Configuring Build Events for Web Projects in Visual Studio .NET

Posted by: on | Friday, November 12, 2004     Comments

Build events are handy ways to perform tasks that need to be done every time a project is rebuilt. The Visual Studio IDE exposes these events through the project properties dialog for windows applications, but not for web applications. However, the IDE can be coerced into supporting build events for web applications, and it's surprisingly easy to do. Simply open your web project's .csproj file and look under the settings element for the following elements:

<VISUALSTUDIOPROJECT>
  <CSHARP>
    <BUILD>
      <SETTINGS>
        <!-- Your Build Events Here -->
        PreBuildEvent = ""
        PostBuildEvent ...





Creating DataModule-like components in .NET

Posted by: on | Friday, November 12, 2004     Comments

Delphi's DataModules were a useful programming tool because they provided a centralized place to define data schema and business logic which could then be referenced from multiple locations. Visual Studio .NET, however, encourages the programmer to place DataSets and Adapters on each individual page, resulting in decentralized and possibly redundant business logic. However, it is possible to roll your own DataModule-like components in .NET. Here's how:

  1. Decide whether you want to have your custom DataSet component in the same project or in a class library. Keeping it in the same project is a little simpler, while putting it in a ...

.NET Expression column bug and workarounds

Posted by: on | Friday, November 12, 2004     Comments

Expression columns are a useful feature of ADO.NET that allows developers to define calculated columns that are maintained on the client side using local data. This is a significant improvement over performing calculations within a SQL query, because expression columns can recalculate based on changes to local data without requiring a round trip to the database server, and less data needs to be transferred from server to client. Besides being able to perform simple arithmetic on values within the same row, expressions can also retrieve values from parent and child rows in a relational dataset, thus providing lookup and aggregation ...