Keith Barrows

While the ASP.NET GridView control supports automatic paging I found it faster to use custom paging in several situations.  I found myself rewriting the same code over and over just to add the basic sorting capabilities to an ASP.NET GridView object.  So today I took just a little bit of time to encapsulate it all into a Class I can use and reuse on any page with a GridView.  In fact, it will probably take longer to write this blog entry than it took to encapsulate the functionality.

I use extension methods when I remember they exist.  I started getting tired of writing code to check strings for Null, Empty, Equal before using a database column when I remembered Extension Methods are there to make life easier!  Some great articles/blog entries on it can be found at:

I am having a devil of a time setting up LINQ for SQL in VS2005.  I have fx3.5 setup, have installed fx3.5SP1, etc, etc.  What googling has shown me is when I want to add a LINQ to SQL Classes item to my project I should see something like the first image.  Instead, what I am seeing is the second image.

From time to time I get a slew of links that may/should be useful to others than just myself. The quotes are from these web pages and are not of my manufacture.

Just a quick blog to say I finally have Live Writer setup to post computer technology related posts to http://weblogs.asp.net/kbarrows now.  I still have a few things to get setup like publishing images and files and such but that will fall in place soon.  I will still be posting all topics at http://sol3.net/blogs/starpilot/default.aspx.

It took me a bit of time but I finally found a solution for loading a XML file that has accented characters (like áéíóúâä) into a UTF-8 format.  I'm loading data for a client and it ended up having a name in it with an accented e character.  For the first time on this project System.XmlDocument.Load() was blowing up.  With a lot of Googling I finally found a link that gave me, what I hope, is the solution for this problem.  For now it is working so I'll go with it.  The link to the article I found is in the code sample below as well as the image to the left.  The magic happens by reading in while enforcing a double-byte encoding then saving out in an encoding that gives the visual representation we, in the US, would expect.