Today I ran into an annoying nuance of the StringDictionary class (located in the System.Collections.Specialized namespace so as not to be confused with the other imposter string dictionaries). It's not a bug, but I feel the API for it could have been slightly better on this minor point.
Right there in the documentation for the class it points out that:
The key is handled in a case-insensitive manner; it is translated to lower case before it is used with the string dictionary.
Thus it takes the key you give it, and changes it to a lower case value before storing it. I verified this with Reflector.
public virtual void Add(string key, string value)
{
this.contents.Add(key.ToLower(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture), value);
}
Whoa there! Stop the presses! Call Michael Moore! Ok, ok. So in the grand scheme of things, it's a minor issue. It's not a huge deal. However, API usability (and language design) focuses on keeping the minor annoyances to a minimum. Otherwise they'll add up and form a major disturbance and soon you'll have an angry developer standing on his/her soap box whining and ranting about it on a blog.
The issue for me is that this wasn't the behavior I expected. If an API is going to change data you give it, I wish it would indicate that somehow. Perhaps the method could be
AddKeyAndValueButLowerCaseTheKey() ;). All joking aside, it isn't necessary to lower-case the key before storing it in order to provide case-insensitive storage. Internally,
StringDictionary uses a
HashTable to store its keys and values. The dictionary could have made the
HashTable use a
CaseInsensitiveHashCodeProvider when storing keys. That way the key doesn't have to change, but you get case insensitivity.
In any case, like I said, it's normally not a big deal except for the fact that I am building a Setup and Deployment project within Visual Studio.NET for a Windows service. When building a project installer, the Installer (in the namespace System.Configuration.Install) class provides a property called Context of type InstallContext. This class gives you a property called Parameters which is a StringDictionary containing values you may have pulled from the user interface.
I'm trying to look up nodes within an XML file that correspond to the keys of the Parameters dictionary using XPath, hoping to update the node values with the values from the dictionary. However, XPath is case sensitive so I can't match these things up. Unfortunately I can't change the XML to be all lower case, and I can't change the Installer class to not use a StringDictionary (or better yet, correct the dictionary's behavior), so I'm stuck with resorting to a hack until something better comes along.