I have covered the IDisposable interface in my previous posts IDisposable and using in C# and Implementing IDisposable. To make the implementation of IDisposable easier, I have written an abstract base class that handles the details of the IDisposable pattern. The objectives of the class is to:

• Provide a simple, reusable implementation of the disposable pattern.
• Pass all code analysis rules.

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There are lot of code generation tools available. Microsoft Visual Studio has had code generation possibilities since I started using it in the mid 90-ties. Code generation can be a blessing for getting something up and running quickly, but also a curse when maintaining code.

Whenever a code generation tool is considered, there are two very important aspects that need to be considered:

• Is there support for regeneration when the code needs to be updated?
• Are there possibilities to make adaptions without loosing them on regeneration?

Unfortunately a lot of the tools fail on at least one of these points. The blessing that helped creating something working quickly becomes a curse during further development and maintenance.

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Controls that can be used with data binding typically expect some kind of collection as the data source. One example is the ASP.NET DetailsView control. It displays a single record, but still expects a collection (to be exact: something that implements IEnumerable) to be assigned to its DataSource property.

I use a small extension method called WrapInEnumerable to help in this situation:

public static class ObjectExtensions
{
    public static IEnumerable<T> WrapInEnumerable<T>(this T t)
    {
        yield return t;
    }
}

With this function it is easy to use the DetailsView for displaying a single object:

myDetailsView.DataSource = myDataObject.WrapInEnumerable();

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