So I was stuck in a scenario where I needed to have multiple DetailsViews run an update command at the same time. I thought through it in my head saying to myself, "How do I click two update buttons at once?". Wouldn't it be nice if I could have a single button click event and have both DetailsView controls update at the same time? I tried simply calling the .Update() method of the ObjectDataSouce controls they were bound to and it didn't work. So I had one last thought, wouldn't it ... [More]

Ok, I ran into a major problem not so long ago. This problem stemmed from a DataObject that had a child object within it, here in referred to as a "complex object". When I put an ObjectDataSource on my page and bound to my business layer with my complex DataObject, for some reason only the simple properties would show up. Simple properties being those that are passed by value and of a .NET system type. My custom typed property never shows up in my data bound control. Hmmmmm...   ... [More]

Lately, I have been having to deal with finding ASP.NET Ajax when creating server controls. It is actually quite simple to do, and I think that if you are going to be coding server controls for ASP.NET you should definitely know how to do it. So in this post, we will go through embedding a javascript file into your assembly and then registering it to the page. Then I will show you how to find out if ASP.NET Ajax is loaded during the script registration and also how to find out if ASP.NET Ajax is loaded in... [More]

Some of you may have read my previous post Creating a Simple Site Wide User Notification Pattern. Upon a revision round of thinking, I thought it may be better to actually have a server control. This would offer some significant advantages, the biggest one being that we could drop the BaseMasterPage. Having the control be a strongly typed server control, we could find it on the page by it's type. We would also only have one place to go to maintain the code, rather than digging through a user controls ... [More]

Have you ever worked on a project that had a ton of Javascript in it? Not only that, but let me add that the project also made no good use of a Javascript framework. A lot of times when working in a project rich in Javascript, I find functions just defined all over the place without any rhyme or reason. Sometimes it is hard to judge if you are re-defining a function or not. This can get quite hairy, especially without the use of a tool that supports Javascript intellisense such as Visual Studio 2008. If y... [More]

A friend of mine was showing me about some common interfaces and some good use cases for them the other day. A discussion arose of how to accurately create a deep copy of an object and the best way to go about it. Shortly after that discussion we got into the Sort() method and how to dictate how that method will sort your objects. This is when he spilled into telling me all about these common interfaces. So I decided to try to put together a good sample of these and the best way I could gather to implemen... [More]