Category: Web

I was reading through someone else’s C# code the other day when I saw something that wasn’t immediately clear. It went something like this:
[code]
Object o;
for (int i=0; i < myCollection.count; i++) { o = myCollection[i] as SomeObjectType; // Huh? if (o != null) { // Do something with 'o'... break; } } [/code] While the cast seems clear enough, there are a few things to be aware of. If the above cast fails, it assigns a null value to 'o'. If the null value is not handled immediately, you may not realize the problem until some time later when you run into the null reference. [code] Object o; // As-casting - Returns null if the cast fails! o = myCollection[i] as SomeObjectType; // Prefix casting - throws an exception if the cast fails! o = (SomeObjectType)myCollection[i]; [/code] There may be a performance benefit to the As-cast but I'm much more comfortable knowing that my cast exceptions were handled properly using the Java-esque Prefix cast.

While working on a simple test page, I wanted to use getElementById to get an Image object from JavaScript.  I quickly wrote up the code and tried it.  Firefox was fine but it failed on my IE7 with “Microsoft JScript runtime error: Object doesn’t support this property or method”.  It took some digging to see what the problem was.

First thing I checked was that I used both element Name and Id and that they were the same.  I *always* do that given that IE will use whichever one matches the desired string.  After reading a few blog posts about common problems but with no good ideas I went back to my code and reviewed it carefully.  It turns out that I used the same name for my element and my local JavaScript variable.  That by itself isn’t a problem but what made it an issue for me was that I failed to initialize my variable with the “var” keyword.

See the code below for the example:
[code]





Do Something




[/code]