Padding Wrong for Ordered Lists

As I'm making some modifications to my blog, I couldn't help but noticed that ordered lists.

1. example
2. example
3. example

Are messed up with most templates I picked. So I wrote some simple css to fix that issue, under the advanced section of the template manager. I put this in the "Add CSS" text box.

ol {
    padding-left: 40px;
    padding-top: 10px;
}

Just throwing this out there in case someone else was just as confused as me.

Serialization Helper Methods

I keep forgetting the classes/methods I need to Serialize/Deserialize objects to and from XML. So I decided to make a couple of helper methods.

/// <summary>
/// Writes the serialized form of the object, in xml format, to the file
/// location specified.
/// </summary>
/// <typeparam name="T">type to serialize from</typeparam>
/// <param name="toSerialize">data to serialize</param>
/// <param name="fileLocation">to serialize the data too</param>
public static void Serialize<T>(T toSerialize, string fileLocation)
{
    if (toSerialize == null)
        throw new ArgumentException("The data to serialize cannot be null.");

    if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(fileLocation))
        throw new ArgumentException("You must provide a file location to output the data to.");

    using (var textWriter = new StreamWriter(fileLocation))
    {
        XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
        XmlSerializerNamespaces ns = new XmlSerializerNamespaces();
        ns.Add("", ""); //turn off namespaces
        serializer.Serialize(textWriter, toSerialize, ns);
    }
}

/// <summary>
/// Reads the data from the file location specified and creates an instance
/// of the object type. The object must be serializable.
/// </summary>
/// <typeparam name="T">type to deserialize the data too</typeparam>
/// <param name="fileLocation">data to deserialize from</param>
/// <returns>new object of type T with properties filled out</returns>
public static T Deserialize<T>(string fileLocation)
{
    if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(fileLocation))
        throw new ArgumentException("You must provide a file location to read the data from.");

    using (var reader = XmlReader.Create(fileLocation))
    {
        XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
        return (T)serializer.Deserialize(reader);
    }
}

They're pretty straight forward to use, but just for clarification.

public static void Main(string[] args)
{
    MyObject obj = Program.Deserialize<MyObject>(@"Files\SerializedData.xml");
    obj.AdjustValues();
    Console.WriteLine("Done!!!: {0} test: {1}", obj.Property1, obj.Property2);
    obj.AuditDirectoryName = "Test";
    Program.Serialize(obj, @"Files\SerializedData.xml");
    Console.ReadLine();
}

Short and Sweet

So today at work I had to come up with a method that would give me a listing of something from a collection. If the listing didn't exist, I wanted the listing to be initialized and automatically added to the list.

Let's look at my pathetic first attempt.

private Listing GetListing(List<Listing> cars, string name)
{
    Listing listing = null;
    IEnumerable<Listing> results = cars.Where(i => i.Name == name);

    //if map doesn't exist create it
    if (results.Count() == 0)
    {
        listing = new Listing()
        {
            Name = name,
            AdditionalData = new List<Data>()
        };

        cars.Add(listing);
     }
     else
     {
         //If we originally did this, it would throw an 
         //exception when there are no matches found. 
         //That's why this part is in the else block.
         listing = results.First();
     }

     return listing;
}

As you can see, I tried to get fancy and use Linq. I found, through testing, that the method .First() would throw an exception if there were no results. There were other methods, but for some reason I just couldn't think of the right method.

So then I threw my hands in the air and figured it'd be shorter to just write a method without Linq and that I was just over complicating it.