Like many people today, we are exploring HTML 5 for use in web applications. While not really ready for prime-time on its own at this point, it can definitely be used in combination with tools like Modernizr (www.Modernizr.com). One of the first things you might do is create a home page with a simple navigation system on it. This blog post will show you one way to accomplish this.

Many developers use the ConfigurationManager class to retrieve settings from the .Config file of your application. This class allows you to retrieve settings from the <appSettings> element. With just a single line of code as shown in the following line:

Just wanted to let everyone know that I published a new video this morning on "Architecting Applications for Multiple UIs". This $20 video is an hour long and includes 3 sample applications in WPF, ASP.NET and Windows Phone with a common set of class libraries and WCF Services. This video walks you through how to create a View Model to talk to WCF Services and this same View Model is then used from all three of these UIs. Doing this saves you from writing a ton of front-end code. In fact the code behind in most of these is less than 50 lines of code! If you are interested take a look here: http://www.pdsa.com/Products/ProductDetail.aspx?prod=423

As programmer’s we know that if we create a temporary file during the running of our application we need to make sure it is removed when the application or process is complete. We do this, but why can’t Microsoft do it? Visual Studio leaves tons of temporary files all over your hard drive. This is why, over time, your computer loses hard disk space. This blog post will show you some of the most common places where these files are left and which ones you can safely delete.

Calling all Speakers!

As technology keeps moving on, we as developers are continually challenged to learn new ways of doing our jobs. Many years ago (starting as far back as Visual Basic 4.0) the movement was toward OOP and creating N-Tier applications. This meant wrapping up the data returned from DAO, RDO or ADO into classes and collections of classes. .NET came along and we started using ADO.NET to retrieve data. However, usage of classes and collection classes changed very little, at least conceptually. In .NET 2.0 Generics were introduced, but this just helped simplify our code. Again, our basic class structure changed very little.

After my last blog post on how to layout a different UI design instead of a normal tabular format, I had quite a few comments on how you would add sorting, paging and filtering and so on. That is one of the best parts about using the GridView control, you can still use all the normal sorting, paging and filtering that you would with a normal tabular GridView. If you take a look at Figure 1 you can see that I sorted the data using the SqlDataSource object, then applied paging and added a Search/Filtering mechanism. I also added a drop down list of field names so you can sort the grid using any field from the table you want. All of this was done and you will only have to add 1 line of code to perform the sorting!

I have long had a problem with using grids to display data to the user. I have an even bigger problem with editing on a grid. A grid is easy to implement for a developer, and this is normally why developers use them. However, a grid is normally not the best interface for a user. Now, note that there are always exceptions, but these should be the exception and not the rule. There are many reasons why a grid is not suitable for user consumption.