Reverse Alchemy

Welcome to the second installment of my series on the SPGridView.

In Part 1 I introduced the SPGridView, the ObjectDataSource and the SPGridViewPager. The result was a reusable component that supports sorted and paging. In this installment, we will extend the component to support filtering.

Filtering is one of the most sought-after features of the SPGridView. Whenever a customer asks to display data in a grid, filtering is the first requirement they want implemented (sorting and paging seem to be so common they aren’t even mentioned). After all, the standard list views in SharePoint support filtering as well, don’t they?

Continue reading ‘Building A SPGridView Control – Part 2: Filtering’

For you who did not know yet, the first Beta of Visual Studio 2010 Professional is now available for download. I just set it up on a VPC and I must say, first impressions are good.

So I have a soft spot for eyecandy. I think it’s incredibly important that the tool you work with just about 90% of your time looks slick. Whenever I go back to Visual Studio 2003 I have to work very hard not to get irritated by the (now) dated look of the UI. What’s also important is that the changes aren’t too major. In this case, I think the Visual Studio team has done a great job once again.

And I am not even mentioning all the techie goodness that comes with this release..

The Beta 1 download comes in two flavors; the Web Installer is available here and the ISO download is available here.

Last year, on May 22nd I wrote my very first post on this blog. The topic? My visit to the DevDays ‘08. How time flies..

This year, I was almost forced to miss DevDays. The economic recession has hit all of us and since Antares’ customers are mostly based in logistics, financial and government fields it has hit us pretty hard. Which meant no conferences. But we’re not in a problemsolving business for nothing. Me and a colleague of mine were determined to find a way to get ourselves to DevDays and today I am very happy to be able to say that Yes, we’ll be attending!

I can’t wait! Azure, Dublin, .NET 4.0..if it wouldn’t look extremely silly I’d be jumping up and down.

Now to pick which sessions I’ll be attending as I will *probably* not finish my personal cloning device on time..

The SPGridView is one of the most ubiquitous controls used in SharePoint. Every single list in SharePoint (and as we all know there’s lots of those!) uses the SPGridView to display its data in neatly formatted rows. We’re able to sort its data, filter it and click on an item to choose from any options available on that item, amongst other options.

When we build a custom Web Part, we suddenly find ourselves without all that SharePoint goodness. The standard GridView (found in System.Web.UI.WebControls) gives us all the abilities we look for, but it takes a lot of effort to make it look like a SharePoint grid. Luckily, there’s the SPGridView (found in Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls). It inherits from the GridView so can do whatever the GridView can do. But it does it in style – SharePoint style.

Continue reading ‘Building A SPGridView Control – Part 1: Introducing the SPGridView’

There are quite a number of posts concerning the SPGridView. The ones I would particularly recommend are those of Paul Robinson and Robert Fridén. However, most posts are only concerned with a particular feature of the SPGridView, like paging, sorting and menu fields. So I gathered it was a good idea to try and combine these posts and my own experiences into a series.

Continue reading ‘Building A SPGridView Control: ASPGridView’

I’ve spend the last few days building a set of Virtual PC’s running Windows 2008 to cater for my different development needs. As I was starting from scratch anyway, I spent some time researching ways to optimize the performance of my VPC’s. Andrew Connell has an excellent HOWTO on several ways to achieve better performing VPC’s here.

Continue reading ‘Improving VPC Performance: ReadyBoost’

As of this morning I am officially allowed to call myself Microsoft Certified Professional Developer: Enterprise Application Developer! Needless to say, I am quite pleased with myself

The question is, what will I do next? The MCPD upgrade exams for Visual Studio 2008 aren’t available in my area yet. I am considering Windows Workflow Foundation as it does not seem to be part of the upgrade exams anyway. That, or perhaps I’ll invest in the SQL Server 2008 – Database Development exam.

So many choices, so little time..

I’ve been playing around with Telerik’s OpenAccess ORM for a while now and I am slowly falling in love with it. Since I started using it I have literally not touched my SQL Server Management Studio once except to view the content of my tables. Why? Because OpenAccess supports forward mapping. I create my class structure, add the Persistent attribute and OA does the rest. This means that I can focus on what I like best, which is programming and are able to postpone getting into the nitty-gritty of the database design until later. Much, much later.

Continue reading ‘Exploring Telerik OpenAccess: Unit Testing your Business Logic using Rhino Mocks’

I’ve been away for a while due to illness but I haven’t sat completely still.

Last Friday I passed the 070-529: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 – Distributed Application Development exam. This completed my MCTS: .NET Framework 2.0 Distributed Applications.

In addition to that, I passed the 070-526 TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 – Windows-Based Client Development exam yesterday. So I’ve also completed my MCTS: .NET Framework 2.0 Windows Applications!

So now I have only one exam to go to reach my goal, the MCPD: Enterprise Application Developer certification. The plan is to do the exam in a week or two.

I must admit I feel kinda good about myself at the moment

Today I passed the 70-536 TS: Microsoft .NET Framework – Application Development Foundation exam. I’m happier about this one than I was about the Web-Based Client exam since I barely had time to study due to illness. So, this completes my MCTS: .NET Framework 2.0 Web Applications and gets me yet another step closer to my MCPD: Enterprise Application Developer certification