I think I figured out why Seattle is such a hot spot for technical innovation: it rains a lot.
Raleigh's been having one of those patterns where it seems to be raining every weekend lately. Usually that's bad news but we're emerging from a drought so I'm not going to complain. There's only so much you can do when it's raining so I spent the weekend learning how to use Subsonic and the Ajax Control Toolkit's Cascading Dropdown Extender. And then I figured out how to use both of them together.
Subsonic is a DAL code generator. Usually when I hear the phrase 'code generator' I shudder. I've dealt with some pretty nightmarish code generation tools in my years of development. Subsonic has really made me rethink how I view code generation, at least for the DAL. It is surprisingly easy to use and and I really like their Query Tool; it's very T-SQL orientated. The fast track to learning Subsonic is viewing and practicing along with their tutorial web casts. The best ones to start off with are the Getting Started and Database Query Tool web casts.
As the rain continued I caught the web casts for the Ajax Toolkit's Cascading Dropdown Extender. The basics are covered in a web cast that binds to an XML file data source. There is also a new web cast explaining how to bind to a SQL data source. After watching both of them I was able to do the data binding via Subsonic. Maybe that should be a future blog post for me?
So anyway, thanks to the rain and some web casts I'm a little smarter after this weekend. Sadly, it also helped that my Red Sox were swept by Toronto during this weekend's series. I just picked up the MLB package on TV for the season but couldn't watch the slaughter. So that meant more time to watch web casts; oh the fun! I hope next weekend is sunny.