All about the Microsoft way

Some things are too much like magic commandName="select"

2006-10-27T09:51:00.000-06:00

I had to use commandName="select" as a magic keyword in a detailsView to get the updated info from a gridView. This was a painful lesson that took me several hours to figure out. It wasn't documented anywhere that I could find and I was only able to find it in a code example. These types of things are what has frustrated me with asp.net so far. Every framework has a certain amount of tricks that are used, but they seem to be much greater in number within asp.net than anything else I've used.

Some light reading - starting to get familiar with msbuild

2006-10-10T11:33:00.000-06:00

To customize and better understand the build process in .net applications I'm starting to learn MSBuild. This is the reference I found http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wea2sca5.aspx which at quick glance appears to be fairly extensive. Hopefully it will be more than just light bedtime reading for those times when it's difficult to get to sleep.

I hope to also eventually evaluate whether NAnt is a good alternative or MSBuild is the right path.

updating a dataSet based on an event in an asp:RadioButtonList

2006-10-09T10:03:00.000-06:00

I'm trying to figure out the best way to re-execute the sql to update the data in a dataSet based on a change in what's selected in a asp:RadioButtonList. I can see what has changed and am able to update the selectCommand for the dataSet object. I just can't find what I need to do to make it actually execute the sql and update the page with the new data.

Databinding was the key. I asked a friend and found an answer to this question very quickly. It seems many times that the simple things take some time to become accustomed to.

So I'm learning about MS

2006-10-07T12:46:00.000-06:00

I just started working on several programming projects that are using Microsoft technologies. This is different for me as I have come from programming on a UNIX and Linux environment. I'm trying to use as many best practices that I know about and learn how to do thing in the "approved" way. So I thought I'd write about this and other Microsoft and Windows related things from this perspective.

Previously I have typically used vim and eclipse as my primary editors. Here is what I'm trying to use in the Microsoft world.