Many companies are moving away from constantly building applications from scratch, and instead focusing their development on  building a reusable and testable framework to encapsulate their business rules.  Their frameworks are then used to quickly produce custom apps, webservices, components, etc. It is sort of like building a house. First they build a solid foundation, and then build on top of that foundation whatever structure they may need. If you are part of a team about to head down this path, I would strongly recommend a few of my favorite resources, to make sure you get the foundation right the ...

I hate writing the same code over and over again. Whenever I do, ennui begins to set in and even writing the same five lines of code again suddenly becomes unbearable. That’s usually a good time to refactor the duplicate code into a method or utility class. I recently found myself writing some code like this that defied the usual Extract Method refactoring: code that created and opened a connection, created a command, executed a reader, iterated through the reader’s results, and did something on every record. Read on to see how to refactor this code into its own reusable ...

Falafel Software launched their fast and easy to use web site that promotes their software development, consulting, and training services. In addition to promoting Falafel’s products and services, the site also features informative blogs by Falafel employees, an active community forum, and a store where Falafel and AutomatedQA products can be purchased.

The site also marks the debut of Falafel’s new creative director, Eric Titolo. On the Falafel web site, Eric spent many hours researching the previous Falafel sites trying to figure the best way of presenting the products and services Falafel has to offer.

“One the of the first ...

Written by Phillip Blanton

There seems to be a lot of trouble encountered by people attempting their first install of DotnetNuke 4.x. I have developed a step by step guide for installing a new Dnn4 development system on your Windows XP machine, and I find that I am constantly looking for the last place I posted it so that I can copy and paste it into a new thread.

I figured that Falafel would be a good place to stick it. That way I can just post a link to this one static location whenever I need to share this ...

If you have a BoundField in a GridView that displays a datetime, but you only want to display the date, how would you go about doing that?

Set the DataFormatString to "{0:d}" ?

That is what I thought too. Turns out, this doesn't always work.
That is because by default the value is extracted from the data store, HtmlEncoded, and then the format string is applied. After HtmlEncoding,  the format string won't do anything. The fix in most cases, is usually pretty simple. Just turn off HtmlEncoding for that field by setting HtmlEncode="false".
If you can't turn off HtmlEncoding, it ...