Manuel Abadia's ASP.NET stuff - Monday, April 03, 2006

This post explains the properties and methods of the ControlDesigner class, the base class for all ASP.NET designers.

Creating cool controls is only the first half of the work. The second half of the work is to add rich design time support in order to make it easy to use and improve productivity.

This post is an introduction to Component Designers.

Finally WebParts are getting Drag & Drop support for FireFox although WebParts are not working 100% yet.

An Excel spreadsheet where you have guess some old games based on the screenshots.

Very funny!

My copy of Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Advanced Topics has finally shipped

Everybody knows that reflection is slow but I wanted something more measurable than slow so I did some performance tests for the basic things I do with reflection.

This week has been a different week for me.

Somehow I ended up designing the layout for a book

This completes the emulation of Trivial Pursuit (Spanish).

There are some screenshots of the game.

In the past weeks I've been posting some detailed information about how the ObjectDataSource works in ASP.NET 2.0.

In those posts I pointed out some limitations or problems with the ObjectDataSource control. The only real solution here its to code your own data source control but it isn't an easy task.

As I was very unhappy with the ObjectDataSource I coded my own data source control based on the ObjectDataSource but with a lot of improvements.

Take a look at it here:
http://www.manuelabadia.com/products/EODS_features.aspx

Trivial Pursuit (Spanish) is not a simple rom swap. There are 40320 possible combinations to map the program ROMs.

With some patience I have reduced the number of combinations to 120.

There are some screenshots of the current progress. I'll finish emulating this next week.

Finally a PCB for Trivial Pursuit Spanish has been found. This was a MAME Most Wanted board and will be emulated soon...

Al fin se ha encontrado una placa del Trivial Pursuit en español, que era uno de los juegos más buscados del MAME. Pronto estará emulado...

This is the last part in the ObjectDataSource tutorial. It explains the importance of setting AffectedRows, optimistic concurrency, parameter merging in detail, caching and design time attributes.

There's an example where most of the ObjectDataSource capabilities are used.

I was "playing" with the ObjectDataSource's example from Part 2 when I realized I didn't enabled client callbacks for paging and sorting. I set GridView's EnableSortingAndPagingCallbacks to true and tried it. To my surprise, it didn't work! I was confused because I had tried it that in the past and it worked without any problems so it made no sense that it wasn't working now.

Of course the first thing that comes to my head in those situations is: "There's a bug in GridView's implementation". The reality is that 95% of the time it's my own fault but one never finds himself guilty until proven wrong!

This article continues exploring the ObjectDataSource. The topics covered are paging, sorting, filtering, parameters and events.

ObjectDataSource lets you integrate your own objects in the ASP.NET data binding framework without much work. In order to do so, you have to understand the data binding infrastructure (see my previous posts if you need more info about it) and what ObjectDataSource does for you.

Another year and another Grammy that Steve Vai lost.

This is the last post in the series about data source controls and the new data binding infrastructure.

Now I’m going to explain what does the framework internally to support two way data binding.

A data binding expression is contained withing <%# and %> delimiters. Inside those delimiters you can place code that return a value, an Eval expression or a Bind expression. You have two way data binding only if you use a Bind expression.

It’s time to talk about the abstract class DataSourceView.

The DataSourceView class exposes the capabilities of the data source control (if it can update, insert, delete, page, sort…) and has the methods to do CRUD operations (select, insert, update and delete). It’s the element with most functionality in the new data binding infrastructure by far.

In a previous article I explained the infrastructure for a data bound control (how it gets data from a DataSourceView and when the framework calls the DataBind method). Now it’s time to explain a bit the DataSourceControl class.

The new data source controls and the new data binding infrastructure is a cool feature that can simplify development time (especially for simple scenarios and for people without much knowledge of the framework).However, for hardcore developers, not knowing what exactly the new data binding infrastructure does under the hood is problematic and unfortunately, it isn't very well documented anywhere...I'll try to explain some of the "magic" involved in this.