ASP.NET

Window 7 Launch Event – Ft Lauderdale / Miami

Dave Noderer — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:53:08 GMT

I'm at the Windows 7 launch event in Ft. Lauderdale working the community booth with Alex Funkhouser, Kathy Malone and a brief celebrity appearance by Shervin Shakibi,

Here are some pictures I took this morning!

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Book Review - Effective REST Services via .net

Dave Noderer — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:25:41 GMT

I just got done reading "Effective REST Services via .NET" by Kenn Scribner and Scott Seely. ISBN-13: 978-0-321-6125-7

I've been hearing a lot about restful services and have absorbed the basics by osmosis but always like to read a book to cement the ideas more clearly.

This book does a good job of that but goes a few steps further.

A few things I particularly liked were:

- Review of http and how the internet works, things I don't pay much attention to any more!

- While presenting "pure" restful services also pointing out practical applications that might divert a bit.

- This book has a very good tutorial on asynchronous programming.

- The examples are good if a bit complicated but do build on each other.

- Senarios and examples cross both windows and web development.

- All in C# but was easy enough to read it looks like C# only books are the future.

It was worth the read and I have a much better understanding of restful services.

Programming Entity Framework – Julie Lerman – O’Reilly Media

Dave Noderer — Sun, 17 May 2009 16:50:56 GMT

Long past due is a review of Julie’s book, Programming Entity Framework, ISBN 978-0-596-52028-1

Julie adopted Entity Framework early on, from before it was even available to most MVP’s. This book is a reflection of that involvement with the product and the product teams over the past few years.

This 23 chapter, 750+ page book covers a lot of ground and provides a great reference book for almost everything entity framework related.

The first few chapters introduce the framework and will give you a good working knowledge of how to use it. A few other chapters like using the framework with stored procedures and the entity data source control are a good place to start.

What was amazing to me was the variety of ways that you can (in some cases have to) query the entities with Entity SQL LINQ and method based queries. I’m hoping this is more related to the early stage of the entity framework and eventually the options required to get at various features would focus on a single methodology.

The base of the entire framework is the entity model and is usable in theory with or without a sql server backing store. The “wizard” type of tools currently drive off of SQL Server which is fine with me because I have always started with the data model. The modeling language does allow you to go further and add both relations and entities which don’t / can’t exist in a purely relational model.

Once you leave the vanilla scenario of matching your entity to the database the workload goes way up and there is a lot of detail in the model and storage parts of the framework you will have to be familiar with and manipulate.

The good news is that this book goes through all of the above scenarios and has something about all of the related subject.

Another nice feature is that all the examples are in both vb and c#.

In this light I highly recommend this book for both an introduction to the Entity Framework and also as a reference book you will use over time as you need additional features.

For more information visit Julie’s website: http://www.thedatafarm.com/main.aspx

Ft Lauderdale Online – 1st Meeting

Dave Noderer — Wed, 06 May 2009 07:44:00 GMT

We had the first online version of the Ft Lauderdale developer group meeting tonight.

Eighteen people were online but i was the only one with a web camera… I hope more start getting the video cranked up!

The topic was Introduction to MVC and was suppose to be given by Jim Zimmerman out of Tampa but he called at 5:30 (for the 6:30 meeting) reporting that his laptop power brick was toast and he was out of juice. He had tried to get another one but at this point he was dead in the water because his presentation was on the laptop too….

So he gave David Hayden a call who agreed to do the presentation as they are planning to do some of this for the TampaDev.org group too. That group is focused exclusively on MVC, at least for now.

David did a great job of just going through the basics of an mvc app, no power points, just use visual studio and make a project. We dug into the T4 templates a bit and also validation. There were a number of questions that sparked additional discussion.

I used live meeting to record it all to.

A link to the recorded meeting can be found here: https://www311.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/view?cn=&id=PZ6Z2C&pw= no key is required.

More information, video’s, etc at: http://asp.net

Lots more info at the Tampa Bay Developers MVC group: http://tampadev.org

South Florida Code Camp 2008 - 2/2/2008

Dave Noderer — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:39:41 GMT

FREE - 4th Annual South Florida Code Camp - Register Now - Spaces are going fast!

To attend this free, all day .NET Developer mini-conference register at: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=122048 ! The Code Camp will be held on Saturday 2/2/2008 and include breakfast, lunch, giveaways, valuable raffle items and of course lots of great content!

The sessions are now listed on the agenda page. A big thanks to all the speakers that have stepped forward and volunteered to come speak at their own expense. We have already scheduled 70 of 72 sessions. There will be something for everyone... from the person who is new to .net to advanced architecture and software process sessions. For the second year we will have an all Spanish track. Dedicated tracks include "Into to .NET", "Silverlight" and "Agile / CI". Sessions include Ajax, MVC, Visual Studio 2008, Powershell, Windows Workflow and .NET reflection.

Find more information at http://codecamp08.fladotnet.com . We have many sessions lined up. The track chairs will get them organized and on the website agenda over the next couple of weeks.

Visual Studio for Database Pro... WOW!

Dave Noderer — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 23:40:00 GMT

This is going to be one of my favorite features of Visual Studio!

I've been working with the new "Database Projects" and have been very impressed.

You can import a schema and it will script all aspects of the database so it can be used to compare against. More importanttly it can be checked into source safe (or other source control system) as it is just a bunch of SQL scripts.

There are menu items for "Schema Compare" and "Data Compare" which is what I will use the most. It is very quick and easy now to point to a source and target database, do a schema compare and then select all or some of the differences to be "written" to the target datbase. The "Data Compare" is the same but for the actual table contents. I believe you can adjust what it uses to do the compare but I have not dug into it yet.

One thing that it does not seem to do is that once you import a schema then change the source database, it does not seem to want to be able to use the schema project as a destination, I will investigate this more.

Multi line editing with a gridview (or other bound) control

Dave Noderer — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 14:41:00 GMT

I have used this technique before... use the item template for the edit controls and scrape the values by looping through the rows using events other than edit command.

But I got lost for a bit, this article helped me get back on track: http://www.dotnetjohn.com/articles.aspx?articleid=83

I'm using a gridview control and calling my "ReverseBind" from both page changes and also when the user clicks on a button that takes the final results and transfers the data to other places in the database.

I loop through rows which are actually of type "DataControlFieldCell", the controls I'm interested in are contained in the cells. If you know the control names you can use the FindControl method.

For Each oC In oCell.Controls
   '
   Dim ID As String = (oC.ID & String.Empty).ToUpper
   '
   If ID.Length > 5 Then
      '
      Select Case ID.Substring(0, 5)
         Case "ELBL_"
            oItem.SetValue(ID.Substring(5), CType(oC, Label).Text)
         Case "ECHK_"
            oItem.SetValue(ID.Substring(5), CType(oC, CheckBox).Checked)
         Case "ETXT_"
         oItem.SetValue(ID.Substring(5), CType(oC, TextBox).Text)
         Case Else
            ' don't care
      End Select
      '
   End If ' Id.length > 5
   '
Next ' control in cell

In this case I have named the controls "ELBL_fieldname", "ETXT_fieldname", "ECHK_fieldname" so I can loop through the controls and determine both type and database field name. I could separate and rename the db and ui field names but why introduce that level of confusion?? To me it is much clearer to maintain the names from end to end so you know what you are looking at.

While I could use some more generic tag and use gettype to determine the type this is much easier for the limited scope of this particular usage.

Passing the the field name and control "value" (.text, .checked) to a simple object (Item) that basically represents the row but also has logic for validation and saving to the DB.

Validation of ViewState Mac failed

Dave Noderer — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 15:53:00 GMT

Ran across this error trying to get a datalist from the old CW site working under 2.0. I've seen some of this with third party controls but setting the page directives to:

enableEventValidation="false" viewStateEncryptionMode="Never"

worked for me...

Found the answer here: http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/thomasswilliams/archive/2006/06/06/139890.aspx

ASP.NET 2.0 - Accessing master page controls

Dave Noderer — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 00:01:00 GMT

Recently I needed to access a control in the master file of a page. Pretty simple but took a little investigation and experimentation.

I was looking for a control in the footer and in the actual application fetch contact information relavant to the current context.

If Me.Form.Parent IsNot Nothing Then
    Dim olbl As Label = Me.Form.Parent.FindControl("lblRegFooter")
    '
    If olbl IsNot Nothing Then
        olbl.Text = "Set to what you want, will probably be something dynamically generated or fetched from a database!"
    End If
    '
End If