Must have been one of the issues I left on a plane somewhere. :doh: Seemed like every article and blog post I read was written by a an "architecture astronaut". Every so often I start feeling like I'm behind the technology curve so far that I'm going to end up obsolete. Then I go look at the leading (frequently bleeding) edge and go back to the comfortable middle and wait for other people to see if something actually makes sense in the real world. Just call me Mort. :laugh:

Interesting rant. For me it's all about being pragmatic. This isn't for a service, it's an intranet application. I could care less about the politics and motivations behind the tech, I simply want to get the project done and move onto the next. With a respite from pressing deadlines for once, I took the time to look at new tech. One of the requirements of this contract is a resource scheduling feature. The Customer has 1000's of locations and wants a web app with zero client deployment requirements. Wants drag and drop event scheduling, inline editing, "Like google calendar". Telerik RadScheduler can give me the majority of that for near free in terms of development hours if I use WebForms, or I can spend days/weeks in javascript hell. While I might have liked to have made use of "better" tech, it's not worth the cost to me or the customer.

Agreed. WebForms does make it easy to throw something together quickly and then try to make it work. There was a reason I went looking at the shiny new toys, hoping they made it better. However, with all the hand waving over the new stuff, I'd expected a better solution to the controls issue, i.e. it's still ASP.NET. I was sooo jazzed watching Hanselman show lambda expressions for creating links so that a change that would have broken a link before will break the build now and the helper methods that handled all the databinding plumbing. Then the shoe dropped and I felt like the hottie I was looking at turned out to be a guy! Like it or not, customer expectations for web apps have just been getting higher. We're not going to convince customers that in the interest of clean seperation they can't have web apps like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, etc. they've seen it's possible. But they're not going to pay to have them written from scratch either. I predict MS will have to solve the controls issue before MVC makes it, at least in the world I work in... I need a beer, is it 5 yet? :((

Marc Clifton wrote:

Software is rapidly morphing into the oldest profession in the world.

You'd have thought I'd have spotted the hairy knuckles and adam's apple quicker. So much noise about stuff that I can't think of a reason to make myself use...

ASP.NET server controls require a "server" form to be present on the page <form runat="server">. Since such server form is not present by default in a MVC ViewPage server controls won't work and in most cases will throw an exception that a server form tag is missing. You can hack it in there by manually adding a server control to a MVC View page, but there are other issues requiring a lot of manual workarounds that end up polluting the nice clean view page you were hoping for.

:confused: Planning a new project, I spent the last couple of days watching Scott Hanselman's video's on the subject, reading a lot and playing with this a bit. While I agree that it does make it simple do build in unit testing and keeps the architecture clean, it appears you give up a hell of a lot. Apparently third party controls by and large don't work. Telerik's last response I found on their support forum was basically "there is not yet a clear recommendation from Microsoft for using third-party UI controls with MVC". Ajax doesn't work easily. Basically if I want to use MVC, it appears I go back to a bare bones, standard controls only design without the rich client side experience that's become the expectation. I'm finding the same sort of things with other stuff that's all over the developer magazines and blog press lately. Sweet and sexy for a tech presentation, falls on it's face when faced with real application requirements. Or I am just getting to be a grumpy old man? I'm honestly not looking to ignite a flame war, I just hadn't looked at any new tech in the last year and now that I have I'm afraid I'm just not getting it...

Hmmm, but OneNote and Frontpage are tools for developers... right. Something's gone screwy in Redmond. I tried for a while to get information on Microsoft RMS, their retail POS platform (I do POS system development), but the end answer I got was I had to sign up as a reseller to get the API docs. Trying to explain to the drone on the phone that we wanted to write add-on products and were not interested in reselling the system itself got nowhere.

Hmmm, strange that Expression doesn't seem to be available as a MSDN subscriber download. Am I missing it somewhere?

Get it from the DataKeys collection for the selected row like this? Protected Sub GridView1_RowDeleting(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.GridViewDeleteEventArgs) Handles GridView1.RowDeleting Try Dim iInt As Integer = CType(GridView1.DataKeys(e.RowIndex).Value, Integer) ' Do stuff here Catch ex As Exception LogException(ex) End Try End Sub

Three: Napa/Sonoma, about my favorite place on earth. Even if you're not a wine and food person there is something peaceful about the whole area. Highway 1, drove it in a Mustang convertible on our honeymoon. Blue Ridge, drove through with my in-laws a few years ago to see the foliage. Should be adding Route 1 to my list next month.

I had that one bookmarked, waiting for 5.0 to come out. Have the forums and community been good about responding to questions?

That's the second person this month to reccomend XtraReports. Add that to the list of things to evaluate...

Good sound advice. I worked for a company not long ago that had a third party toolkit provider that tried to hold them hostage after an app was widely deployed. They had negotiated an unlimited redistribution agreement for X number of years, and when that initial contract was up the price went supernova. When they wouldn't get reasonable (they did no support for us, it was purely a money grab) engineering was told to rewrite anything that used their stuff, as they couldn't reach terms. Not something I'd like to be involved in on my own dime... I pretty much see myself prototyping the entire app and writing a proxy class to wrap the graph controls, so I can keep it abstracted away. And you're right, better to spend the time up front than be cursing the control I choose two weeks before delivery... What reporting component did you end up with? We're currently experimenting with SQL Server Reporting Services after having given up on Crystal. We've also got a rather insane home grown system that uses Excel to generate reports...

What I'm going to be working on is a dashboard application, and the more options the better as far as charting, however it does have a limited resale market, so price does matter. The part that is going to be painful for prototyping is in exposing options to the end user. Seeing if the high dollar components can actually tell me why they're worth all that is a good idea. Only problem is trying to shake the sales calls afterwards....

I'm currently planning a new project, and need a good charting library. Flipping through the pile of magazines on my desk and googling a bit found a lot of choices... I'm curious as to how other people go about evaluating something like this. I figure I should at least look at 3-4, but do most of you just install, run the samples, look over the docs and make a decision based on that, or do you spend the time using it for a prototype? I've gotten burned before with the first approach, but the second approach takes time, and when you're working for yourself... I could easily spend a couple of weeks on this one piece of the project if I really tried prototyping with that many different components. And do you immediately toss out packages with seemingly outrageous licensing costs, or do you look just to see if somehow they've got the secret sauce and are worth the extra expense? For example one heavily advertised component costs $3000, and that is NOT a redistribution license, but a developer and a SINGLE production server. Compared against components that are 20% or less of that cost and are redistributable, it had better pretty much write the code for me, or make customers throw money... How do you decide to spend your/your employers money?

emran834 wrote:

Can anyone help me to find out a tool which will create Dump .SQL file from a SQL Express 2005 .MDF file ? I developed my projects with SQL Express 2005 in my PC and Now I want to deploy in remote Hosting where remote sql server doesn't allow remote connection so I can use any sql manager type software to transfer data.

Just download Sql Server Management Studio Express from Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c243a5ae-4bd1-4e3d-94b8-5a0f62bf7796&DisplayLang=en[^]

I had this happen, but it was due to my leaving anon ftp with write access running when a customer trying to send me some files simply couldn't get the idea of logging in, and I wanted to go home. The next morning I was serving up a wide variety of stuff we didn't produce... In my case, the filenames had been created with invalid characters, causing the windows functions to behave badly. Download a Knoppix LiveCD image, boot into that and delete the file.

Yes, it's very reasonable until you start adding users to the Customer Web interface. I'll add it to the eval downloads though, it does look pretty much like what I was after. Thanks!

I'd rather not dsy, as it was simply a mistake on my part. I want something fast and flexible, while this required miles of setup, all the parts where intertwined where a change in one cascaded through another, so it was very rigid. If I'd insisted on demoing it first, I'd have never bought it, as it wasn't at all what I was hoping for. However, it might work well for someone with that mindset, i.e. force the customer to enter all this information before they can create a case so the system can categorize and report on things without anyone on my team having to do anything but assign the task...

I'm going to download the eval and play with it. Why I haven't looked at it yet is that it seems like it tries to do too much with the forums and such. I don't see a mention of a knowledge base or a customer web front end.