Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Goodbye trim()

I’ve been playing a bit the the RC version of the .net framework 4 and already found a new cool method.

Until now when I wanted to check for a valid string I had to use the following code:

if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(text) || string.IsNullOrEmpty(text.Trim()))
    throw newArgumentNullException("text", "text is not valid");

And I had to do that because a string containing nothing but white spaces was not valid and if you called the Trim() method on a null string you’ll get a NullReferenceException, you know the message… (“Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”)

So, the new cool method I found is a static method from string called IsNullOrWhiteSpace. the name pretty much says it all, except that the real name should be IsNullOrEmptyOrWhiteSpaces ;)

Instead of writing the code shown above, where you could easily forget the second condition, now you can have the same behavior in one single sentence:

if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(text))
    throw newArgumentNullException("text", "text is not valid");

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

New features to the Azure Web Storage Explorer

storageexplorer
On the first version you could only manage blobs, upload, delete and download them. Now I added the same functionality for Queues and Tables.
I found a pretty cool way of showing unstructured data from the Azure tables from a gridview control. How? with my good old friends the DataSets :)
I also updated the source code so you can download the source files from the version that it’s right now running on the Azure platform.
Go to http://storageexplorer.cloudapp.net/ to see the application running and here to download the source code.
Feedback is always welcome!

Edit: url is now http://azurestorage.azurewebsites.net