Microsoft ASP.NET Web Matrix Starter Kit (Bpg-Other)

You ve now created a quotations page that will show a different quotation every time the page is displayed. But you still haven t seen any quotations! It s time to test the page to see how your quotations look in the page.

Run the quotations page

1. Press F5 to run the page.

2. Verify that a quotation does appear.

3. Click the Show Another Quote button in the browser to run the page again. You should see a different quotation. (Because you re working with random numbers, it s statistically possible that you ll see the same quotation, of course.)

4. Click the button several more times. You should see a selection of quotations.

Depending on how many quotations your  quotations.txt file contains, it might not be obvious that you re getting a true random selection. I recommend that you click the button until you re satisfied that you re getting different quotations, including both the first and last quotations in the file.

If your quotations aren t showing up as they should, check the following:

• Make sure the  RandomQuotes.aspx file and the  quotations.txt file are in the same directory.

• Make sure you added an extra backslash character (\) in this line:

  srQuotes = New System.IO.StreamReader(path & "\ quotations.txt")

• Make sure that each quotation is on a single line in the text file (no wrapping) and that there aren t blank lines at the end of the file.

• Check that you don t have the file open in your text editor if the StreamReader object can t get exclusive access to a file, the open process fails.

• Make sure the quotation and author name are delimited with the correct character.

• If you changed the code from splitting the line to simply converting the pipe character to another character, make sure you commented out the line-splitting code.

We ve accomplished what we set out to do read quotations from a text file and display a randomly selected quotation on the page. The  RandomQuotes.aspx page works, but it can work more efficiently. In the next section, I ll show you a technique for improving the page.