Archive for May, 2009

NamingContainer, where have you been all my life!

0
1006 days
by in Code Snippets, Microsoft .NET

Well, it’s been where it’s always been – in the .net framework, all the way back to version 1.0 apparently!  I’m sure I must have written some awful code in the past to get around the fact that I didn’t know about this, and I really must spend more time getting down to the details of the framework for reasons of framework nuggets like this.

Imagine you have a ListView and want to allow updates on each item, with perhaps a text field etc. in there, and you click a button inside that ListViewDataItem.  NamingContainer for the button will return that ListViewDataItem so that you can find just within that container… ace!

protected void btnWishList_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Button _button = ((Button)sender);
    RadTextBox tb = (RadTextBox)_button.NamingContainer.FindControl("txtNotes");
    // do other processing
}

the above is formatting awfully at the moment, looking for a nice wordpress syntax plugin.

A wee step backward…

0
1008 days
by in Learning, Microsoft .NET

Well, maybe not.  I’ve been reviewing over the weekend my approaches to learning, and after reading considerably, I think Entity Framework isn’t the right path for me at the moment.  So many are reporting issues with it, and the Julie Lerman book highlights a number of hoops you need to jump through on complex datasets that simply shouldn’t be there.

So it’s back to basics.  Linq, and then by definition Linq to Datasets, Linq to SQL (and eventually when it matures, Linq to Entities) is the path I’ve chosen.  Linq to Datasets may well be considered legacy code, though suite-e uses them in a few places to retrieve large sets of data (converting stored proc –> objects for 45,000 rows proved too time costly), and I think it’ll be handy to start at this grass roots level.

I’m convinced by ORMs, and ideally would like to proceed with Entity Framework, but at least the above will give me a solid grounding that I can then proceed through to something like EF with limited pain.  VS2010/C#4.0 apparently will have some updates, so I’ll keep monitoring.

On a separate note, I’m getting so heavily addicted to stackoverflow – I post where I can, but as a resource for learning it’s fantastic.  You still have a number of weaknesses (people not answering the question, but posting fast to try to get points, downvotes for stupid reasons, etc.) but on the whole, it’s a cracking resource.

This month will see me probably post very little, we have 4 large client sites up for launch and 2 minor client updates, so I suspect the hours will be long and arduous, but we soldier on :)

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