I used to love include files in Classic ASP. I would group together similar functions and subroutines into collections of files, and selectively include them at the top of a page based on the page's requirement. ASP.NET doesn't support this approach, and one of the first questions I asked in a newsgroup relating to ASP.NET was how to manage this?
One very kind poster told me to create a "utility" class, and reference it from my code-behind. Being completely new to OOP, I had no idea how to approach this, so they even posted some sample code, based on what they were using in professional applications:
public sealed class Utils // sealed to ensure the utility class won't be inherited
{
private Utils() {} // Ensure you cannot instantiate an object of this type
//Add static methods which means you can reference them
//anywhere in the project simply by using Utils.
//This one keeps the name of the connection string in just 2 places -
//once in the Web.Config, and once in the Utils class.
public static string GetConnString()
{
return WebConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["myConnString"].ConnectionString;
}
}
To use this method is simple. Whenever a connection object is created one of the arguments passed to the constructor is the connection string. This is done as follows:
string connectionString = Utils.GetConnString();
This simple snippet also made me realise the difference between static and instance methods. And the best thing? Intellisense loves to colour "Utils" light blue.
