Today, I had to print out all the .cs files in a Visual Studio project for code review. To my big surprise it wasn’t possible from within Visual Studio. It doesn’t even support multiple file printing. My only choice was to open and print the individual .cs files and print them separately. It’s just an unnecessary nuisance that could easily have been implemented by Microsoft.

All this made me think about how I write software and what the users of that software expect of it and how they use it. Normally, I have a pretty good idea about how my application is going to be used, but I always get surprised by the way it is actually being used by end users.

Things that the users would expect to find in an application should always be there. Otherwise, they get annoyed and maybe even frustrated. It’s extra work, but probably not that much.

Some time ago, when I wrote the blog post importer for BlogEngine.NET, I wanted to be able to display different text in the ClickOnce application dependant on the user opening it directly from a web page. I did some digging and found out that ClickOnce supports query strings just like a website.

That made it possible to create a link similar to this:

BlogConverter.application?url=http://blog.madskristensen.dk/&username=my username

Enable URL parameters

In your ClickOnce project, right-click the project file in Solution Explorer and click Properties. Select the Publish tab and press the Options… button. Here you need to check the Allow URL parameters to be passed to application checkbox and hit the OK button.

Retrieve the parameters

The next thing was to find out how to retrieve the values of the query strings, because a ClickOnce application does not have an HttpContext so there is no Context.Request.QueryString property.

Instead, you need to retrieve the query strings from the application deployment context. I used this handy method, which returns a NameValueCollection of all the query strings.

using System.Deployment.Application;
using System.Web;
using System.Collections.Specialized;

private NameValueCollection GetQueryStringParameters()
{
  NameValueCollection col = new NameValueCollection();

  if (ApplicationDeployment.IsNetworkDeployed)
  {
    string queryString = ApplicationDeployment.CurrentDeployment.ActivationUri.Query;
    col = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(queryString);
  }

  return col;
} 

It’s pretty easy if you know where to look.