So, I have written before about how to put your database into version control using database projects in Visual Studio. Even while having the scripts in the solution, there can be times when you can't exactly remember what you changed and needs to go out with your project deployment to the production database. Deploying files is easy because of tools like WinMerge, however deploying things to a database can get quite complicated. You could script both schemas and use WinMerge to see the differences between ... [More]

In April of '08, I wrote a post about cleaning up the ASP.NET head tag using control adapters. I've got some great feedback from it, and I'm glad that I'm not the only one that is horrified when looking at the source of an ASP.NET rendered web page. From the comments of that article I was recently asked how to clean up JavaScript tags. With the code from the project download of the article as-is, when I just slap some script tags in the head tag I get something that looks like this rendered: However, so... [More]

So you may have found yourself in a similar situation, needing to make a TCP/IP request to a 3rd party API possibly using SSL. Well, that is a quite simple task. It can however, be complicated if this 3rd party requires the use of certificates for communication to its API server. I found myself in some sort of certificate hell where I had the certificate, added it to the request and somehow it still wasn't working. If you know what I'm talking about and had as many hurdles as I did, my condolences to you. I... [More]

So, I'm sure you have been met with a similar scenario during development. You know the one that you have to rename a column or even drop a column in the database. This can be quite annoying if you are doing stored procedure based data access for your application. Once you change the column on the table, you have to figure out which stored procedures reference the column. They aren't always tough to find most of the time, but sometimes you are dealing with a column that may be referenced in many stored proc... [More]

In a look back at what I have put up this year, here are the posts that have been most frequently visited: LINQ Distinct, a DataTable and the IEqualityComparer<T> Using Database Projects for Visual Studio Custom Entity Classes Using LINQ to SQL (Series) Implementing Interfaces: ICloneable and IComparable ASP.NET Ajax, JQuery & JSON Date Serialization There you have it! I hope that these articles have helped. I have had a lot of fun this year, my first year blogging. It is ve... [More]

So this is what it has come to anymore. Everyone is all about server side paging via SQL Server. As well they should be! It is so much faster and more efficient than having ADO or ADO.NET bring back a ton of records and then chop it to page it. However, there has always been some problems when trying to accomplish this task, especially using a SQL database that is pre 2005. This task is easier to accomplish in SQL 2005 and 2008 using the ROW_NUMBER() function. The part that gets flaky is having a dynamic o... [More]

If you have read any of my previous posts on site wide user notification patterns and controls, then you may know where this is going. I have compiled a server control to bring this functionality to the fingertips of my fellow ASP.NET developers! Simply drag and drop the control onto your page or your master page and you are in business. I figured out how tired I was of trying to get notifications to users in a simple way and got tired of rewriting one on every project. Lets take a look at how it works. &#... [More]

If you look up accessibility levels on the MSDN web site, it will tell you that the accessibility of the private access modifier is limited to the containing type. I ran into an instance that showed me the direct meaning of this statement. The scenario I had was this: I wanted to have the ability to make an object read only. That is the original object however, if a clone was made then the object could be modified again because it wasn't the original object. Of course this is a simple task, we get to go bac... [More]

A little while back I came across a great post on how to use JQuery to do more efficient client side paging by Dave Ward. The sample shows you how to use JQuery to do Ajax callbacks for client side paging using a grid template. After downloading the demo and parsing through it all, I found a lot of things I really liked and even came across a little gotchya with the way ASP.NET serializes dates in JSON.   One part I really enjoyed about this sample is that your objects on the server are tra... [More]

In a recent situation I was trying to pull some aggregates out of a DataTable using LINQ. I needed to get the rows of the DataTable with a Distinct clause, but my aggregates would be on other columns of the row. The problem is that when you call LINQ's Distinct() extension method with no arguments, it uses the "default IEqualityComparer". This means that it will work if you use the Select() extension method, only returning the column you want the distinct on. Well that works great, unless yo... [More]