In my scenario, I had several buttons in my View that I wanted to handle with a single method.  I needed to find a way to differentiate between them to find out which one the user clicked.

Solution:

In IB I created three buttons as shown below.  I then selected each one separately and assigned it a unique ‘Tag’ attribute.  The ‘Tag’ attribute is located on the ‘Button Attributes’ tab of the Inspector.

That part wasn’t much of a challenge.  What, unfortunately, was a challenge was getting this value from within the IBAction method.  First, the action method is declared in my ViewController.h file like any other IBAction method:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>

@interface ViewController : UIViewController {
}

- (IBAction)push:(id)sender;

@end

Next, the important part.  I had to find a way to get the actual value in my push method.  After several unsuccessful variations of trying to call [sender tag] directly, I found the answer (shown in bold below):

@implementation ViewController

- (IBAction)push:(id)sender
{
 UIButton *btn = (UIButton *)sender;
 NSInteger tag = [btn tag];
 NSLog(@"Tag: %d", tag);

The answer is actually very simple.  Since sender is a generic object type I had to cast it to a UIButton before I could get to the tag property.

Stay tuned.  At this rate there are many more of these quick samples on the way…

ASP.NET, JQuery, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, LINQ, NUnit, Castle ActiveRecord, NHibernate, HQL, T-SQL, PL/SQL, Data Modeling, Stored Procedures, AJAX, Log4Net, Usability, and more.

Is it time to further specialize developers?  You bet.  Offshore, onshore, it doesn’t matter.  How can we realistically expect our entire development team to be “experts” in all the technology above and still deliver projects successfully?  I, for one, feel more comfortable writing “back-end” code such as business logic, SQL, etc. and I’m sure there are others like me out there.  I am nowhere near as strong a developer in client-side development (Javascript, AJAX, JQuery, etc.) and making pages look exactly like the prototype that was handed to me.

So, here is what I propose going forward.  We begin to evaluate our developer pools in a different ways than we have in the past.  In the past, we’ve interviewed candidates to find out which one could answer the most amount of questions in all the technologies listed above.  The one that could hold her own in the most areas won and was awarded a long-term contract where she had to keep her skills up in all these areas and more.  Over the past several years this hasn’t worked as well as it could so we are about to change it.  We are now going to reevaluate our talent and find out strengths, weaknesses, and areas of interest.  (Yes, you must find out where developers are interested too because these are the areas where they will probably be most successful).  We are going to separate them as shown below:

Front-end Developers:
ASP.NET, AJAX, JQuery, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Usability

Back-end Developers:
LINQ, NUnit, Castle ActiveRecord, NHibernate, HQL, T-SQL, PL/SQL, Data Modeling, Stored Procedures, Log4Net

Common Skills All Developers Must Have:
C#, XML

The list above is not absolute as there will always be a mixture of skill sets.  However, the goal will be to use the general categories to help staff projects.

Now, on our upcoming projects, we are going to pair the developers and divide the work based on thier skill sets.  In each project we will do our best to split the skill sets 50/50 (or close to it) as needed.  This way, the developers that really shine in front-end development can spend most of their time building the web pages, working on the AJAX and working on the user experience.  The back-end developers can spend their time where they are the strongest in wiring up the database and building the business logic.

Please help by making a donation – large or small – to fight MS. Or, why not join us on the day of the event as a cyclist or a volunteer? Become a participant and we can work together in to raise the funds to make a difference.

Whatever you can give will help! We greatly appreciate your support and will keep you posted on my progress.

Sincerely,
Rick Tempestini

Click here to get to my personal page and make a secure, online donation.

[Update:  Thanks for all your donations!  It was a great ride.  Ryan and I were able to raise over $1400.  We are looking forward to next year...]

First, the GetUpperBound method of an array will return an integer with the number corresponding to the highest number “element” that can be placed into a array. For example, Label1 would display the number ’4′ after the following snippet of code because the array was created to hold five (5) values (remember, arrays in .NET are zero-based)

In the code above, however, a zero (0) was used when calling the GetUpperBound method. Since the array was declared as a single-dimensional array, there was only one dimension to get the upper bound value from. Therefore, a zero (0) was passed in to represent the first (and only) dimension of this array. Note: dimensions of the array are even zero-based and that is why a one (1) was not passed in.

On a two-dimensional array, this parameter can now take a zero or a one based upon which dimension you want to return a value for as seen in the following example:

In the code above, a two-dimensional array is created with three (3) as the first dimension and four (4) as the second dimension. Again, since the dimensions of an array are zero-based, the call to GetUpperBound(0) will represent the first dimension and the call to GetUpperBound(1) will represent the second dimension.

If, however, the Expires property is set to a date and time in the future of the current date and time, a persistent cookie file will be written to the local client hard drive. For Internet Explorer, cookies are placed in the c:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\Cookies directory.

Therefore, the code sample below will write a permanent cookie to the clients hard drive because the Expire property was set to a time in the future.

Now, looking into my local cookies directory I see my new cookie file:

If I open the cookie, I can now see the name of the cookie “TestCookie” and the name-value pair that I stored in the cookie: setting1-test.

Lab19
Default.aspx
Default.aspx.vb

Lab18
Lab18.sln
Default.aspx
Default.aspx.vb

Lab17
Default.aspx
Default.aspx.vb
Login.aspx
Login.aspx.vb
Register.aspx
Register.aspx.vb
web.config

Lab16
Default.aspx
Default.aspx.vb
Login.aspx
Login.aspx.vb
Register.aspx
Register.aspx.vb
web.config

Lab15
Default.aspx
Default.aspx.vb