Tips and Tricks

Make sure the speech API is installed

Jeff Certain — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 15:47:44 GMT

This should go without saying, but I've had recent problems with people not understanding this concept.

If you're using System.Speech in Windows XP, you need to make sure that the speech recognition engine from SAPI 5.1 is installed.

If you're deploying an application, make sure you include the SAPI 5.1 merge module in your installer.

String.Format performance

Jeff Certain — Wed, 16 May 2007 19:00:31 GMT

Since I work with a lot of data-centric applications, I've come to really like String.Format. There's something nice about seeing all your single quotes without them being obscured by double quotes.

For example, if I were adding a call to javascript function as an attribute of a control for use in client-side validation of an aspx page, I can use

chk.Attributes.Add("onclick", String.Format("updateSelectedStructure({0},{1}.checked);", workTicketId, chk.ClientID))

instead of

chk.Attributes.Add("onclick", "updateSelectedStructure(" & workTicketId & "," & chk.ClientID & ".checked);")

Personally, I find the first easier to comprehend. Of course, this led to a discussion with a colleague on the pros and cons of this approach. One question that came up was performance... which approach performs better, and by how much.

So I instrumented a simple test case, similiar to the example above. It turns out that string concatenation is roughly an order of magnitude faster than calling String.Format. One of these days, I'll get around to comparing it to StringBuilder...

Binding a Dictionary to a ComboBox

Jeff Certain — Wed, 16 May 2007 18:29:04 GMT

I had cause recently to try to find a way to use a Dictionary as the data source for a WinForms combo box. There's a really cool, really simple way to do this, as described here.