Pierre-Emmanuel Dautreppe

Let's say we have the following specifications :

- We want an application that will turn continuously on a machine
- This application shall require no manual interaction (starting automatically)
- This application shall monitor a specific folder on the file

The specifications are very simple and we will probably start thinking to a windows service that would be launched in an automatic manner. This service could then use a FileSystemWatcher to do its job.

We'll see in this post how we can create this service and how to start / stop the FileSystemWatcher in the OnStart and OnStop event of the service, and to parameter it, specifying the properties NotifyFilter and EnableRaisingEvents.
We'll also see how we can install the service and specify that it will start automatically on each startup of Windows.

Finally we'll give some extra links to be able to customize the behavior of the service. [Plus]

A bug exist in the method CompilerType.Equals that may produce a NullReferenceException in some cases. You will find some more explanations about this bug. [Plus]

Recently, one of my colleague wanted to call an auto-implemented property setter in a class' constructor.
I do not think this is a good idea as we don't know how the class may evolve in the future.
In this post, I will show some of possible evolutions that make me think that we should not use auto-implemented properties in a class' constructor, but rather use a classical property and thus the member variable. [Plus]

I recently wrote a post describing the use of control adapters to adapt the rendering of a control
However there are special things to know where we use control adapters with validators (ie controls deriving - directly or not - from BaseValidator), unless what the rendering result may be far from the one expected. [Plus]

Depending of the browser, some control may need to be rendered differently. By default the .NET framework works with "Control Adapters", id est, some classes that will be plugged into the rendering process.

How does it works ? When the server receives a request, it will try to find which browser does the request, based on the user agent or on HTTP headers for example. To do it rely on some browser definition files (of extension .browser). To see them, please go on %windir%/Microsoft.NET/Framework//CONFIG/Browsers.

When the server has identified the browser (at worse, it would be identified as a "Default" browser), and that it needs to render a control, it will look if there is some control adapters plugged for this kind of control. If there are some, they will be in charge of the rendering. If not, the control will render himself. Note that an adapter can redirect / delegate some treatment to the control.

In this post, I will show
- how to create a basic control adapter
- how to use the adapter in a website (ie how to create a ".browser" file)
- how we can use this for testing purpose (by adapting the user agent used for testing requests) [Plus]