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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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: [...]

I use Virtual PC for my desktop virtualisation needs. I love how virtualisation works. I have a set of base images I use to quickly set up any development environment, anywhere (provided the host pc has enough memory, which is pretty much a non-requirement these days). Today I was getting settled down to do some SharePoint [...]

Recently I’ve been exploring the possibilities of MSBuild in my projects. MSBuild is a command-line tool so this involved spending a lot of time at the Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt. And having to change directories every time I started a new instance really started getting on my nerves. So, Google to the rescue! I [...]

There is an -imho-  disturbing tendency amongst developers when it comes to applying coding and style standards, unit testing, duplication analysis and the like. The typical mindset seems to be “if my colleagues don’t do it, I won’t, either”. I know, I’ve been there as well. In fact, I am still there. But if you [...]

Sometimes you discover a little gem that you just know you will be using over and over again. My latest discovery is implicit type conversion. Implicit type conversion basically allows you to convert any object to any other type. Note that not all conversions make sense. As an example, let’s assume the following Field and [...]