Manuel Abadia's ASP.NET stuff - Friday, April 21, 2006

ASP.NET 2.0 data binding infrastructure is a lot better than the previous binding infrastructure. However, for complex scenarios is not mature enough.

In this post I show an example of cascading DropDownLists inside a FormView and point out the problems that appear. Also, I show you how to make some instrusive smart hacking to avoid it.

InDesign exposes its functionality as a COM object so it can be used in Microsoft .NET Framework.

I explain some things that you have to keep in mind when working with InDesign in C#. There's also a sample to remove the carriage returns from the end of the footnotes.

Finally the Atlas control toolkit is available!

It has some cool controls but it's missing some IMHO

In previous posts we studied the functionality offered by ControlDesigner and we coded a custom data source sample.

To add design time functionality to our custom data source we need to understand the DataSourceDesigner class...

Before explaining the DataSourceDesigner class and all related classes/interfaces, we need a custom data source to be able to apply what we’ll learn about the DataSourceDesigner.

In this post I explain how to implement a custom DataSourceControl with similarities to the ObjectDataSource that ships with ASP.NET.

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.