Lewies Blog

So I’m working on my little log program for my transactions. I look into moving my hard-coded strings into a resource file as good practice. I’m finding that in .Net framework 2.0, it is so much easier. I mean … easy easy. Everything is done for me

I added a resource file to my project and just start typing away names and values for each of my strings. From there, every string is directly accessable from a class that the resource designer makes for me as static methods. I’ve never had it so easy.

In the old .Net framework 1.0, It seemed like I had to jump through a few hoops to pull out resource strings. I’m liking the .Net 2.0 more and more every day.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll go ahead and start running FxCop to help me apply Microsoft suggested practices. I usually try to apply them, but I haven’t gotten around to downloading the program for my new compie.

This entry was posted by Second Life resident Dedric Mauriac from Higgins.

So last night, I was able to figure out how to download a log of all my transactions throughout the day

Authenticating with cookies was a pain because the CookieCollection object gets confused with cross-subdomain cookies (ie. .secondlife.com instead of secondlife.com)

So anyways, tonight I got on the ball with XmlSerialization – this handy namespace has an XmlSerializer that can serialize/deserialize xml into objects

Without it, I would have to create an XmlDocument and loop through each element off of the root document

Then depending on each child element, i would have to assign the innerText to different properties on my objects

Let’s just say XmlSerialization takes a lot of work out of the equation

Problem!

SecondLife transaction elements do not share a common name. Each element name has the id appended to it! i.e. transation_1234567. This makes it painful. Why the ID is in there i have no idea as “id” is repeated as a child element of the transaction.

To get around this, I simply used a regular expression.

xml = Regex.Replace(xml, “”, “”);

So yea … that solved the problem there and I was finally able to get my deserialized object just fine

I took it a step further an used a generic collection rather then an array. collections were introduced in .Net 2.0 and they are a god send!

[XmlElement("transaction", typeof(SecondLifeTransaction))] public Collection Transactions

So with that all done, I’m setting happy

well … not quite

I have issues with microsoft. I love to catch every exception within my debugger. even when they are caught and handled. My beef is that microsoft decided to look for assemblies that don’t exist for user-defined serializers.

so the MS Core library decided to complian that assemblies didn’t exist … twice. ugh! Although this doesn’t raise an error to the end user, it raises an exception to me as the developer.

Come on mr. gates – can’t you actually communicate amongst your core library without raising exceptions? or at least prevent me from seeing your “core” exceptions since I don’t have access to that code anyways.

To get around the problem, i created an empty library called LogViewer.XmlSerializers and referenced it from my LogViewer project. that fixed the exception problem just fine

End of Line

This entry was posted by Second Life resident Dedric Mauriac from Higgins.

Ok, I think this is going to happen.

I’m typing away within the world of second life

and hopefully this little watch i’m wearing from slstats.com will record all of it

then it puts it on http://slstats.com/user/view/Dedric+Mauriac

and hopefully (fingers crossed) it posts it to http://www.lewismoten.com/

Drumroll please ….

This entry was posted by Second Life resident Dedric Mauriac from Huin.