GridViewGirl

Book: WPF Unleashed

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 03:42:56 GMT

Pearson was kind enough to send me a review copy of WPF Unleashed by Adam Nathan, so I thought I'd spend a few moments and review it.

The first thing I noticed about the book is that it is all in color! Every figure and screenshot is color, and all of the code is color-coded which is really nice. Not just a few sections, but every page in the book has color. I think this is the first tech book I've ever seen in all color. It deserves kudos just for that.

Luckily, the content is also as colorful. I don't do much with Windows development, but I think it's important to stay aware of topics like WPF which will eventually affect us webby folks, at least indirectly through WPF/E. This book begins with a solid introduction to WPF and XAML for newbies like myself, before digging in (very deeply) to the guts and technical details.

By Chapter 4 (WPF Controls), I notice that WPF has its own GridView control. I'm pretty sure Microsoft added this in to confuse me, but it caught my eye as a topic I should probably learn more about. I see that unlike my beloved ASP.NET GridView, with the WPF GridView, you can automatically drag and drop columns, resize by dragging, and double-click a column header to automatically size to fit the data it contains. This is the Windows world after all, but still, that's pretty cool stuff that I can't do easily with a web GridView. Sadly, the WPF GridView lacks any automatic sorting capability, so that's a small comfort. Of course, you can still sort these things with a little bit of code.

Chapter 9 on DataBinding also caught my attention. One nice feature explained in this chapter is that you can set your Bindings to load asynchronously to keep the UI from freezing up as data is bound. The next few chapters have my eyes glaze over because they deal with graphics, both 2 and 3-dimensional plus animations. I'm sure this stuff would make more sense to someone who is more graphically inclined than I. I think I need to go back and study my 9th grade Geometry books before reading this section again. For now, I just enjoyed looking at the pretty pictures.

The book concludes with advanced chapters on topics such as creating custom controls and panels, interop, integrating with WinForms, plus including audio, video, or speech in your applications.

Overall, this is a well-written book that covers a lot of fairly complex material in a concise way. Personally, I'll probably hold out until Visual Studio Orcas with more built-in XAML support, but this is definitely a technology to keep an eye on for me, and this book gives a strong overview.

BizTalk 2006 Training in Atlanta

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 12:55:25 GMT

My good friend Mark Dunn and co. are offering a BizTalk 2006 training class in Atlanta next month. Very few companies are offering training yet on the new 2006 version, so if you're interested, go check it out. Also, since this version of the class is new, they're offering a substantial discount this time around. I hear they're also adding 2 more major cities in the coming months, so stay tuned if you can't make it to this one!

--Marcie

Moola

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 01:49:40 GMT

Ok, it's not exactly GridView-related, but it is a fun time waster. Let me know if anyone needs an invite for Moola, I have 3 to give away.

--Marcie

UPDATE: I got some more Moola invitations today, so let me know if you still need one.

GridView Databinding and CustomTypeDescriptors

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 19:37:40 GMT

Mike Christensen likes binding to custom objects the hard way, but his article on databinding a GridView using type descriptors is an educational read. And, he asked very nicely for a link.

--Marcie

New Community Site: InfoQ

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Wed, 24 May 2006 21:54:58 GMT

I don't really know what an "unlaunch" is, but InfoQ has "unlaunched" itself this week. It's a new community site covering various areas, currently .NET, Agile, Ruby, SOA, and Java. I'm assuming they're planning to add more areas later. It's a neat site -- there's already some good content there, and I thought it had a clean, fresh layout. You can customize the site with a few simple checkbox clicks to just the communities you're interested in. I'm looking forward to seeing more good things from these people. I was particularly interested in the Agile posts, but sadly, the .NET section doesn't have anything on either Datagrids or GridViews.

-- Marcie

Paint.NET

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Fri, 05 May 2006 21:15:50 GMT

I just wanted to recommend a handy little program called Paint.net -- it's a Photoshop-like (but free) program written in .net 2.0, for those of who may be a bit Photoshop-challenged, but need to do a bit more than we can with Programs | Accessories | Paint.exe.

Thanks to my friend Jason Hoekstra for the heads up on this one.

--Marcie

JSUnit

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 21:56:03 GMT

I didn't realize until the other day that there's a unit testing framework for Javascript, JSUnit. I'm a big fan of NUnit, NUnitAsp, and CruiseControl.NET, so I thought I'd give JSUnit a try.

Essentially, you just need to include jsUnitCore.js on your test page, and then you can use Assert statements that you should be familiar with from other xUnit testing tools (assertEquals, assertNull, assertTrue, assertFalse). Here's an example:

<html>  <head>   <title>Test
Page for multiplyAndAddFive(value1, value2)</title>   <script language="javascript"
src="jsUnitCore.js"></script>   <script language="javascript"
src="myJsScripts.js"></script>  </head>  <body>   <script
language="javascript"> function testWithValidArgs() { assertEquals("2 times 3 plus
5 is 11", 11, multiplyAndAddFive(2, 3)); assertEquals("Should work with negative numbers",
-15, multiplyAndAddFive(-4, 5)); } function testWithInvalidArgs() { assertNull("A
null argument should result in null", multiplyAndAddFive(2, null)); assertNull("A
string argument should result in null", multiplyAndAddFive(2, "a string")); } function
testStrictReturnType() { assertNotEquals("Should return a number, not a string", "11",
multiplyAndAddFive(2, 3)); } function testWithUndefinedValue() { assertNull("An undefined
argument should result in null", multiplyAndAddFive(2, JSUNIT_UNDEFINED_VALUE)); }
  </script>  </body> </html>

Then there's a TestRunner (HTML) page that you can use to execute your tests, with a (hopefully!) green progress bar (similar to NUnit) to show the status of your tests. Now, since the test runner needs to load a pure HTML file, your test pages will need to be .html (not .aspx). So that being the case, I can only really see JSUnit being useful to test libraries of Javascript code, rather than Javascript that sits inside of an ASP.NET page, at least that's my initial impression. It's designed for Java folks, so there's a server side implementation that comes with the download for integrating with Ant, so presumably JSUnit could also be integrated with nant or your favorite build tool.

Heros

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 15:38:16 GMT

Why do I feel like they're making fun of me?

(courtesy of Matt Lynch)

MIX06 Part II

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 19:48:37 GMT

I've been plagued by wireless problems this entire week -- apparently my wireless card (Intel 2200BG) is not particularly compatible with the Aruba access points they have here at MIX06. I had about 5 technicians here on the event staff trying to figure out the problem, but they eventually concluded it was pointless. I'm finding out there are all kinds of known issues with this card, so if I have any more troubles with it after I get back home, there may be a new WLAN card in my future.

But other than that, I've had a tremendous time here at the event. I'm very excited about Atlas, which has a Go-Live license as of this week. I'm going to be doing more with it soon, and bought yet another domain name today on that theme -- more on that later.

This has been a conference where I've been really torn on which session to go to -- there are always several for each timeslot that I'm particularly interested in. I normally get the urge to skip sessions at most conferences -- not this one, there is wayyyyy too much interesting stuff. I found a little bit of time yesterday to work through some of the Atlas Hands-On Labs at the Sandbox, and that's only whet my appetite to try out some more.

After a full day of great sessions, I went to an AspInsiders dinner last night with a bunch of Microsoft guys, mainly members of the Atlas team, like Shanku, BradA, and Bertrand. It's always fun to hear the inside track (and eat some great food with smart people). And make fun of Wally, who's been going around for the last 3 days wearing T-Shirts with a giant picture of his own face.

Off to one more session now, then I'll post more later after I've digested all of this information...

Marcie

MIX06

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 20:16:39 GMT

Well, here I am in Las Vegas for the very cool MIX06 conference. The Bill Gates keynote this morning was quite good -- giving a solid overview of all the technologies being covered this week: things like Atlas (ASP.NET AJAX framework), WPF, IE7, IIS7, InfoCard, etc. There was also a debate between BillG and Tim O'Reilly about Web 2.0 and the future of the web in general -- quite entertaining.

They also had a guy from MySpace talk about the successes they've had with ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005. They have like 95 million registered users now, and an obscene number of page views. Apparently with going to 2005, they were able to reduce their web server farm from 243 to just 150 servers. Very cool.

I've had problems with the WiFi here, so I'm having to write this from the "Internet Alley", hopefully I can get that sorted out after lunch. I'm still trying to adjust to the meal times here in the Pacific zone, by my watch we should have eaten about 3 hours ago. I sat with some nice folks from Nestle in the keynote, and they gave me some candy, so I like them a lot. I also met the guys who do Squeet, an RSS-->Email thingy, Hamid Shojaee and Jonas Bush, who were sitting with my old pal Scott Cate. They didn't give me any candy though, but other than that they were alright.

To me, the coolest stuff here is Atlas, which Scott Guthrie showed in the second part of the morning session. He had a nice demo with a GridView control (yay!) and everything working AJAX-style with Atlas. I can't wait to see the more detailed talks on that later.

Off to lunch now...

GridViewGirl

XAML Chick

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 19:31:03 GMT

I just noticed (well, from looking through my referrer logs) that AniB is now XAML Chick, with a pink background and everything. Love it!

--Marcie

The Cost of Free Features

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 19:11:32 GMT

I just ran across this great post by Micah Martin : Beware the Freebie!

GridView Bulk Editing

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 00:50:59 GMT

Matt Dotson of Microsoft has a good article on editing multiple rows at once using the GridView. Of particular interest is that he implements this (in C#) by creating a server control, derived from GridView. It's kind of fun to see the same concepts from ASP.NET 1.x resurface with new, cleaner 2.0 solutions.

--Marcie

Miscellaneous GridView FAQs, as seen around the web this week

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 22:59:09 GMT

Word to the wise: Ken talks about some very annoying GridView behavior when you change the columns for your SqlDataSource.
Better late than never: Michele "das Blonde" talks about Eval() and late binding.
So that's how you do that: Ryan has a piece on retrieving GridView cell contents during an edit.

--Marcie

Book: eXtreme .NET

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 00:07:00 GMT

I just finished reading eXtreme .NET, Introducing XP Techniques to .NET Developers by Dr. Neil Roodyn. It's a great overview for those new to Extreme Programming, and who want to see how to apply it to .NET.

Even if you don't want to, or can't implement all of the XP practices right away, everything in this book is worth trying at least once over the course of a project (or at least, over the course of your career).

Topics covered in the book include:

On-Site Customer
Planning Game
Pair Programming
Test-Driven Development
Refactoring
Spiking
Continuous Integration
Stand-up Meetings
Problem/Task Breakdown

It also has a few tie-ins to one of my other favorite books, Software For Your Head. At 268 pages, this book covers each topic briefly, but a short overview with practical examples is all you need to see how these techniques would benefit you and how to implement them. I'd say this is in my 5 most important books for a .NET developer.

--Marcie

Unit Testing Web UI with VS 2005 Team System

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 23:05:37 GMT

As a fan of NUnit, I'm particularly excited about all the unit testing functionality built in to the VS 2005 IDE via Team Systems. Even an ASP.NET UI becomes easy to test now with the Web Test Recorder.

Read all about Web Tests on MSDN. (spotted via Andrew Stopford)

--Marcie

GridView Resources Added 11/21/05

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 22:43:16 GMT

I've added 3 new resources to my GridView Articles page today:

A Java Evangelist's take on ASP.NET and GridViews, compared with JSF
GridView Webcast by Ken Getz -- though he does use the evil SqlDataSource, a nice introduction to the ASP.NET GridView. Also covers master-detail relationships.
A GridView blog post -- nice coverage of parameters

If you run across (or write!) any GridView resources that I'm missing, please email me.

Also if you want to subscribe to just the new GridView resources that I add (and not my random babblings), I'll mark them all with the "GridView Resources" category: RSS is here.

--Marcie

SqlDataSource, a good thing?

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 03:31:32 GMT

Let me start off by saying how much I love the GridView control, which is a great upgrade to my old favorite, the Datagrid control. And I'm also a big Microsoft-lover, just ask any of my former co-workers, or people who have heard me speak on Microsoft topics, so I'm not trying to Microsoft-bash here.

All the GridView examples I'm seeing so far are based on binding it to one of the new datasource controls, such as the SqlDataSource. I come from a 3-tier enterprise application kind of a world, and this kind of coding just isn't sitting well with me. I don't like seeing SQL statements in code-behind, and I sure don't like seeing them in the ASPX. I'm a big fan of the server control model in general, and I'm all about doing things declaratively when possible (and appropriate). I even like making custom server controls -- I get a happy feeling when code is tidy and reusable, but I can't seem to get excited about SqlDataSource.

I can understand the ASP.NET Team wanting the feature in order to compete with ColdFusion, where everything is tag-based (SQL queries are just a <CFQUERY> tag). I worked with a client a few years ago who was moving some functionality from ColdFusion to ASP.NET, and there was some whining that ASP.NET "couldn't do" these handy things that CF could. Maybe now Macromedia will take this off their site.

And maybe SqlDataSource is suitable for coders who were used to drag-and-drop data access in .NET, and actually used all that (clunky) data access code VS 2003 generated. For you, SqlDataSource may be an improvement. And rank beginners or hobbyists, go wild with it.

But for the rest of us, developers creating real-world, serious applications, I can't see using SqlDataSource. I'm more of a custom objects kind of girl, so I can see using the ObjectDataSource and binding that to a GridView, but I think it's possible to get a little too declarative with some of these new controls. So article authors, book authors, and presenters: please show at least some GridView examples that would be appropriate for an n-tier app, and not just a Hello World, demo-candy app. Thanks!

--Marcie

Caffeinated Spiders and Web Design

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 04:49:04 GMT

No, not that kind of web design, the design of spider webs. See what caffeine (and other drugs) did to the brain of a poor spider.

Datagrid to GridView Conversion: No Invisible Columns

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 23:23:42 GMT

One thing that is tripping up some people who are upgrading their VS 2003 Datagrid code to use the VS 2005 GridView is that invisible columns can no longer be used for passing data around. Polita Huff explains the reasoning behind that change (for security reasons) here.

There are (at least) 2 workarounds for this issue, if you've depended on this functionality in the past.

1) If you're using invisible column data before a PostBack to determine something, say, during the ItemDataBound event, you can just use the DataItem property of the Item you're working with.

Old code:

If CType(e.Item.Cells(7).Text, Boolean) Then
e.Item.Cells(3).Text = "Owner"
Else
e.Item.Cells(3).Text = "Not an Owner"
End If

Change to:

Dim drv As System.Data.DataRowView = CType(e.Item.DataItem, System.Data.DataRowView)
If CType(drv("IsOwner"), Boolean) Then
e.Item.Cells(3).Text = "Owner"
Else
e.Item.Cells(3).Text = "Not an Owner"
End If

2) If you need that invisible data after a PostBack, use the new DataKeyNames property of the GridView (similar to DataKeyField in ASP.NET 1.1, but it now supports multiple columns). Note that when you use DataKeyNames, the page will automatically decide to encrypt your ViewState (ControlState) to help protect those values, as it assumes your primary key data is potentially secure information.

-- Marcie

Upgrading to VS2005

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 23:32:20 GMT

Microsoft has come come out with an Upgrade Guide for moving to VS2005

Official Summary: Avoid pitfalls in the upgrading process with these best practices for converting Web projects in Visual Studio 2005. (14 printed pages)

GridViewGirl Summary: Try it. If you get errors, fix them.

That's pretty much all the article says, and that's all you really need to know. Oh, and backup first.

"If the application you are converting is of reasonable size and has several Web projects and additional projects, such as class libraries, in a single Visual Studio solution, it is possible to encounter issues during migration. Be prepared to spend the better part of a day completing the entire process. The steps and guidance provided in this article can help an informed user to migrate most applications of medium complexity."

I just got done upgrading an app "of reasonable size", and their time estimate was about right. Most of the issues I encountered weren't covered by this article though. More on that soon...

--Marcie

Intellisense Crack

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 23:06:37 GMT

When VS 2002 was first coming out, I was a Classic ASP w/VB6 COM developer, used to doing the ASP part of my work in TextPad, so I started off doing all of my ASP.NET in TextPad as well. It was painful for a while, but it did help me (force me) to learn all the syntax the hard way, using the Class Browser, Reflector, and MSDN. It was fun to see the look of horror on the faces of my audience in my early Datagrid presentations, where I presented using TextPad as well. Finally I switched over to using VS2002/2003 as I worked with clients who were using it, and while I didn't feel like I *needed* the Intellisense, it was nice to have, and sometimes sped up the process, since I didn't have to hit the references as much.

Now it's two years later and I'm hooked on Intellisense like a crack addict. I'll be typing an email or a post on the ASP.NET forums, and if I type System (DOT) and nothing comes up, I feel naked and alone. Or in VS.NET, if Intellisense lags a little bit (because I'm running 94 other apps at the same time, and sucking down RAM), I'll type the period and wait for that next name to popup, even though I could have typed it myself while I sat there and waited. Plus I email a good bit from my Pocket PC, which has its own flavor of Intellisense, guessing (sometimes poorly) which word I'm choosing next.

So imagine my giddiness today when working on a VS 2005 project, and see the Intellisense delight appear in the Watch window:

It also looks like Intellisense got better in the ASPX/ASCX files as well. Intellisense everywhere, Intellisense for all!

Now I'm waiting for dasBlog Intellisense to guess what I want type for the rest of this post...

--Marcie

Welcome to GridViewGirl.com!

myemail@myemail.com (Your DisplayName here!) — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 06:04:29 GMT

Welcome to GridViewGirl.com, your new resource for all things related to the <asp:GridView> control in ASP.NET 2.0.

Check out the listing of GridView Articles, in particular, Scott Mitchell's GridView examples. This one is thorough (think: Extensive Examination of the Datagrid). When Scott says "extensive", he means extensive -- the GridView "article" is 122 printed pages.

Also if you're new to ASP.NET 2.0 (VS 2005), check out the QuickStart tutorials, particulary the GridView reference.

Soon I'll be adding a GridView FAQ to the site, and a Book Reviews section focusing on the GridView chapters of ASP.NET 2.0 books.

-- Marcie