If you are using conditional directives in your C# code, you know that you can't set a breakpoint on any code within the directives using Visual Studio. Thankfully, you can add a breakpoint programmatically:

#if MYSYMBOL
   #if DEBUG
      System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();
   #endif
   DoSomethingForMySymbol();
#else   
   #if DEBUG
      System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();
   #endif
   DoSomethingForEverythingElse();
#endif

System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break() can only be called in Debug mode, so make sure you wrap it in a #if DEBUG check first. Good luck!

Here's a handy little tip for those of you using DataGrids or something similar, for instance, the Telerik RadGrid control. If you want to allow the user to double-click on a row to do something (edit the row, for example), implement the CellDoubleClick event handler for the grid and put your code in there. If you do this, then double-clicks in the column header will also fire the event; this can happen if a user clicks the header too quickly while trying to sort. To prevent this, add code to check e.RowIndex. If the user double-clicked on a header, e.RowIndex will = -1.

When programming for Windows, you'll sometimes want a container object (a form, a panel, etc.) to handle certain events, such as MouseOver, MouseMove, MouseUp, MouseDown, etc. But what happens if you have other controls in the container? You could write event handlers for each of those controls, but that seems like a lot of duplication of effort. One solution to this problem is to send the child control's events that you'd like to capture to the event handlers of the container

If you're like me, you sometimes use AJAX controls in your web page. And, if you're like me, you find that when they fail to behave as expected, you as the user are not notified as to the reason. Instead, the page will just stare back at you blankly: no spinning globe, no twirling fox to indicate that it is processing your request. Of course, what's really happened is that your AJAX request caused an unhandled exception on the server and the request was canceled. If you're like me (and if you've read this far I am forced to conclude we must be twins) you'd like some visibility into that unhandled exception.

There is a quick and easy solution! Simply add the following to your ASPX code-behind and during your debugging session Visual Studio will report the exception being thrown, complete with the exception message and stack trace. If you'd like to report the exception to the user, you would wrap the inner call in a try/catch block and update your UI (or Logging) accordingly.

Good luck!

C#

VB.NET
Protected Overrides Sub RaisePostBackEvent(ByVal source As IPostBackEventHandler, ByVal eventArgument As String)
    MyBase.RaisePostBackEvent(source, eventArgument)
End Sub

Once again I’m sharing some tips and tricks for the Telerik RadGridView control; this time for your combobox editors inside the grid. Learn to allow cell clearing using the combobox and have properly sized dropdowns regardless of cell width.

Tomorrow, May 27th 2009 from 9:30-11:00am PST, Falafel Software is holding a webinar on Data Driven Testing in TestComplete 7.0. The agenda for the webinar is as follows:

1. CSV population of data
2. Excel population of data
3. MS SQL Server population of Data
4. Windows and Web examples
5. Driver methods versus iteration methods in DDT
6. Realistic example of using DDT to solve real problems.

If you’re interested you can sign up here. The cost of the webinar is $29.

How to delete TortoiseSVN Username/password cache for specific repositories in three easy steps!