Besides the shortcoming of it not being a generic class (and thus not being especially type-safe), Enum also has some strange inconsistencies in terms of how it handles matched integral types.

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I recently spent a couple hours yesterday to fix a problem I was having with my custom EnumStringType (see this post).

Basically, what was happening was when my repository was making a call to ICriteria.List(), which in turn called the Set method of EnumStringType, it was always passing in a lowercase string instead of an enum instance.

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NHibernate lets you map C# enums to database columns. This can be quite convenient in cases where you have a database column for something like gender. To map them, you follow the procedure outlined here.

That works all fine and dandy, as long as the strings you want to store in the database are valid C# identifiers.

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As someone who has had to write a lot of IE-only code (against my will, I swear!), I was pleased to hear that Firefox 3.0 added support for the IE JavaScript function window.showModalDialog. Being in the middle of re-writing an IE-only web application, I thought this would simplify rewriting the modal dialogs to be compatible with both browsers.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the folks at Mozilla put their best effort into this one.

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