Another helpful Enum method

If you are a C# programmer, chances are that you are using Enum.Parse somewhere in your code. You must be knowing that Enum.Parse throws an exception if you pass an object which is not a member of the enumeration. There are two ways in which you can handle this exception. You either adorn the call to Enum.Parse with try-catch block or use Enum.IsDefined.

I like the latter for obvious reasons. Enum.IsDefined checks if the given object is a valid member of the given enumeration type. If it is, returns true. false, otherwise. So simple, yet so powerful.

Use it and admire it.

Ranorex: Gui test automation library

If you ever attempted at testing a Windows based GUI application, you know the woes that are involved in it. The tools available for automating GUI tests are far inferior compared to the tools available for creating the GUI application itself. Bridging this barried to some extent, is this GUI test automation library from Ranorex. It’s free to use, but not open source.

It has high level methods to find a button, menu strip, form, text box and much more. These methods return an object of type that you are looking for and using these, you can perform operations on the object as if you are actually using the GUI. You can simulate mouse movement, mouse clicks, keyboard strokes et al. What else could one ask for?

They have a few samples which demonstrate how to use their library to simulate actions on a scientific calculator, a .NET application etc. The sample code is neat, which tells me that the library code is equally neat or neater. They provide an application named RanorexSpy which is similar to WinSpy. For people who do not know this, it’s an application using which you can find out properties of any application, like window handles and control names etc.

Now only if they made this toy open source! I am dying to know what secret are they keeping.

From their site:

Ranorex is a Windows GUI test and automation Library for C++, Python and for the .Net languages. Ranorex doesn’t have a scripting language of its own like other test tools. The user (e.g. the software tester) should use the functionalities of the powerful programming languages like Python or C # as a base, and enlarge it with the GUI automation functionality of Ranorex.

Finding number of elements in enumeration

Problem:

public class myNamespace
{
public enum Day
{
MONDAY,
TUESDAY,
WEDNESDAY,
THURSDAY,
FRIDAY,
SATURDAY,
SUNDAY
}
}

Find the number of days. In other words, find the number of elements in the enumeration.

Solution:

Type enumType = Type.GetType(“myNamespace.Day”);
Type numElementsInEnum = Enum.GetValues(enumType).Length;
int numElementsInEnum = Enum.GetValues(enumType).Length;

Note: Make sure the string which you pass to GetType method is fully qualiified. If the enum is within a namespace, the string should be namespace.enumName and if the enum is in a class which is within a namespace, then the string should be namespace.className.enumName.

MS may include this as a method in System.Enum class in the next version.

Double clicking on .sln does not open it

Problem: Double clicking on .sln file does not open the solution in Visual Studio.

Solution: This may happen if you have some version control system installed, especially Clearcase. This is a problem with the extension-application association. If you right click on .sln file, you will see that the application associated with this extension is ‘Microsoft Visual Studio Version Selector’. Change the association to devenev.exe. You can find this executable under <Visual Studio installed directory>\Common7\IDE.

Next time when you double click on .sln file, it should open it Visual Studio IDE.

Note: This solution works for Microsoft Visual Studio 8 / 2005. This has not been tried on any other version.