Localizing the GridView date values

This is weird. I should have bumped into this problem ages ago. The problem is, whenever I'm trying to enter a localized date into a datagrid, it is saved as if it were an American date. I.e., 1.02.2008, which is the 1st of February, is saved as 01/02/08 (January 2nd).

Setting the page's Culture to Russian didn't work. A quick Reflectoring showed that ObjectDataSource uses InvariantCulture for parsing the supplied values.

The solution is sort of ugly: use the grid's Updating event and swap the string with the corresponding date:

    Protected Sub gridDjSchedules_RowUpdating(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.GridViewUpdateEventArgs)

        e.NewValues("TheDate") = Convert.ToDateTime(e.NewValues("TheDate"), System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture)

    End Sub

Looks like it's time to create a custom control..

In search of a developer-friendly CMS

After a lot of frustration with DotNetNuke, which was quite a while ago, and some recent adventures with mojoPortal (by the way, Joe, the maintainer and almost a single contributor for this project, does excellent job fixing all the bugs in no time after they are reported), I decided that no way I'm gonna use a CMS again, ever. Yes, I used it on my own site, http://sm-art.biz, but then, it required no custom modules.

The problem is, all these frameworks focus on how simple it is to get your site up and running, provided that you don't need any additional functionality, other than included in one of the million modules. When you start to add something that is unique to this site, you quickly realize that it's much simpler to start from scratch than follow the module development guidelines. At the very least, they require that youк module inherits from a base class, and is initialized in such a way that it is totally impossible to test it outside of the framework.

So, here are the qualities of a CMS I wish existed. Has anybody seen this puppy?

1. Respect the composition-over-inheritance principle. Don't make me inherit, let me use a plain old ascx control.
2. Make it simle to plug this control into my site. Don't make me write these manifests and put sql scripts in a predefined place. However, I do want this possibility to exist, and also custom installer classes.
3. Use Convention over Configuration, it's the latest trend.
4. Make it decoupled. I don't want to see a column "totalforumposts" in the users table.
5. Use Ivonna for testing, I don't want a buggy product :)
6. I want to go from a regular site to a CMS and back in small steps. I want to be able to use various parts of it independently and switch off other parts if necessary. It should be more like a framework. There shouldn't be one "switch to a CMS" step, but rather start using various pieces one by one.

Until I see something like this, I'll be trying to write my own.

A Dose Of Code

While developing Ivonna, I often have to figure out how various stuff in System.Web works. Sometimes Reflectoring it is enough; however, there are some particularly gigantic methods, full of loops and branches, that are hard to figure out. In any case, Reflector gives a static picture, while I need to see it live. Sure now you can download the source and debug through it (although I've never managed), but the real hackers don't use debuggers, preferring asserts and console output.

Anyway, I needed to inject some code (or stop the debugger) at some particular method call in some assembly I don't have the code of. I've been using the TypeMock's MockMethodCalled event for it. After a while, it became tedious, so I decided to put some repetitive code into a class. Soon I found that it could have a couple of more useful features, but I wanted it to be really simple, and I didn't need much, so I'm keeping it to one class, three methods, three relaxed evenings of development.

How does it work.

1. Create an instance of Njector using the target type (this is something like creating a mocked instance).
2. Add one or more injected pieces of code (something similar to adding expectations).
3. Call the main code, in which an instance of the target type is created, and the target methods are called.
4. The injected pieces are invoked before, after, or instead of the target methods. You also gain access to the target instance, target method parameters, and return value (in case you use the After injection).

Example
This is something that I actually used to figure out how the System.Web.HttpMultipartContentTemplateParser class parses the input using the ParseIntoElementList method. This method has several loops and branches, so it's not easy to find out what's happening given a particular piece of data. What you see here is just the preparation; after that I prepare the input data and call the framework code using Ivonna, but that's outside the scope of this post. GetPrivateField() is an utility extension method doing guess what.

var web = Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof(System.Web.HttpRequest));

var parserType = web.GetType("System.Web.HttpMultipartContentTemplateParser", true, true);

var inject = new Njector(parserType);

inject.After("GetNextLine", null, delegate(object target, MethodBase method, object[] parameters, object retValue) {

Console.WriteLine("GetNextLine: {0}", retValue);

Console.WriteLine("Pos={0}", target.GetPrivateField("_pos"));

Console.WriteLine("line={0}", target.GetPrivateField("_lineStart"));

Console.WriteLine("partDataStart={0}", target.GetPrivateField("_partDataStart"));

});

inject.After("AtBoundaryLine", null, delegate(object target, MethodBase method, object[] parameters, object retValue) {

Console.WriteLine("AtBoundaryLine: {0}", retValue);

});

inject.After("AtEndOfData", null, delegate(object target, MethodBase method, object[] parameters, object retValue) {

Console.WriteLine("AtEndOfData: {0}", retValue);

});

inject.After("ParsePartHeaders", null, delegate( object target, MethodBase method,object[] parameters, object retValue) {

Console.WriteLine("ParsePartHeaders");

});

inject.Before("ParsePartData", null, delegate(object target, MethodBase method, object[] parameters, object retValue) {

Console.WriteLine("ParsePartData Before");

Console.WriteLine("Pos={0}", target.GetPrivateField("_pos"));

Console.WriteLine("line={0}", target.GetPrivateField("_lineStart"));

//System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();

});

inject.After("ParsePartData", null, delegate(object target, MethodBase method, object[] parameters, object retValue) {

Console.WriteLine("ParsePartData After");

Console.WriteLine("Pos={0}", target.GetPrivateField("_pos"));

Console.WriteLine("line={0}", target.GetPrivateField("_lineStart"));

Console.WriteLine("partDataLength={0}", target.GetPrivateField("_partDataLength"));

});

//Prepare the data

//Do the POST

//The framework creates an instance of System.Web.HttpMultipartContentTemplateParser and calls its ParseIntoElementList method,

//which in turn calls the methods like GetNextLine, AtBoundaryLine, etc.

//After the GetNextLine method is called, our code is executed, and we're able to see the result.

Download the source here.

Update: there's a much better project now, called CThru, developed by TypeMock.