ASP.NET Resources

November 2007

Free Microsoft AJAX Templates for CodeSmith + Overview Video

Here’s something I wanted to do for a long time. The Microsoft AJAX library brings order to the chaos of JavaScript development by introducing familiar concepts: namespaces, classes, interfaces, enumerations, property setters and getters, etc. The downside is the laborious and error-prone manual coding of all that goodness.

11/28/2007 |

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The Strategy for Discoverers and Entrepreneurs

From The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

11/26/2007 |

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Enterprise Library / NHibernate Smackdown

When writing the back-end for Positive Lookahead, I chose the Enterprise Library naïvely thinking it would free me from some of the boring manual writing of data access code. The experience was quite sour because I had to wrestle too much with the damn Data Access Block and ended up writing even more code than I would’ve written with plain vanilla ADO.NET.

11/26/2007 |

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Random Thoughts

There are days when I feeling like shooting whoever decided that it was a sensible idea to pop up a nagging dialog asking to reboot for a critical security update. Windows has always had a dumb preemptive way of window activation, so this prompt always pops up at the worst moment on top of any other window.

11/18/2007 |

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How to Display Day Names In The Right Order

What happens when you call AbbreviatedDayNames is you get an array of day names in the language of the current culture. There’s a caveat: the array always starts with a Sunday even if the first day in that particular culture is Monday. This disconnect can be very confusing if you’re plotting day names against a chart axis, for example.

11/14/2007 |

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Connecticut Code Camp Follow-up

This past week-end I attended Connecticut’s first Code Camp which went great! Code Camps are an ideal place to recharge batteries, gain new ideas and simply interact with like-minded geeks. Only enthusiasts will drive across two states, on a week-end, on their own dime to attend a free-for-all geek fest.

11/14/2007 |

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Craving For Language Expressiveness

What I’ve been missing in C# for years is expressiveness. For example, which construct is more natural?

11/7/2007 |

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Taming DataList With a Custom Adapter

Suppose you want to extend a DataList and have it put out a div for each row. The RepeatLayout property can be either Flow (“Items are displayed without a table structure”) or Table (“Items are displayed in a table”). Since we want divs, we’re after RepeatLayout = RepeatLayout.Flow. Not so fast, though. This control isn’t that easy to extend.

11/1/2007 |

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Web talk

November 2007