Taking Generics and Anonymous Delegates for a spin

Posted by: on | Saturday, April 28, 2007     Comments

Behind this dropdownlist is some of the coolest code I have written for ages!

 

 

How can that be? Well, I learnt a lot about generics and anonymous delegates in the process… if you want to see some totally geeky code, read on,

Of course, there is a chance that for most of you this is all old hat, in which case you can go back to sleep…it was new to me for sure.

 

Still awake?

 

So, first of all, I had a lot of fun retrieving the data that populates this list.

The data that drives ...

Convert.ChangeType and nullable types

Posted by: on | Tuesday, April 24, 2007     Comments

Yesterday I ran into an exception trying to read a non null DateTime value into a nullable type (DateTime?), using a helper method that was calling Convert.ChangeType. It turns out that this method, although very useful, doesn't support nullable types. However, I soon came across a useful blog that has a wrapper class that takes care of that particular problem, courtesy of Peter Johnsson.

Debug JavaScript in Visual Studio 2005 - Web Debugging Tools Part I

Posted by: on | Tuesday, April 17, 2007     Comments

You might overlook the JavaScript debugging utility that's already built in to Visual Studio 2005: the Script Explorer window.  The Script Explorer can take care of the usual debugging tasks like stepping through code, adding watches and evaluating variables. 

To use the debugger in Internet Explorer navigate to the browser Tools | Internet Options | Advanced tab and make sure that "Disable script debugging" is turned off. 

Run your web application in Visual Studio 2005.  Then select the menu option for Debug | Windows | Script Explorer.  Notice in the background the tags for telerik RadEditor controls...

The first thing ...

Firebug Debugger Works with AJAX Web Applications

Posted by: on | Tuesday, April 17, 2007     Comments

The Firebug debugger add-in for Firefox handles the entire stack of AJAX related technologies.  Ever wanted to tweak the margins in your style sheet while you watch the changes?  Profile a web page and see a visual representation of when scripts are loading and how big they are?  Watch the XmlHttpRequest (i.e. AJAX) requests move over the wire in real time?  You can do all this in Firebug, and of course you can step through your JavaScript code.  At Falafel we use this tool in our consulting work and telerik recommends Firebug for use in web applications using their RadControl suite...

Dynamically add rows to a GridView

Posted by: on | Thursday, April 12, 2007     Comments

Ever need to show something in a databound gridview that isn't in your datasource? Don't worry, relax, forget about that datasource. Just create that extra row dynamically.

Lets assume I have a GridView with 2 columns. The first column shows the items on an order,  the second column shows the price of that item and the footer shows the order total.  How would I inject a row that shows the tax?

Something like this in the RowDataBound EventHandler would do the trick:

decimal orderTotal = 0.0m;
decimal tax = 0.0m;
protected void gvOrderDetail_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e)
{
    //TODO: ...









Haskell for C# Programmers

Posted by: on | Wednesday, April 11, 2007     Comments

A nice blog post highlighting some aspects of Haskell and the new functional elements of C# 3.0 http://themechanicalbride.blogspot.com/2007/04/haskell-for-c-3-programmers.html

Getting TableAdapters to participate in transactions

Posted by: on | Monday, April 09, 2007     Comments

I love the new features of ADO.Net, the Object Datasources and the table adapters that the XSD designer can generate. But they kind of have a will of their own! They open and close connections as they see fit, and dont really care about transactions. If you have a set of related tables that you make changes to, and then want to write all of the changes to the database in one transaction, you need to do things a certain way to make it work...

What about the TransactionScope class?

My first attempt was to use the new TransactionScope functionality ...

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 is here

Posted by: on | Tuesday, April 03, 2007     Comments

When I first installed Windows Vista I was a little worried that I would not be able to use all my development tools, like Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, so I wanted to install an XP virtual machine just in case. I soon found out that the only version of Microsoft Virtual PC that would run on Vista was a beta of Virtual PC 2007, so I installed that, and it actually worked nicely.

Well, now the release version of Virtual PC 2007 is here. You can download the full version for free from the ...