Back in the Saddle
Back to the grind. Actually, I've been back to the grind for weeks but haven't been blogging due to time constraints. 2007 ended with a fender bender followed by my eldest daughter going to the hospital in East Podunk New Hampshire with 105 F fever and pneumonia. She's much better and the folks were nice enough if not exactly happy to be there on Christmas Day. Then 2008 started with my dog being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. She had to be euthenized immediately because a tumor had completely blocked her esphagus preventing her from ever eating again. That really sucked since my wife had never lost an animal before. Bad day. Then my youngest daughter went in for major surgery three days later. It was planned but she wasn't drinking enough on her own after surgery so she had to stay in the hospital for an extry day (3 total). Thank God it was at Johns Hopkins, agruably the best hospital in the world. A far cry from the places we spent nightmare days in China. Then I get my first speeding ticket in YEARS. Not exactly a slap on the face, more of a flick on the ear.
So I'd like to say it can only get better from here but that would be a really stupid basis upon which to plan...
My last few posts were directed toward Linq to SQL and I was planning on listing out how to pass an anonymous type to another object. This turned out to be a bad idea and not very well supported. Most of what I found on the subject and generated myself did not fall into the KISS model so I think I'll just reference some of Scott Guthrie's blog posts on Linq. This is part 9 of his series and you can back track from there through the entire thing. Dude is way smart and detailed and has presented more already than I even know so I'll defer to the master. Hot Rodding Lesson 2: Never race when you know you're going to lose. Lesson 1 doesn't really apply here (If you're spinnin', you ain't winnin'). So I'll just leave you in Scott's capable hands and roll off of that. A hint: Either pass a strong object out of your data layer (akin to DTO) or look into the .ToList() method. I think its an extension method.
What I do need though is a complete tutorial on building a web part in VS 2008 from scratch AND deploying it to multiple environments repeatably. That's coming soon.