More and more it's becoming a common practice to detect browser features and capabilities. There are even libraries and or tests used by many sites. Libraries such as Modernizr come with a slew of such tests.

It would be nice to issue the client a token/url for the scripts and css specific to that browser after doing feature detection.

This prevents ever subsequent page running the same test and doing the same conditional loading of scripts. Otherwise, another ugly alternative is to have a bunch of bundles for common browsers, but this seems more like doing browser sniffing rather than feature detection.

Would love to hear if this is something that could be in the product instead of having to hand roll using Web Optimization intrinsics.

While, when building an SQL statement, within a Web Pages .vbhtml module, I can write -

HWB_Series_Books_sqlCommand = "SELECT * FROM Titles WHERE Titles.Available_in_Series_" & Req_Series & " = 1"

where Req_Series is a variable containing, in my case, a capital letter in the range A to P, thus creating a dynamic reference to one of 16 fields, all of whose names begin with the same first 20 letters.

OR

in the case of Form Controls I could write something like

Dim LabelName = "Label 1"
Me.Controls(LabelName).Text = "Publisher"

thus being able to dynamically change the label whose text is being changed.

I find, to quote from a thread elsewhere, "There are not dynamic variable names in .NET (like PHP or other scripting languages)."

Having now set the scene I will make my suggestion / request, but just for clarification of the following, I include here the pair of interacting statements, which I have used to create Title_Details_Data.

Dim HWB_Title_Details_sqlCommand = "SELECT * FROM Titles WHERE Titles.Book_No = @0"

Dim Title_Details_Data = HWB_Database.QuerySingle(HWB_Title_Details_sqlCommand, Req_Title)

I find that I cannot write, in an IF statement, for example, which is referring to the values retrieved from a database, where there are many similarly named fields -

If "Title_Details_Data.Available_in_Series_" & Req_Series = 1 Then
[code to be executed]
End If

I wonder whether something like one of the two following options could be provided in VB, please?

Either -

1. A function that might be invoked with code something like -
ValuetoTest = VarValue("Title_Details_Data.Available_in_Series_" & Req_Series)

which would then lead on to IF ValuetoTest = 1 Then ...

OR

2. A property invokation accessing the returned database record could be provided, so that coding similar to the above regarding forms controls could then be used, such as maybe

If Title_Details_Data.Value("Available_in_Series_" & Req_Series) = 1 Then ...

As noted above in the quote from elsewhere I understand that something like what I want may be available in something like PHP, but I like VB and am happy using it. I have been using various varieties of BASIC since I first learnt the rudimentary BASIC, back in 1975, and so prefer to stay with what I know. Along the way I have also been a PL/1, IBM Assembler and dBase/Recital programmer.

Please consider my suggestion and, if you feel able, give me some feedback as to what you think of it.

Regards

Philip, Gosnells, Western Australia

At present what we do is that - We take a textbox and button in asp.net. And then double click on the button to generate its event handler. In the event handler function we declare a variable which could properly handle the textbox value. Further we use the conversion function which converts the textbox value to the proper variable type.

So my idea is that - if we think through programmers point of view we can directly think of the textbox as a variable. So now the programmer can think textbox's ID as variable name. Now to save the efforts of the programmer what I want to suggest is that the textbox show have a property called DATATYPE which could tell what kind of value the textbox is going to expect - such as text, int, double and so in. If we can successfully implement this then we will not have to declare the extra variables for processing in c# and this would further simplify the programmers task and increase his productivity.

Explanation with the help of suitable Example.

Implement a program to make the addition of two numbers and display it within label.

Solution: By OLD Method

Take two textboxes, one button and one label control.
Double click on button to generate its event handler.
In the event handler function we declare 3 variables of int type - vNumber1, vNumber2, vResult;
Then, we access the textbox value and convert it to the variable type.

vNumber1 = convert.toint(textbox1.text);
Repeat the process for textbox2 and save the converted value in vNumber2.
Now we add the two variable vNumber1 and vNumber2 and store the result in vResult.
Now in order to display the result on label we once again convert the value stored in vResult to text type.

So this was the solution by old method.

Now I would like to show the solution to the same problem but with NEW METHOD.

Take two textboxes, one button and one label control.
Set the textbox's DATATYPE property to INT. Change the ID of textbox1 to vNumber1, and that of textbox2 to vNumber3.
Set the label's datatype to INT, set visible property to false. Change the ID of label to vResult,;
Double click on button to generate its event handler.
Now directly use the variables without conversion as shown below:

vResult = vNumber + vNumber2;
Now change visible property to true. vResult.visible = true;

Now you may say that this is not possible. But this is already implemented in visual studio for the VALIDATION CONTROLS. The RANGE VALIDATOR has a property called TYPE which helps to temprarily assume the textbox's value as either string, int, double and so on. So this is not impossible at all.

I think these steps are much easier to follow than the previous ones. And this would help the programmer to increase his productivity.

As CSS has minimized the work in HTML the same would happen if we can do THIS for ASP.NET.

I request you to consider this IDEA seriously and have a technical discussion with your team as to get suggestions of how to implement this.