July 2008 Blog Posts
The other day I started the Tech Green Initiative and I want to continue pushing it. I had someone tell me he didn't know you can recycle the printer cartridges so in that sense I made at least one person aware of something green. The other day they sent me this video which I would like to share with you. It is entitled "The Story of Stuff". It speaks for itself.
Randy Pausch, a Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, died 5 days ago after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The reason why I'm blogging this is not because he died, but because of his inspirational last lecture: Happy Living!
I was in need of using some brackets with the AppendFormat of the StringBuilder class, but the brackets are a special character for the AppendFormat. The function uses the brackets to indicate variable placement. So in the code below the {0} will be replaced with the value of the variable name. StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
sb.AppendFormat("Hello, my name is {0}", name);
Dim SB As New StringBuilder()
SB.AppendFormat("Hello, my name is {0}", Name)
If you...
I have been into the Go Green Initiative for about 2 months now. I have been watching Planet Green way too much and I always felt like I had to do something about it. I feel like making green changes in my home is not good enough and that I have to reach the masses somehow. So this blog post is the official introduction of the Tech Green Initiative (TGI). The purpose of the Tech Green Initiative is to help the conservation and improvement of the natural environment with anything that is, in one way or another, related to technology....
My colleague and ex coworker, Jay Kimble from the Run Time is starting a new User Group in Tampa called "Tampa User Experience" with Bill Reiss, Shawn Cady, and Perry Panagopoulos. Their first meeting will be on September 10th, 2008 and it will about MS Ajax Scripting by Jay Kimble. Jay usually charges for this session and he will give it for free. Plus there will be Pizza and a raffle for an MSDN Universal Subscription. It is a great opportunity to network and win some prices, so if you are in the Tampa area I don't see a reason...
One of the cool features of ASP.NET 2.0 is the new Object Data Source, which lets you bind your business entities/objects to your ASP.NET controls. What I hate about this control is that when you open the dropdown you get a list of all the classes that are referenced in your project, which in some cases in can be a lot of them. If you check the Show only data components box then most of the time the dropdown empties out.
So how do you get your business layer classes to show as Data Components? All you have to do...
UPDATE: you can read Jowen Mei's post for an updated version of this code.
Anyone who has been trying to use LINQ To SQL with ASP.NET would know of the problems of dealing with state. Since LINQ To SQL does require to maintain state of the entities and the DataContext, the stateless behavior of the web leaves us with a lot of problems that we have to deal with. One of the patterns I have seen over and over again is to keep the entity in memory (through cache, session, viewstate, etc) during postbacks, create a new context, and reattach the...
I was doing some research on Component Art's Web.UI suite and I came across this post by Milos. Basically Component Art added a new feature in the 2007.2 version to allow all the client script references to be downloaded all at once. Why? Because the roundtrip during the request for the scripts adds a lot of overhead. The problem with this is that now all the Web.UI scripts are downloaded with one big request, which according to Milos is about 300K. They resolve the size issue by allowing you to specify which scripts to get based on your needs. So...
Thanks to the MVP program for renewing my MVP award for one more year. The real people I need to thank are the people that attend my sessions, read my blog, and read my articles. Without them there would be no reason for me to keep on going in the community. Thank you all and I look forward for another great year.