On December 2nd 2008 at 6:30 PM, Lino Tadros, President & CEO of Falafel Software, will present two sessions on AJAX and Silverlight 2.0 from 6:30 to 8:30 PM at the Foothills College campus in Los Altos Hills.

Please visit http://www.baynetug.org to learn more about the UsersGroup and the two sessions.  Hope to see you there!

There are times when you may want to create your own custom build configuration in Visual Studio, such as to define compiler symbols or to set build options for different projects within the same solution.  Fortunately, as I recently discovered, Visual studio makes this very simple. 

Select your solution in the solution explorer, then use the Build menu to choose "Configuration Manager", which will let you manage the different configurations of your project.

Next, from the left-most drop down menu, choose "New" to create your own configuration.

From the next window, you can name your configuration, and even select whether ...

If you've ever worked with an object with an IDENTIY column and an INSTEAD OF INSERT trigger defined, you are familiar with this issue; since the INSERT occurs within the scope of the trigger instead of the scope of the insert statement that caused the trigger to execute, SCOPE_IDENTITY() does not return the value of the IDENTITY column. Here is an example of a common situation: a base table with an IDENTITY column and and extension table with a 1:1 relationship to the base, and the storage details abstracted by a view that encapsulates the join logic:

begin  tran  go...

Sometimes while working on a project in Visual Studio, I come across a property or setting that makes me think, "Hey, that's just too easy, why haven't I used this before?".  That's exactly what I thought when I returned to Windows Forms development, and found the AcceptButton and CancelButton properties of a Form. 

Let's say you've got a standard form, and when the user is finished filling in the information, they either "Submit" the information, or they "Cancel" out of the form.  Users generally also expect the Enter key to submit, and also the Escape key to cancel, since that's ...