I’ve just started using Entity Framework, and I’ve found that it really helps speed up development time when dealing with queries where performance isn’t a huge issue. I added to an existing project which needed to keep the EF classes isolated in the data layer. This made it difficult to pass in a sort order without having a massive switch statement to deal with each of the options. I solved this by building an OrderBy extension method that takes a string, and builds the sort expression using reflection. This means you can sort without having to know the actual type of what...

A couple of weeks ago I posted about C# like Properties in JavaScript. I wanted to explore how properties could possibly be added into JavaScript, and hopefully offer some insight into how some frameworks might work. Another feature that JavaScript doesn’t explicitly support is events. Though using some of the same techniques I used for events also work very well for building events. Most implementations of events in JavaScript use optional arguments in order to provide two overrides to an “event” function, one for adding a listener and the other for raising the event, like this: //...

On a project that I’ve been working on recently, I was having some trouble combining SQL scripts that where in a couple of different formats. While there’s no easy way to detect all of the possible encodings, by checking the byte order mark (BOM) there is a pretty straight forward way to detect the following encodings: UTF-16 UTF-16BE UTF-32 UTF-32BE UTF-8 public static Encoding GetFileEncoding(string path){ if (path == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("path"); var encodings = Encoding.GetEncodings() .Select(e => e.GetEncoding()) .Se

JavaScript doesn’t inherently support properties in the same way that .net languages do, which is a shame since the syntax really helps simplify access internalized data in a structured way. There’s a common solution to this in JavaScript, that exploits the fact that JavaScript function arguments are optional. A property function will have a single argument. If the argument is undefined then the current call is a ‘get’, otherwise it’s a ‘set’. jQuery has many good examples of this, for example the val() method: var value = $('input').val(); //...

I’ve been writing a lot of Node.js recently, and I’ve really love how the asynchronous database access works, and thought to myself “I wonder if I can do that with Entity Framework?” While I couldn’t find anywhere in EF the inherently support any form of async calls, I did find that you can with the underlying SqlConnection (assuming you’re using MSSQL.) So with a little bit of Async CTP magic mixed in, I created an extension method to read the data asynchronously. Unfortunately I couldn’t find an obvious way to open the connection or write data...