Gunnar Peipman's ASP.NET blog

What is the difference between GridView and Repeater? This is one of the most common questions that beginners ask when they are trying to get familiar with data bound controls. Both of these controls have their own using context and I try to explain when one should use GridView and when it is okay to use Repeater.

Some time ago I introduced here book titled as "Domain Driven Design". One concept this book described was Services Layer. Okay, there were some other layers too but I want to stop at services layer this time :)

I was asked through this blog how to become a good developers. I think this is the question that many beginners want to ask. For every question there are throusands of answers. Okay, there are many answers like these but these ones are mine. :)

Building up a good business library is art. Because every bad decision made early will eat project's time later. Bad decisions will also waste many time of developers who have to use this library in their work. One of the most common mistakes made is mixing DAL functionality to business objects. At first it may seems like a good idea - why not have a smart objects? - but as project goes this solution causes more and more problems. And, be warned, each next problem is worst than previous.

Avoiding excpetions is always a good practice because exceptions can hurt as when thay occure. They may cause also hard performance loss. Assigning selected value to list controls is one candidate for ArgumentOutOfRange exceptions. Often this problem is solved using unhandled exception:

Usually developers think that DTO (Data Transfer Object) is something related to web services where data serialization is required to move data from one point of network to another. It is clear that in most cases there is no point to move complex data structures over network when client side needs this data in pretty simple form. That's why DTOs are created - they are simple, easily serializable and there is no data that client side doesn't need. But there are also other DTOs you may find useful.

There are some cases when integration tests are more protective than unit tests. Of course, there is no reason to compare these two kinds of tests but if we have to write them we have to set priorities and think what problems may arise during development. One special case when it is important to have integration tests early in place is when we are using O/R-mappers.

During one of my current projects I wrote some useful extension methods for DateTime class. I had to write custom calendar component and therefore I needed manipulate dates a little bit. Here is some extensions I would like to share with you. And, of course, comments and suggestions are welcome as always.