To all who have used my corporate site, www.infotekcg.com, in the past to obtain information and download controls and code: I've reorganized everything into a new site. I've decided to gear the InfoTek site more toward services provided to my customers and the new site, www.dotnetdude.com, to my peers. I wanted something a bit more personal and little less corporate. Check it out and tell me what you think. I've kept it real simple and no-frills. You can download all the WebControls and other code I've put there for no charge, as well as obtain other information regarding articles I've written, etc.
I welcome all your comments and I hope some of the stuff on there is useful to you. Visit it often because I'm finishing up some killer controls right now that will be on the site in the next couple of weeks.
Yours Truly,Miguel - www.dotnetdude.com
April 12, for the Northern New Jersey .NET Users Group at SetFocus, my talk will be:
WebControls in ASP.NET 2.0
The coverage will include:
If anyone wants to sponsor this event, all you have to do is buy the pizza and you get a 15 minute window for a presentation. Contact Stacey Uhrig.
By the way - anyone within eye/ear shot of this blog that would like this presentation done at their users group, please feel free to contact me.
Looks like I'll be doing WebUI, Scott Watermasysk will be doing Web Architecture, Don Demsak will be doing Data Layer/XML, and Doug Seven will be doing Enterprise Library/Patterns & Practices. I believe there's someone doing Web Services/Connectivity as well. I'll post it as soon as I find out.
Cabana Night will be held in the Microsoft offices in Iselin, NJ on March 8. The 'whiteboard' sessions will be about 2 hours long and you can rotate freely among all of them.
See everyone there!!!
I've been self-training in ASP.NET 2.0 for several weeks now and I'm ready to rewrite my GalleryBuilder WebControl. The control will work pretty much the same way with addition of script callbacks. This should avoid any screen flicker during control postbacks. I'm also going to be taking advantage of the control state. Next on the slate is my Scheduling Suite which is almost done in the 1.1 version, but 2.0 will allow the injection of script callbacks as well. This feature is one of the coolest things in ASP.NET 2.0 WebControl enhancements. Can't wait to get this done.
The GalleryBuilder in its 1.1 version is available from http://www.infotekcg.com/downloads.aspx. The GalleryBuilder can be seen in all its glory on my daughter's site at http://www.familiacastro.com/victoria
The SchedulingSuite will be available in the next couple of weeks.
In the past, I've always written my non-mapped ViewState-driven properties for my custom WebControls using a technique I learned from the books a few years ago.
public string MyProperty{ get { if((object)ViewState[“MyProperty“] == null) ViewState[“MyProperty“] = “Default Value...“; return (string)ViewState[“MyProperty“]; } set { ViewState[“MyProperty“] = value; }}
I've since figured out a better way (which in fact the newer books use) which doesn't over-bloat the ViewState.
public string MyProperty{ get { if((object)ViewState[“MyProperty“] == null) return “Default Value...“; return (string)ViewState[“MyProperty“]; } set { ViewState[“MyProperty“] = value; }}
The difference here is that in the first method, if the property is simply accessed, it's default value is placed in the ViewState. In the second method, when the 'null' test is performed, only a null get's placed in the ViewState and the default value is 'returned' (the null gets automatically placed in the ViewState due to the nature of the Dictionary), thus keeping the since to a minimum until the time actually comes to give the property a value.
This is very well written.
http://weblogs.asp.net/palermo4/archive/2005/02/14/372170.aspx?Pending=true
And make sure you read the feedbacks too - there's a couple of great ones there as well.
Great Job Michael!
I'm going to be participating in a Cabana Night on March 8th at SetFocus. What's Cabana Night you ask?
The following is a list of people committed to participating in our first Cabana Night. We are in talks with a number of other experts...check back for frequent updates on both our speakers and topic areas!
The Feb/Mar issue of CoDe Magazine hits the shelves on the 20th of this month. This month I have two articles in it - one on ASP.NET Application Skinning using MVC and the other Declarative Programming: A Custom WebControl Approach to ASP.NET Development.
If you read them, please leave me feedback at www.code-magazine.com and/or as feedback for this posting.
I don't think I blogged about it in the past, but I started writing for CoDe Magazine last year when they published two other articles, one on Encapsulating Asynchronous Functionality Directly Into your Business Objects, and the other on writing Custom Enumerators. Check their site or the back issues for them. All my articles have accompanying code at www.infotekcg.com. Also, I always provide the sample code within the article in both VB.NET and C#.
The April/May issue commemorates the fifth anniversary of CoDe, so keep lookout for that one.
Hear-ye, hear-ye:
I am officially coining a new term. In Scott Bellware's posting, he refers to a breed of VB.NET developers who still code like they did in VB6. He and I both agree that this group contributes to the continous war that brews between VB.NET and C#; a war that I do not feel should exist. I'm going to let Scott's posting continue that conversation as opossed to branching one out here. However, I am officially coining the term CLR6Coders (pronounced Clear-six-coders). You heard it here first folks. Now start passing this around... now!!! Do it!!!! :)
Thank you for Frank LaVigne for possible costing me about $2500 very, very soon. Last nights NJ User Group presentation was about the Tablet PC and I have to say, it was great. Not only did it spark a lot of discussion but the presenter semed to have a good grasp of Tablet development and gave us some cool demonstrations. I've been looking for an excuse to buy one (I like the HP TC100 Slate), and I'm awfully close to finding one. I've always thought they were worth it just for Microsoft OneNote. I feel that's the killer app, the VisiCalc of the Tablet world. Well, I promise to blog about it as soon as I get one so be on the lookout.
Check out Paul's entry on the evening.
This is actually very well put.
http://www.geekswithblogs.net/sgreenberger/archive/2005/02/01/21735.aspx
I myself have worked for a Big 6 consulting firm, or Big 5, or 4, or whatever damn merger-resulting number it is today. So I can vouch for his last statement in his posting, about companies throwing non-qualified people onto customers just to keep them billable. The problem in some of these firms is that the practices are set up as partnerships, so if your salary cannot be billed back to a client cost center, then it literally gets billed to partner's. In the end, this can very well mean that his or her bottom line will be less at the end of the year. It's really a shame, considering that a lot of companies rely on reputable consulting companies like the Big #s for services. In a future post, I'll have to share a couple of my war stories.