Fantabulous Auto Tabbing with jQuery

One of the tasks my team was assigned was the ability to implement auto tabbing in a web application. 98 percent of the population would cringe as they read the previous sentence because auto tabbing is not natural. It is a business requirement, and because the business wouldn't budge on the feature, it HAD to be done.

Enter jQuery AutoTab by Matthew Miller

AutoTab is fairly simple, as are most jQuery plugins. It just extends the jQuery namespace adding a function called autotab. Apply this method to any text box, enter target, previous and format and the plugin does the rest for you.

Without copy and pasting the details of the plugin, click here to see the documentation.

Linq saves the day when sorting ui lists...

Have you ever been in a situation where you have to write elaborate code to order a list of something by date and some of the dates are null? Well worry not, Linq is here to rescue.

Background:

This list contains an object that has a created date. The created date did not exist in the legacy database, and was therefore null. Unfortunately using Linq from o in list orderby o.CreatedDate descending didnt work.

Solution:

After some investigation, (and whining about having to do lots of work for simple gain), I discovered Union in Linq. Sure enough this solved the problem and i could bind to the repeater with the correct order.