Eli Robillard's World of Blog.

Today is a milestone of sorts, my first article is now live on the MSDN Developer Center! I'm happy with it for a few reasons. First, the topic is thoroughly lazy -- how to build a content management system that can serve up pages based on the extension thrown at it. Want to serve .rtf, .txt, or .rss files that users can save without frigging with an .aspx extension? Here's how. Want to serve your whole site as .htm instead of .aspx (like if you're a Sun shop and want to pretend you don't run IIS)? Here's how. Want to throw in versions for PDAs and printers? Here's how.

I'm trying to find a .NET app to manage I.T. workflow including job tickets, help desk calls, app deployment, all that. Let's start with the price point to hit: under $1000CAD. That's around $750USD these days. If the features are all there and it looks good, double that might be acceptable, but don't expect it to be. Here's why.

In feedback to the Collections and caching post, ServProvAdmin asked enough quick questions to fill a whole post.

The post on “the two most frequently asked questions in I.T.” gets a fair bit of traffic and is worth following up with an easy suggestion to try:

What's a collection? The dumb answer is that collections are objects that implement ICollection. A slightly better answer would be to say that collection is a group of instances of any given object type or struct. One customer is an instance, many customers is a collection.

The other day I described how to check the values of individual validation controls on a page rather than the entire page. It worked fine, but it meant writing blocks of code that I found kinda klunky (see that post for an example). 

This is a pretty simple block of code. There are other ways to export a CDF, this works for me.

I built a DataGrid with an EditTemplate to edit records and a FooterTemplate to Add records. I made the footer invisible and put a ButtonLink just below the grid to expand the footer. Then I made an if (IsValid) {}
section around my code to Update a record, and another around my code to Add a record.