February 2003 - Posts
My second in a series of attempts to bring some legitimacy to the .NET area of Builder.com is now online. This article discusses the subject of deleting data in an paging DataGrid. This is a fairly common task but one that has not yet been discussed elsewhere.
Maybe someone can answer for me the one question I could not get answered while writing the article:
When handling the delete postback, why do I have to set the PageIndex back 2 before I run the delete routine? The logical way to do it would be to run your delete routine, re-run your DataSource function, and re-bind the data. You would think that in a decoupled system like .NET that this method would work just fine. Unfortunately this is not the case, and caused me quite a bit of confusion.
Anyway, here is the article for your perusal. Be sure to check out the previous one linked in the first paragraph if you need to get up to speed.
http://builder.com.com/article.jhtml?id=u00220030217MCL01.htm&fromtm=e065
Caught
this thread on the ASP.NET Forums. It's pretty sweet for keeping directory browsing off. Of course, it would be really easy to extend the system into a hyperlink-builder. You could even extend it into a server control that enumerates through the files in the directory for you. Something like that might come in useful. Do you guys think I should write about something like this for my Builder.com column?
Ran across this article a while back, just wanted to bring it up here. I'm preaching to the choir of course, but oh well. Maybe you can use these in your next discussion with an MS-hater.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-946250.html
I have not been doing much .NET blogging lately, and that's because I haven't been doing any .NET work to speak of. To the two people who probably read this thing with any regularity, let me bring you up to speed.
The Floor Bore
I'm building a network for a company called The Floor Store in Mesa, AZ. It's going to be a nice operation, but I get treated like a second-rate employee, to put it nicely. At any rate, it's going to be a slick setup. I'm running Windows Server 2003 on 2 machines, taking serious advantage on the new Group Policy infrastructure to lock down the machines. Working on implementing 802.11b, but the signal is extremely strong, which I am not happy about. I'm not happy because I can take my makeshift tin-can antenna and pick up the signal nearly a half mile away. Granted it's not fast enought to do much with but still. Because of this I've spent many hours studying Microsoft whitepapers, reading articles on MS's RADIUS implementation, and deploying internal CAs (certificate authorities). While all this is fun, I really want to be programming. The good news is, that starts Monday.
I was hired for that job in Scottsdale, and I'm now officially working for myKB.com, a pretty innovative knowledge-base system built in .NET. I don't know what they're going to have me programming exactly, all I know is I'll be making 2x what I make now, which is a serious chunk of change. He thinks he's short-changing me (didn't think my skills were worth THAT much) but hey, all I know is I'm getting a SERIOUS lifestyle upgrade.
On .NET-related news, I'll be diving into the IIS6 metabase schema soon, and I'm going to attempt to build a .NET API for manipulating the metabase through it's underlying XML file, without needing to know WMI. Since I've been doing so much work in file parsing and string manipulation it should be a breeze.
Anyway, I'm going to go finish up my next article for Builder.com. My 2nd one should be up by Friday, and it's got some innovative code that hasn't really been talked about anywhere else before. I'll post about it on Friday.
I saw this really awesome article here:
http://dotnetweblogs.com/Jkey/posts/3006.aspx on how to access the files in the GAC. Really frickin awesome. Now I can troubleshoot GAC errors without having to deal with GacUtil. I plan to test this extensively.
Saw an interesting link online today. It's how to configure Windows Server 2003 in a workstation environment.
http://www.neowin.net/articles.php?action=more&id=54
Slick tutorial.
What follows is the contents of an e-mail that I sent to MIcrosoft Watch
regarding their misquote of an MS employee. Crap like this really makes me
angry. I doubt that it will ever do any good, but maybe you guys can all send in
enough "tips" like this that they post a retraction,
My name is Robert McLaws. I am president of my own software
company, and a moderator on the official ASP.NET Forums. I have to object to
your statement that the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit is a blogger. You are dead
wrong, and you took the MS employee you quoted WAY out of context. If you had
done your research, you would have found that one of the MS developers
responsible for making the ASP.NET Forums, Rob Howard, was building a blogger a
LONG time ago, and it may be released as open source sometime in the future.
As to the rest of your article, it is obvious that you are jaded in your
outlook to MS. If you had *ANY* inkling about the developer community, you would
know that MS treats their developers like gold, and MS employees are CONSTANTLY
answering questions on the Forums. And while the Forums are another program
built by MS employees, it is NOT an MS product and NOT supported by Microsoft in
any way. Everyone lambasts MS about how they won't ever release anything open
source, and yet MS-employees have built a stripped-down version of VS.NET,
Forums, a system for hosting ASP.NET pages WITHOUT IIS, and tons of free
controls.
Your attitude towards MS is decidedly liberal. It's people like you that
spread half-truths and misquotes that give MS a negative reputation that it
doesn't always deserve.
PS: Think I'm full of crap? This was in a REAL
blog, with corroboration to match:
http://dotnetweblogs.com/PMarcucci/archive/02192003.aspx#2663
I went to the Arizona .NET Users Group meeting for the
first time last night. I had been meaning to go for nearly a year now, but have
lacked the means and the motivation to get there. Man it was so cool. I realized
that I've been holed up in my apartment too long. It was so great to get to
socialize with people who know what I'm talking about when I mention
"System.DirectoryServices" and "Bitwise Operators".
At the meeting, Scott Cate informed us that the AZDNUG is one of the largest
(if not THE largest) .NET Users Group in the country, weighing in at almost 400
members. That's dang cool. There were a bunch of good presentations, and I
learned some new things about VS.NET and creating Windows Services. I'll post a
link to the presentations when they go online. Now for the exciting part:
I ended up talking to a small group of stragglers for about an hour after the
presentation was over about some of the work I had done, and I guess Scott was
impressed because he wants me to come into his office today (at myKB.com, I
presume) to discuss a job. Hell it would be a lot better than getting yelled at
for $10 an hour, although at my current job I do have my own office. We'll see
what kind of offer he makes me, and chances are I'll have a nice long dicussion
with my girl about my options.
Well, I've been gabbing long enough. Time to grap a quick shower and start
getting together my source code to take with me. I'll post this afternoon how it
went!
I've been reading all your blogs this morning about how bad the weather is back east, and I have only one thing I can say: I'm glad I live in Mesa, AZ. All it ever does here is rain, oh yeah I almost forgot about the heat. The drought out here has been horrible, and we received a welcome 6 inches of rain over the past 3 days. The earth is so parched that for the most part it sucked right into the ground. I know it's probably bad out there, but just remember we've had once of teh worst droughts in decades, and this precipitation will definitely help out the water situation.
Anyone want to build a .NET powered snow blower? LOL.
Just woke up, and headed off to work. I wish I could get
a .NET-related day job, instead of this $11.50/ht network admin job, but hey at
least it's a job. I know too many developers that are unemployed. It's a
shame.
Last week was so busy, I forgot to mention that my first article for
Builder.com was published. It wasn't exactly in the format I wanted, but I'll
post them the way I wanted them on my website, www.robertmclaws.com, sometime in the
next week or so. I'm going to be touching on a whole lot of topics, including
using source code from the Framework to show how certain server controls work
(thanks MS!). You can check out my article here.
Scott Guthrie had a great post about ASP.NET V2. I'm hoping that he continues
to post about the process, and I hope I get on the beta ;) [hint hint
Scott!]
Anyways, I'm going to start writing about the development process for my
server controls, and probably a bit on my feature brainstorming process.
I'm finishing up a series of really cool server controls and VS.NET add-ins, so
I'm hoping that all you .NETters out there like them.
Well, off to punch the timeclock. Here's to hoping that someday I can be my
own boss...
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