Category: .Net

.Net: MySQL and Entity Framework

With the arrival of the MySQL .Net 6.1 Connector you now have an alternative to Microsoft SQL server or SQL Server Express when it comes to using the new Microsoft Entity Framework.

This new connector library is provided free directly from the MySQL website and actually integrates with Visual Studio 2008. Simply download the installer, install and you will now have access to your MySQL databases directly from within the Visual Studio Server Explorer.

By having access to your MySQL databases from the Server Explorer within Visual Studio you can simply drag and drop tables directly onto your Entity model.

 

Tim Clark

C#: Case Insensitive Generic Dictionary

This is a portion of a console app I was using to investigate the Dictionary class and its methods. I was running into issues with Keys not being found within a dictionary that was being auto-generated from incoming web service data, data which I of course had no control over. There were several clients hitting the service which were not using the outlined parameter names with the correct casing. The Dictionary class in .Net uses hashing algorithms to create unique Keys from the key that is entered when the Key/Value pair is added. Because of this hashing the same string with different casing will generate a different unique key. In order to overcome this I found all you have to do is  pass in StringComparer.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase in the constructor of the Dictionary at initialization and from that point on it no longer cares about the casing.

            try

            {

                Dictionary<string, string> dictionary = new Dictionary<string, string>(StringComparer.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase);

                dictionary.Add("KeyOne", "Value");

                dictionary.Add("keyone", "Value");

                foreach (KeyValuePair<string, string> valuePair in dictionary)

                {

                    Console.WriteLine(

                        string.Format("Key: {0}, Value: {1}",

                        valuePair.Key,

                        valuePair.Value));

                }

            }

            catch (Exception ex)

            {

                Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);

            }

            Console.ReadLine();