ASP.NET Programmer

Panasonic Viera Plasma TV: AV Input Changing by Itself

So I’m heading off the reservation on this one. Not exactly a programming issue (or is it?), but a major technology annoyance for those who are experiencing it. About a month ago my Panasonic Viera Plasma television just started cycling through the input selections on its own. No real rhyme or reason to it. It would just skip down the list regardless of how you tried to make it do otherwise via the remote control or via the panel on the front of the television. I tried taking the batteries out of the remote — no change. I called Panasonic and they had me to a remote and system reset — still no go. Finally, I just happened to stumble across a message board one evening concerning an unrelated issue, saw a solution and decided to give it a try. Basically, there is a hidden installer menu that can be accessed by pressing the volume down button on the television while clicking the AV button on the remote three times. Once this menu comes up, I changed the AV from — over to Control 1 and the cycling stopped. Its been a week with no relapses so I’m thinking (knock on wood) I’ve found a solution that didn’t involve a costly repair man and a gutting of my TV. If you are pulling your hair out because of this bizarre input cycling problem, give this solution a try. What can it hurt?

Reading Files from a Directory using C#

So I had a project which I needed to find out what files were being held in a given directory and write those back to the browser. This is very helpful in automating posting of files to a website by your users without you being involved in tedious static html updates. The key here is the System.IO .NET class. We are going to access the DirectoryInfo class so we can iterate through and pull back all file objects contained within. In the code below, the DirectoryInfo looks in the current directory as we’ve defined through Server.MapPath(“.”). We could just have easily directed this through stepping up the directory (i.e. c:\intepub\wwwroot\directoryread\filestoread\). Next, we tell it to grab all the files that end with an .aspx extension which screens out any text or pdf files we may not be interested in. In the FileInfo class, we extract the name of each file to wire up the hyperlink and print this back to the user. I’ve taken it one step further to strip out the hyphens and the .aspx file extension that we print back to the user so the file name “Reading-files-from-a-directory-using-csharp.aspx” becomes “Reading files from a directory using cSharp”. Much cleaner and user friendly. That FileInfo class has lots of cool properties including LastWriteTime, CreationTime, Length (for a full rundown on the FileInfo properties checkout Microsoft’s .NET Framework Developer Center). <%@ Import Namespace="System.IO" %> <script language="c#" runat="server"> void Page_Load(object s, EventArgs e) { DirectoryInfo di = new DirectoryInfo(Server.MapPath(".")); FileInfo[] rgFiles = di.GetFiles("*.aspx"); foreach(FileInfo fi in rgFiles) { Response.Write("<br /><a href=" + fi.Name + ">" + formatString(fi.Name) + "</a>"); } } string formatString(string url){ url = Regex.Replace(url, "-", " "); url = Regex.Replace(url, ".aspx", ""); return url; } </script> Tags: c#, fileio, system.io

Looking for NULL Values in SQL

After spending much too long trying to figure out why a SQL CASE statement wasn’t correctly evaluating the second condition in this statement:

CASE WHEN [column_name1]=’ASP.NET Programming’ AND [column_name] = NULL

I realize rather foolishly it is the way I am comparing the value to NULL. SQL is always IS NULL and not = NULL.

[column_name] IS NULL Tags: case statements, null, SQL

Introduction to ASP.NET Programmer

ASP.NET Programmer is a site built to store programming code samples for daily challenges we come across that will no doubt surface over and over again as well as an avenue to feature our projects we’ve built and systems we manage to highlight our consulting services. Regardless, we hope to provide much value in an overall webspace that seems loaded down with fluff. Enjoy!