Most projects I work on need a list of countries at some point so I put together a snippet of SQL that I could reuse to create and populate a countries table in the database with all countries as given in ISO 3166-1. After recently writing a utility class to populate list controls with world currencies according to ISO 4217 it got me wondering if I could also do the same for countries using only the .Net Framework. And so I came up with the following utility class to do the job.

        /// <summary>
        /// Populates the list control with countries as given by ISO 4217.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="ctrl">The list control to populate.</param>
        public static void FillWithISOCountries(ListControl ctrl)
        {
            foreach (CultureInfo cultureInfo in CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.SpecificCultures))
            {
                RegionInfo regionInfo = new RegionInfo(cultureInfo.LCID);
                if (ctrl.Items.FindByValue(regionInfo.TwoLetterISORegionName) == null)
                {
                    ctrl.Items.Add(new ListItem(regionInfo.EnglishName, regionInfo.TwoLetterISORegionName));
                }
            }

            RegionInfo currentRegionInfo = new RegionInfo(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.LCID);

            //- Default the selection to the current cultures country
            if (ctrl.Items.FindByValue(currentRegionInfo.TwoLetterISORegionName) != null)
            {
                ctrl.Items.FindByValue(currentRegionInfo.TwoLetterISORegionName).Selected = true;
            }
        }

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I am working on a Job File System (JFS) for a client and they had the requirement to include a drop down list of currencies on their Purchase Order and Invoice documents, at first I was going to manually put together a list control but on reflection I thought their must be a better way of doing this that is more reusable. So here I have a utility method I put together to populate a ListControl with currency options. I would be interested in any feedback on this and alternative/better methods of achieving the end result:

/// <summary>
/// Fills the ListControl with ISO currency symbols.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="ctrl">The ListControl.</param>
public static void FillWithISOCurrencySymbols(ListControl ctrl)
{
	foreach (CultureInfo cultureInfo in CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.SpecificCultures))
	{
		RegionInfo regionInfo = new RegionInfo(cultureInfo.LCID);
		if (ctrl.Items.FindByValue(regionInfo.ISOCurrencySymbol) == null)
		{
			ctrl.Items.Add(new ListItem(regionInfo.CurrencyEnglishName, regionInfo.ISOCurrencySymbol));
		}
	}

	RegionInfo currentRegionInfo = new RegionInfo(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.LCID);

	//- Default the selection to the current cultures currency symbol
	if (ctrl.Items.FindByValue(currentRegionInfo.ISOCurrencySymbol) != null)
	{
		ctrl.Items.FindByValue(currentRegionInfo.ISOCurrencySymbol).Selected = true;
	}
}

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While working on my customisations to Tim Geyssens MailEngine I was looking for an accurate method of automatically creating a plain-text version of the HTML emails that were being sent out by the site. Further reading brought my attention to something called Markdown. After some hunting around with a little help from my friend Google I managed to find a markdown XSLT file. Using the XSLT I could transform my HTML email to plain-text with relative ease and accuracy. Of course in order to do this I would need a valid XML document and as my pages were already valid XHTML I had no problems there.

Here is my method for doing the conversion, all it requires is that you pass it the HTML you want to convert which must be valid XML:

/// <summary>
/// Converts to HTML to plain-text.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="HTML">The HTML.</param>
/// <returns>The plain text representation of the HTML</returns>
private static string ConvertToText(string HTML)
{
    string text = string.Empty;

    XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
    XmlDocument xsl = new XmlDocument();
    xmlDoc.LoadXml(HTML);
    xsl.CreateEntityReference("nbsp");
    xsl.Load(System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("/xslt/Markdown.xslt"));

    //creating xslt
    XslTransform xslt = new XslTransform();
    xslt.Load(xsl, null, null);

    //creating stringwriter
    StringWriter writer = new System.IO.StringWriter();

    //Transform the xml.
    xslt.Transform(xmlDoc, null, writer, null);

    //return string
    text = writer.ToString();
    writer.Close();

    return text;
}

Download the XSLT file I used from here:

http://symphony-cms.com/downloads/xslt/file/20573/

I would love to hear from anyone that does this differently or if you can find any problems with the method I have chosen to implement for this solution.

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1. C# Utility method to populate list controls with world currencies A requirement that came up recently required a drop down...
2. C# Utility method to populate list controls with all countries as given in ISO 3166-1 Most projects I work on need a list of countries...