We all have those days where we spend hours trying to solve a seemingly simple problem only to smack ourselves in the head when we finally figure it out. Missing quotes, forgetting to flush a StreamWriter, etc. If only we could get back all the wasted time.
Well, this week I wrestled with more gotchas than usual. Below are the ones that burned most of my time.
Streams
Don’t forget to flush a StreamWriter when you’re done. Otherwise, you’ll be deep in the debugger trying to figure out why the target stream is empty.
// Don't forget to flush!
// Good advice for kids and .NET developers.
StreamWriter.Flush();
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of Streams, after writing to a stream, you’ll need to reset the stream’s position pointer to 0 before reading from it. Some third party methods are smart enough to do this for you; others are not (I’m looking at you HttpClient).
// After writing to a stream, you'll need to manually reset the position
// before reading from it.
Stream.Position = 0;
Knockout.js
Knockout.js landed some good blows this week as I dug deeper into the library. In particular, it took hours and a number of searches to figure out how to bind optionsText and optionsValue in an HTML select element. Don’t forget the single quotes or else Knockout will return a reference error.
Unable to process binding “options: function (){return availableContentTypes }” Message: display is not defined
<!-- Use single quotes when binding a viewmodel property to optionsText and optionsValue. -->
<p> <select data-bind="options: availableContentTypes,
optionsText: 'display',
optionsValue: 'value',
value: contentType"></select></p>
Frankly, I don’t know why single quotes are necessary in this case, and I didn’t bother to look it up. If anyone knows, please leave a comment.
Nancy
I stood up a website using Nancy earlier in the week and had some static content to serve up. The easiest way to do this is to add to the static content conventions in a custom bootstrapper class. But when adding a static file to the root directory, you need to include the forward slash in both the requested file and content file.
public class CustomBootstrapper : DefaultNancyBootstrapper
{
protected override void ConfigureConventions(NancyConventions conventions)
{
base.ConfigureConventions(conventions);
conventions.StaticContentsConventions.AddDirectory("Scripts");
// Include the forward slash in the file names.
// If the file is part of a longer path, include the path.
conventions.StaticContentsConventions.AddFile("/SendEmail.html", "/SendEmail.html");
}
}
It wasn’t all bad
Despite the frustration, it really was a good week. Digging through these issues took me down some unexpected tangents. I learned a lot and was able to improve other areas of the codebase. Hopefully this post/rant prevents someone else from making the same mistakes.