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It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Murach’s books. I’m preparing to record a podcast on data access and so I pickup up this book. In a word – BRILLIANT. It covers the three primary data access technologies that matter to developers using current .NET development tools. Detailed coverage of all three makes this book a no-brainer. I read it cover to cover and it has assumed a bit of high-value real-estate on my desk !!!! [ Buy it here . ]   Technorati Tags: Microsoft , ADO.NET , LINQ , Entity Framework , Book Read More...

So with how long ASP.NET has been out for now, I am really curious to know how...

There has been a lot of excitement in the community about the new ASP.NET MVC framework that is about to ship (literally any day now – announcement coming soon).  As with anything new, people are also asking for more tutorials/samples/documentation that cover how to get started and build applications with it. Over the last few months I’ve been helping to contribute to an ASP.NET MVC book that Scott Hanselman, Rob Conery, and Phil Haack have been writing for Wrox.  The book is now in production, and will be available to buy in stores soon (you can pre-order it on Amazon today). I wrote the first chapter of the book – which is a 185 page end-to-end tutorial that walks-through building a small, but complete, ASP.NET MVC application from...

If you have done much programming with Linq and using the relationships between...

Alternate Title: Linq, it’s not just for SQL. I admit, I’m not very proficient with functional programming. It almost feels like a gang war at times - on one side of the tracks is Turing’s crew, sporting their imperative ways. On the other side is the Church group , luring wayward souls onto their turf with the promise of code salvation in the form of functional language. Matt Podwysocki is one of those Church evangelists, constantly reaching out to me, a lost soul, with the promises of eternal code salvation in the form of F# . I keep meaning to check it out, but you know how that goes. What I’ve slowly come to realize though is that the more I use and understand the Linq extensions in C#, the more functional my programming has become in certain...

When trying to implement a Business Logic Layer (i will refer to this as BLL ) with linq one thing that is an annoyance is sorting. Lets say you had a BLL that was being used by ObjectDataSource and had a select method that does sorting and paging, then you'd probably be tempted to write something like this: private IQueryable < Product > SortBy( IQueryable < Product > source, string sortBy) { int desc = sortBy.IndexOf( "DESC" ); bool isDescending = desc >= 0; if (isDescending) { sortBy = sortBy.Substring(0, desc).Trim(); } switch (sortBy) { case "ProductName" : if (isDescending) { return source.OrderByDescending(p => p.ProductName); } source = source.OrderBy(p => p.ProductName); break ; case "UnitPrice"...

Apologies for the sparseness of my posting the last few weeks - work and life have been busy here lately.  Below is a new post in my link-listing series to help kick things up a little.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Bulk Inserting Data with the ListView Control : Matt Berseth continues his awesome posts with one that shows how to handle bulk-editing of data using the ASP.NET ListView control in .NET 3.5. Master-Detail with the GridView, DetailsView, and ModalPopup Controls : Another great post from Matt that describes how to cleanly handle a common data entry scenario. Creating Great Thumbnail Images in...

I've been getting more and more interested in how folks extend their applications using plugins and things. In my new ongoing quest to read source code to be a better developer , Dear Reader, I present to you twenty-sixth ( half a year! ) in a infinite number of posts of " The Weekly Source Code ." Sometimes when I read code, I kick myself (mentally) and say "Man, I should have thought of that!" Then I realize I'm not nearly as good a programmer as I think I am, and then I just let the source just wash over my brain. Here's some source by smart people I've been reading this week that I should have thought of. ;) Coincidentally they are both examples of languages ported or re-imagined in another language. "Processing"...

A few months ago we released an ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview that contained a bunch of new features that will be shipping later this year (including ASP.NET AJAX Improvements, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Silverlight Support, and ASP.NET Dynamic Data). The ASP.NET Dynamic Data support within that preview provided a first look at a cool new feature that enables you to quickly build data driven web-sites that work against a LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities object model.  ASP.NET Dynamic Data allows you to automatically render fully functional data entry and reporting pages that are dynamically constructed from your ORM data model meta-data.  In addition to supporting a dynamic rendering mode, it also allows you to optionally override and customize...

A question that comes up a lot is this: How do I tell my IIS Application or Virtual Directory to use ASP.NET 3.5 rather than ASP.NET 2.0? Folks often go into the IIS6 or IIS7 manager and setup an AppPool and see a properties dialog like this, and when the pull down the option, they often expect to see .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5 in the list and it's not there, and they freak out, rightfully so. Here's an explanation of why this is confusing, and hopefully by the end, it won't be confusing anymore. Marketing This is where marketing and reality part ways. I didn't initially like the naming, because I assumed that each major version of the Framework meant a new CLR, but it's growing on me as I understand it more. I get now why they...