I do a lot of backend programming for Flash frontends. That basically means a lot of ASPX pages that simply return some XML and accept some incoming XML for parameters. Most of the UI logic ends up getting cluttered with manual XML stringbuilding, so I saw this as an obvious opportunity to play around with a fluent interfaces. Now, here's an example of a typical boolean yes/no result from a Flash query: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <root> <result type="boolean">true</result> </root> I'd usually create this bit of XML using a simple StringBuilder like so: StringBuilder output = new StringBuilder(); output.Append("<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?>"); output.Append("<root>"); output.Append("<result type=\"boolean\">true</result>"); output.Append("</root>"); This has the advantage...

Recently I was developing a couple of simple ORM classes that had me confused. [Serializable] public class Domain { // Read private int domainID; public int DomainID { get { return domainID; } } private string domainName; public string DomainName { get { return domainName; } } // Read/Write public int? CompanyID; } Take this simple object as an example. It represents a website domain, it has an ID from the database aswell as a read only domain name and a belonging CompanyID. Now, I want to create a Load() function that given a domain ID will instantiate a new instance of a Domain object and populate its values from the...

Reading and writing values to the DB has always been a bit cumbersome when you had to take care of nullable types and DBNull values. Here's a way to make it easy. Based on this post by Peter Johnson and this post by Adam Anderson I gathered a couple of ideas and combined them to make a completely generic class that will handle DBNulls for both reads and writes, as well as handling nullable types. Let me present the code, I'll go over it afterwards: public static class DBConvert { /// <summary> /// Handles reading DBNull values from database in...