Category: asp.net

The client callback mechanism in ASP.NET 2.0 was apparently changed during the beta, at some point after the book I’m reading was written. To their credit, O’Reilly covers this in a doc file posted on their site.

Also, this page at the quickstarts.asp.net site describes the current mechanism briefly, and this article on the MSDN site gives a bit more detail.

The ASP.NET 2.0 book I’m reading has a simple example of using an ObjectDataSource bound to a GridView. I’m always a little suspicious of wizard-generated stuff like this, but I’m willing to give it a try. The example in the book did not actually work, though, and a few minutes of poking around didn’t reveal anything obvious that I’d missed.
This article has some good material on the ObjectDataSource. I suppose it’s something I’ll need to look into a bit more, in general.

The last time I mentioned ASP.NET 2.0 was probably the last time I did any work on it at home. I went to an MSDN event this week that talked about a couple of things in .NET 2.0, so that kind of got me interested in picking it up again. I worked through a bit more stuff today, basically GridView and DetailsView examples. I still have a lot to learn.

Meanwhile, I was listening to an episode of .Net Rocks this week, and the guest, who had been working in .Net 2.0, referred to that as the “old way”, and wished he could have been using the new stuff, like WCF and WF. I feel like I’m falling behind! We haven’t done much of anything with 2.0 in work yet. I’d really like to move a bunch of web stuff from ASP.NET 1.1 to 2.0, but it’s hard to find the time.

Well, it’s been about a month since I’ve done any ASP.NET 2.0 work at home. I watched a few webcasts at work over the last couple of weeks, though, so I haven’t forgotten anything. I played around with the GridView a bit tonight. Very nice. It’s really easy to put a fairly standard-looking and straightforward grid together quickly. I need to go a little deeper, though, and figure out how to do some of the weirder stuff that we typically do with the DataGrid now.

I made my way through chapter 2 of ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer’s Notebook today. I’ve really been putting off learning .NET 2.0 and VS.NET 2005, but I’m starting to get motivated now. Partially, I guess it’s the whole “New Year’s resolution” thing. I’ve also been listening to a lot of Dot Net Rocks lately, so that’s helping out on the motivation front. After I get through this book, I’ve got another ASP.NET 2.0 book, a SQL Server 2005 book, Expert C# Business Objects, and a couple of other random programming books to read.

I spent some time today surfing through a bunch of .net stuff. I’ve been picking up on some things from DotNetRocks that I wanted to look into, and I just wound up following some trails. Here are a few interesting links:

• CodeSmith — interesting tool that I need to look into.
• DotNetNuke — I interviewed a guy today who was thinking about starting a company and writing his own CMS in ASP.NET. He hadn’t heard of DNN before. He may have been trying to do something a bit different from DNN, or he may have been reinventing the wheel. I hope he takes a look at it before he starts coding from scratch!
• Community Server — the last time I looked at these guys, they weren’t quite done yet. Now they’re at version 1.2 and apparently quite usable. I may have to try this out, maybe for a departmental blog at work.
• An interesting discussion of strings in .Net here. Maybe I should put some stuff about String vs. StringBuilder on the test I give to interviewees.
• Thycotic.Data — maybe not that useful for me, but kind of interesting.
• Rockford Lhotka — I’m kind of interested in his book, after hearing him on DNR. I honestly don’t know much about n-tier development.