C# .NET

BRDNUG Meeting this Wednesday, November 5th

Stacy Vicknair — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:58:25 GMT

Just a reminder about the upcoming BRDNUG meeting. We'll be looking at ADO.NET data services. The whole summary is available here:

http://www.wtfnext.com/archive/2008/10/28/october-baton-rouge-.net-users-group-meeting-in-november.aspx

Technorati Tags: BRDNUG,ADO.NET Data Services

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP available once again

Stacy Vicknair — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 03:31:27 GMT

Maybe you’ve already noticed, but the download links are once again active for the VS2010 .NET 4.0 CTP. Tackle yourself some new team oriented features here:

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/content/content.aspx?ContentID=9790

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio 2010,.NET 4.0

October Baton Rouge .NET Users Group Meeting (in November)

Stacy Vicknair — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:16:44 GMT

NOTICE: Due to a scheduling conflicts as Halloween activities the October meeting has been moved 1 week to Wednesday, November 5th. Sorry for any inconvenience.

.Net User Group Meeting

location:
At Lamar Advertising
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
5:45 PM - 8:15 PM
Sponsored by: Portico Learning Solutions

Presenter
Jeremy Beckham

BIO:
Jeremy is a Senior Developer for High Power Consulting, Inc. and has over 5 years of experience in .Net and SQL Server development. He's worked on projects ranging from ASP.Net MVC websites to enterprise wide custom ERP systems. He specializes in application integration and has built integration solutions including custom FTP interfaces for portal applications, socket interfaces for the Louisiana State Police's Law Enforcement Messaging Switch, interfaces for content management systems such as FileNet and IBM Content Manager, and the correspondence generation system Thunderhead. He has worked extensively with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services including dynamic image generation inside of reports and building report models for Adhoc Reporting.

Topic
ADO.Net Data Services
The ADO.NET Data Services framework consists of a combination of patterns and libraries that enable the creation and consumption of data services for the web. The goal of the ADO.Net Data Services framework is to facilitate the creation of flexible data services that are naturally integrated with the web, using URIs to point to pieces of data and simple, well-known formats to represent that data, such as JSON and plain XML. This results in the data service being surfaced to the web as a REST-style resource collection that is addressable with URIs and that agents can interact with using the usual HTTP verbs such as GET, POST or DELETE.

Presentation Outline:
•     Introduction
•     What is ADO.Net Data Services?
•     How can it be used?
•     Consuming ADO.Net Data Services.
•     Demo
o       Website using ASP.Net AJAX and JavaScript to consume ADO.Net Data Services.

Agenda
5:45 pm - 6:15 pm:      General Introduction/Food and Drinks
6:15 pm - 7:15 pm:      Jeremy will speak on ADO.Net Data Services
7:20 pm - until:        Open forum for questions

Raffle and Giveaways
•     LLBLGen Pro ORM Tool
•     Office Ultimate 2007
•     Infragistics Net Advantage 2008
•     Several Books

Hope to see you guys at the November October Meeting, good ole scheduling issues :)

Technorati Tags: BRDNUG,Baton Rouge,ADO.NET

RegularExpressionValidator will not stop the empty string

Stacy Vicknair — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:45:44 GMT

I’ll be honest that this did happen to me, and thankfully the MSDN straightened me out.

For those of us who normally program for winforms, sometimes the switch to an ASP.NET project can prove to be a whole new world. For instance, I was working on a straightforward single page in ASP.NET 1.1 so that members of the same project could gather some information easily.

The form itself had one field, and I wanted to ensure that the field was a number only. I added a RegularExpressionValidator and pointed it to my text box, and gave the simple regex ^[0-9]+$ which should just allow 1 or more numbers to be entered. When I started testing it out, that wasn’t the case.

The validation worked properly for all cases except when the user would enter nothing. In that case, the validator just let the thing straight on through. I’m not delusional and I don’t have to write a regex every day, so I starting thinking what’s wrong with my regex? I even talked to people I trusted on ASP.NET about it, and they were mostly suggesting the regex might be wrong (from lack of familiarity with regex).

Turns out, RegularExpressionValidator will not stop the empty string. When you think about it (and I’m sure most ASP.NET developers are thinking “Duh!”) what good would regex be if you couldn’t apply it to a field, even if it wasn’t mandatory.

So, to filter out the lack of entry, add a RequiredFieldValidator to the mix. This’ll catch the contingency the regex doesn’t, and you’ll be good to go.

For more info on RegularExpressionValidator and its uses, reference the MSDN here. The first Note in the remarks highlights the information presented here.

Technorati Tags: VB .NET,C# .NET,RegularExpressionValidator

Mono 2.0 Released

Stacy Vicknair — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 18:09:48 GMT

For those Linux devs who don’t have something adamantly against Microsoft, Mono 2.0 has been released!

From the release notes:

Mono 2.0 is a portable and open source implementation of the .NET framework for Unix, Windows, MacOS and other operating systems.

Release Date: October 6th, 2008

Major Highlights

Mono 2.0 is a major milestone in the Mono project, and it supports the following features:

Microsoft Compatible APIs

ADO.NET 2.0 API for accessing databases.

ASP.NET 2.0 API for developing Web-based applications.

Windows.Forms 2.0 API to create desktop applications.

System.XML 2.0: An API to manipulate XML documents.

System.Core: Provides support for the Language Integrated Query (LINQ).

System.Xml.Linq: Provides a LINQ provider for XML.

System.Drawing 2.0 API: A portable graphics rendering API.

Mono APIs

Gtk# 2.12: A binding to the Gtk+ 2.12 and GNOME libraries for creating desktop applications on Linux, Windows and MacOS X.
Mono.Cecil: A library to manipulate ECMA CLI files (the native format used for executables and libraries).
Mono.Cairo: A binding to the Cairo Graphics library to produce 2D graphics and render them into a variety of forms (images, windows, postscript and PDF).
Mono's SQLite support: a library to create and consume databases created with SQLite.
Mono.Posix: a library to access Linux and Unix specific functionality from your managed application. With both a low-level interface as well as higher level interfaces.

Third Party APIs bundled with Mono

Extensive support for databases: PostgreSQL, DB2, Oracle, Sybase, SQL server, SQLite and Firebird.
C5 Generics Library: we are bundling the C5 generics collection class library as part of Mono.

Download Mono 2.0 Here

Technorati Tags: Mono,.NET,Linux

Wondering how to deploy an App in Express Editions?

Stacy Vicknair — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:05:40 GMT

So you’ve got your free fancy express edition for VB or C#, you’ve created your new godlike application that you’ve just got to get out to the world and then the heavens rain all over your parade because you can’t find those other templates necessary to deploy your application.

Now is not the time to give up, you can still get the job done with Click Once deployment, and Mary Lee over at the Visual Basic Team’s blog has got the tutorial to show you how.

http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2008/10/02/looking-for-setup-and-deployment-project-templates.aspx

Technorati Tags: Visual Basic,VB .NET,Express Editions,Mary Lee,steup and deployment