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 Friday, March 23, 2007
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I created a presentation in November of last year with the goal of helping folks make sense of the vast number of Microsoft technologies from development tools, language, data, windows, web and SOA development. This blog post holds the latest links to resources and code for each section. System Requirements The links below use the following technology platforms: - Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0
- .NET 3.0
- NET 3.0 Runtime (installed with Vista)
- Windows SDK for .NET 3.0
- Visual Studio 2005 Orcas Extensions for .NET 3.0:
- WCF&WPF (Nov 2006)
- WF (Nov 2006)
- ADO.NET and LINQ CTP for VS 2005 (May 2006)
- LINQ CTP
- ADO.NET vNext CTP
- ADO.NET vNext Entity Data Model Designer Prototype, CTP
- Visual Studio Orcas CTP (March 2007)
Development Tools In this section I reviewed the stack of development tools and explained how to choose between them. Language Enhancements In this section I talked about moving from .NET 1.1 to 2.0, and discussed the key features of 2.0 that folks should be leveraging. Then, I focused on the language enhancements forthcoming with C# 3.0 and VB 9.0. Demos: Data Access In this section I focused on data access technologies, designing the data access tier, and key features of ADO.NET 2.0, vNext and LINQ to give you some idea how to prepare for the next set of innovations. Demos: - When you install ADO.NET vNext and LINQ there are literally 100s of samples that will really help you get up to speed here. I show a selection of these in this presentation.
Windows Development
In this section I review Windows Forms 2.0 innovations, primarily ClickOnce, and then talk about how to prepare for WPF, explaining the various deployment models. I also talk about practical approaches to choosing the right platform for your development efforts. Demos:
Web Development
In this section I showed an ASP.NET sample application that illustrates key features of ASP.NET 2.0 and practical application of those features. Then we looked at AJAX and discussed trends on the Web compared to Windows development. Popular AJAX Frameworks: Demos: Distributed System Programming In this section I reviewed the typical use for earlier distributed computing technologies like remoting, enterprise services and ASMX web services with WSE, and compared them with WCF. BPM and Workflow In this section I discussed BPM, BizTalk and workflow and trends for BizTalk vNext. DinnerNow To pull it all together, there is a sample you can download here: www.dinnernow.com that illustrates all of the technologies in a practical example. It includes WCF, WF, WPF, AJAX, Vista gadgets and mobile apps.
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Sunday, November 12, 2006
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A big thanks to all the participated in this monstrous tutorial at Dev Connections. Whew, I can fully admit it was a lot of work to put all the information together in one place, but I hope that you got a lot out of it. For those that didn't attend, the goal of the tutorial was to provide an overview of the current state of the various technologies and tools for Microsoft developers, with an emphasis on the reasons for moving forward with each technology stack, and hopefully some enlightenment on when you might choose each technology. I'll be keeping this one day session current for future conferences, and for on-site sessions with clients. If you are interested in such a thing, contact me at IDesign: www.idesign.net.
Here are the resources I promised from the tutorial.
Development Tools
In this section I reviewed the stack of development tools and explained how to choose between them.
Language Enhancements
In this section I talked about moving from .NET 1.1 to 2.0, and discussed the key features of 2.0 that folks should be leveraging. Then, I focused on the language enhancements forthcoming with C# 3.0 and VB 9.0.
Demos:
Data Access
In this section I focused on data access technologies, designing the data access tier, and key features of ADO.NET 2.0, vNext and LINQ to give you some idea how to prepare for the next set of innovations.
Demos:
- When you install ADO.NET vNext and LINQ there are numerous overview documents, tutorials, and samples that will really help you get up to speed here. These are the demos that I showed in the tutorial.
Windows Development
In this section I reviewed Windows Forms 2.0 innovations, primarily ClickOnce, and then talked about how to prepare for WPF and who should use it today.
Demos:
Web Development
In this section I showed an ASP.NET sample application that illustrates key features of ASP.NET 2.0 and practical application of those features. Then we looked at AJAX and discussed trends on the Web compared to Windows development.
Popular AJAX Frameworks:
Demos:
Distributed System Programming
In this section I reviewed the typical use for earlier distributed computing technologies like remoting, enterprise services and ASMX web services with WSE, and compared them with WCF.
BPM and Workflow
In this section I discussed BPM, BizTalk and workflow.
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Thursday, November 17, 2005
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Here are the samples I used (or referred to) in this presentation, enjoy!
- ConfigurationUtility – illustrates how to encrypt a connection string, also shows complext data binding statements, early bound (not using Eva() evil)
- DataDemos – some simple demos of master-details and caching, not presented but consider it extra code!
- PhotoUploadApp – this is the application I demonstrated in the talk
Regarding the SQL cache dependency that didn’t quite work on stage…I forgot to “enable” it on the control, simple silly mistake…I cracked under pressure what can I say?!?
Let me know if you have any questions!
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Monday, August 22, 2005
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If you haven't tried this already, I have definitely saved you at least one hour, for the two I spent playing, toying, testing, and writing this little blog. The issue is when you want to combine formatting statements with binding activity. Of course the trusty Eval() function will allow us to provide a format statement:
<asp:Image id=Image2 width=200 height=200 BorderWidth=2 runat="server" ImageUrl='<%# Eval("url", "~/Photos/{0}") %>' ></asp:Image>
But what if I don't want to hard-code the path? What if I want to use AppSettings, for example? It really isn't so difficult, but it required a little playing around before I realized that I can literally use the binding statement for any code output, including the String.Format...and, within the context of the binding statement <%# ... %> I can use Container.DataItem to get at row values. This example pulls together AppSettings with row values to build the ImageUrl property:
<asp:Image id=Image2 width=200 height=200 BorderWidth=2 runat="server" ImageUrl='<%# String.Format("{0}{1}", System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["PhotosDir"], ((System.Data.DataRowView)Container.DataItem)["url"])%>' ></asp:Image>
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Sure, the syntax got easier. Instead of the cumbersome:
<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "url") %>
We get to save some strokes and remove the entire confusion around “what the heck is Container.DataItem?“:
<%# Eval("url") %>
But, this isn't all its cracked up to be. Eval() STILL uses reflection to evaluate expressions, therefore for every bound column/row displayed in your ASP.NET pages, you are adding overhead, unnecessarily. Of course, what this really means is, just like with 1.1, you should be using explicit casts to cast Container.DataItem to its actual type:
<%# ((System.Data.DataRowView)Container.DataItem)["url"]) %>
Of course the trick is to know...you guessed it...what the heck is Container.DataItem??? A quick way to find this out for various objects you may choose to employ in binding, is to bind just to Container.DataItem as a test. In the attached example I bound the GridView control to the Web configuration sections:
Configuration webConfig = System.Web.Configuration.WebConfigurationManager.OpenWebConfiguration(Request.ApplicationPath);
ConfigurationSectionCollection webConfigSections = webConfig.Sections;
GridView1.DataSource = webConfigSections;
In the GridView declaration I included these labels in a template column:
<asp:Label ID="Label2" runat="server" Text='<%# Container.DataItem%>'></asp:Label>:
<asp:Label ID="Label3" runat="server" Text='<%# ((ConfigurationSection)Container.DataItem).SectionInformation.SectionName %>'></asp:Label>
Now you can consider yourself early bound. ConfigurationUtility.zip (60.58 KB)
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Monday, August 16, 2004
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While researching how to select unique rows from an existing DataSet I ran across many Google references to the following knowledge base article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;326176
NOW THAT YOU KNOW WHERE THE LINK IS, FORGET ABOUT IT!!!! In ADO.NET 2.0 this is now part of the DataView class built-in functionality, and the following article encapsulates this extended functionality in a more object-oriented manner for 1.x:
http://www.aspheute.com/english/20040123.asp
In 2.0, this functionality is available through the DataView class. Consider the following XML file stored as a string resource to indicate supported languages for a Web site:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<supportedCultures>
<culture>
<culturecode>en</culturecode>
<language>English</language>
<country></country>
</culture>
<culture>
<culturecode>en-CA</culturecode>
<language>English</language>
<country>Canada</country>
</culture>
<culture>
<culturecode>en-US</culturecode>
<language>English</language>
<country>USA</country>
</culture>
<culture>
<culturecode>es</culturecode>
<language>Spanish</language>
<country></country>
</culture>
<culture>
<culturecode>es-EC</culturecode>
<language>Spanish</language>
<country>Ecuador</country>
</culture>
<culture>
<culturecode>es-ES</culturecode>
<language>Spanish</language>
<country>Spain</country>
</culture>
</supportedCultures>
If I want to populate a DataList with all supported languages, there are dupes in the file. But, I need the dupes to associate language with Country, for another purpose.
As the following code demonstrates, if I load a DataSet with XML (shown below using a StringReader to demonstrate how to load XML from a string resources, another hidden gem), grab the default view for the (only) table, set a filter on the view to exclude <language> elements that are empty, sort by language, then invoke the DataView.ToTable() overload that supports passing in DISTINCT requirements:
DataSet ds = new DataSet();
System.IO.StringReader rdr = new StringReader(cultures);
ds.ReadXml(rdr);
rdr.Close();
DataView dv = ds.Tables[0].DefaultView;
dv.RowFilter="language <> ''";
dv.Sort="language";
string [] distinct = {"language"};
DataTable tbl = dv.ToTable(true, distinct);
this.dlLanguages.DataSource = tbl;
this.dlLanguages.DataBind();
This is very useful if you are working with offline DataSets from within a smart client, or a cached DataSet supporting a Web application, and you want to bind different perspectives of the data to controls using consistent binding methods. No need to roll your own code to populate rows, or requery the data source.
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