Adding groups to the ASP.NET DropDownList control

Introduction The ASP.NET DropDownList class doesn’t support option groups. (Presumably because it would break the ListItem paradigm that Microsoft has used for all their list orientated controls). However, it is possible to add basic option group functionality by inheriting from DropDownList and overriding the RenderContents() method. This technique for adding optgroups is fully compatible with [...]

c# UK postcode splitting

To maintain consistency with user inputted data, i wrote this small method in order to normalise UK post codes into the standard format. The logic is as follows: Convert all the letters to their uppercase variant. Strip out any character that isn’t letter or a number using regular expressions and remove all spaces from the [...]

Uploading a file via FTP C#

As web developers we all communicate with FTP servers. Desktop applications such as, my personal favourite, FileZilla allow us to manage our files between our PCs and the Server. But the downside is that a user needs to be present to select which files to upload, and to initiate the transfer process. In many occasions, such as [...]

Parsing a .CSV file in C#.NET

Whilst working on my latest project at work, I did some research into the different ways I could parse a .CSV file. This sort of operation is quite common, and so there where a wide range of methods people had come up with to do it. Each one had it’s Advantages and drawbacks. I needed a solution that could handle a file with thousands of records in as little time as possible, since there where other, more time consuming operations that also needed to be done. Below are the 2 examples that I worked with.