Sunday, 23 August 2009

ASP.NET Grid View Hidden Column Binding Problem

When I was using Grid View in my Web Application I run into problem where hidden column would not bind data. After searching I found a simple solution to this problem. Let’s have a look at example. We have a table called Person with columns ID, FirstName, Surname. In our page we want to show only FirstName and Surname columns and have ID column loaded but hidden.

For a Grid View component create RowCreated event handler with the code:

protected void GvRowCreated(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e)
{
    // Hide ID Column
    e.Row.Cells[0].Visible = false;
}

The code above will hide all cells in column Cells[0], which is ID column. If Grid View has paging enabled we need to check e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow to hide only Cells that contain data.

Monday, 6 July 2009

CSS References and Tools

Every web designer and developer knows how powerful Cascading Style Sheets are and how much they can save in HTML coding.

I put together several links to CSS tutorials, samples and Internet resources.

CSS Books

CSS Tutorials

CSS Templates and Samples

Web Designer Tools

  • Rounded Graphics for CSS Box Corners - Cornershop

Resources

Friday, 3 July 2009

How to get Virtually unlimited online backup storage with Live Mesh

As you may already know Live Mesh Online Storage currently offers 5GB of online storage. This amount of data is enough if you are backing up documents as DOCs or plain text files, but if you want to store music, photos, large multimedia files, storing them into one account will quickly add-up to the limit. To expand this 5GB limitation we will use an excellent sharing functionality of Live Mesh.

Lets looks at the example. We want to setup backup for our Photos, Music, Documents. We will need to create a separate live or hotmail accounts for each of them, say my_photos@live.com, my_music@live.com, and my_docs@live.com. All these accounts will need to link with main account say my_mesh@hotmail.com.

DocsLiveMesh 

After creating my_docs account login into www.livemesh.com using it and connect to Live Desktop.

DocsLiveMesh1 DocsLiveMesh2

Double click on ‘Create new folder’ Icon and enter ‘Documents’ in the name field.

DocsLiveMesh3 DocsLiveMesh4

Once folder is created double click it to open it and click Members and then Invite to enter address of your main account.

DocsLiveMesh5 

After clicking OK Email will be sent to my_mesh@hotmail.com account which will have a link to accept an invitation. After that ‘Documents’ folder will be linked to your main mesh account and will be visible in the list of folders.

These steps need to be repeated for photos and music and add virtually unlimited number of folders.

Tuesday, 30 June 2009

Free ASP.NET Learning Resources

In this post I would like to put together a list of ASP.NET learning resources.

Basic ASP.NET Walkthroughs

Advanced ASP.NET Walkthroughs

Visual Web Developer

ASP.NET Settings Schema – Reference for ASP.NET configuration section schema

ASP.NET Deployment

Additional Resources

ASP.NET FAQ's: Part I, Part II

ASP.NET MVC - is a free and fully supported Microsoft framework for building web applications that use a model-view-controller pattern.

Building a Great Ajax application from Scratch by Brad Abrams : AjaxWorld Talk

Web Deployment Projects - provide additional functionality to build and deploy Web sites and Web applications in Visual Studio 2008.

Tuesday, 2 June 2009

Free Windows Software Development Tools

Here is a list of free development tools I found useful and also popular in Software Development.
Large Text File Viewer - this program was designed for viewing large (>1GB) text files.

KompoZer - is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing.

UMLet - is an open-source UML tool with a simple user interface.

OpenProj - is a free, open source desktop alternative to Microsoft Project. It's available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows.

WinSCP - free SFTP and FTP client for Windows.

VMWare Server – run other operating systems on the same computer.

Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express - is a free, easy-to-use graphical management tool for managing SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services.

Liquid XML Studio Free - XML Developers Toolkit and IDE.

ToDoList - A simple but effective way to keep on top of your tasks.

Microsoft Visual Studio


Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition - Easy way to start development with Microsoft tools.

Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition - Easy way to start development with Microsoft tools.

Subversion Tools


TortoiseSVN - A Subversion client, implemented as a windows shell extension.

Commit Monitor - is a small tool to monitor Subversion repositories for new commits.

SVN (Subversion) - version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community.

SVN Notifier - is a simple and useful tool to monitor your Subversion project repository for changes.