Archives
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ASP.NET Data Validation and Data Entry Controls
If there's one thing I hate about building Web Forms it's data validation and custom data entry controls (think date pickers, etc.). ASP.NET provides some nice controls to perform validation, and has controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit that also help, but in many cases you end up writing custom JavaScript or server-side code or may even build custom controls.
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Building an N-Layer ASP.NET Application with LINQ, Lambdas and Stored Procedures (Updated)
Update: I refactored some of the code and also did a better job ensuring Dispose() is called everywhere so that the DataContext object gets cleaned up properly.
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SmartWebControls.com Released
Last night we released a new version of the OrgChart.NET ASP.NET server control under a new name of "SmartChartPro". We decided to give the control a new name since it's capable of doing more than just OrgCharts (although that's what most companies use it for). We also released a new company website named SmartWebControls.com based on .NET 3.5 where SmartChartPro and other upcoming controls will now reside.
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Getting Ready for Silverlight 2.0
Scott Guthrie just released new information about Silverlight 2.0 including 8 tutorials. It's going to be a "happening" client-side development framework once it's all done! Here's a list of the tutorials he released:
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LINQ to XSD
One of the cool features in VB 9.0 is the ability to work directly with XML in code without having to wrap quotes around everything. If you're a C# developer, that's a feature that we don't have although you can do similar things with LINQ to XML (quotes required though).
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Testing Email Messages Sent using System.Net.Mail on Windows Vista
I've been developing for months on Windows Vista and had everything I needed at my disposal. Last night, however, I needed to test whether or not email messages were being successfully sent from an ASP.NET application and see what they looked like. I went to look for an SMTP server in Vista Ultimate and quickly found that there isn't one. IIS7 includes email forwarding capabilities, but I wanted a simple SMTP server (or something that could emulate one) so that I could see the email messages that were being sent.
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LINQ and Lambdas and Sprocs....Oh My!
There's a lot of great stuff in .NET 3.5 and several different ways to work with LINQ technologies such as LINQ to SQL. I'm currently putting together some demonstration code for a talk I'll be giving at DevConnections in Orlando and showing how LINQ, Lambdas and LINQ with stored procedures can be used to do the same thing so that people get a feel for each technique. For shorter queries I generally prefer lambdas since it's more object-oriented feeling compared to LINQ (to me anyway). For more complex queries LINQ is much easier though. Overall, I still prefer stored procedures since you have much more control over security that way and can maintain queries without resorting to C#/VB.NET code changes in some cases. Plus, LINQ makes it really easy to pass parameters to stored procedures without having to create SqlParameter objects (something I've always despised).
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Simplifying ASP.NET ListView Control Templates
I've been working with the new ListView control in ASP.NET 3.5 combining it with LINQ and Lambda expressions and was finding myself duplicating a lot of code between ItemTemplate and AlternatingItemTemplate templates (I'll be posting the sample application that demonstrates using LINQ, Lambdas and Stored Procedures soon). The AlternatingItemTemplate contained the same code as the ItemTemplate except for a CSS class added to the first <tr> element to change the background color. Here's an example of both templates that were used initially:
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CS300 Course Samples
Thanks to everyone that attended the CS300 class last week at Interface Technical Training. I had a great time and enjoyed meeting everyone. You can download the on-the-fly demos relating to ADO.NET, events, Web Services and the BackgroundWorker here. The complete set of samples for the course can be download here.