22nd July 2008

ASPAlliance Times

The industry newsletter for Active Software Professionals

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Featured Article

This article shows techniques to convert data or issues when working with data conversion and validation. Brian examines the techniques involved in Data and Nullable Type Conversion with the help of code snippets in C#. He also provides an outline of String, Data Type ranges, and the different ways with which you can manipulate data input in ASP.NET.

http://aspalliance.com/1679_Data_Conversion_and_Validation

Editor's Comments

For those of you staying on the bleeding edge of the MVC technology, you’re likely interested in the release of ASP.NET MVC Preview 4. With last week’s release comes some new built-in functionality. Even in the previous version, ASP.NET MVC contained a feature called Filter Interceptors. This extensibility was built in, but there were not any pre-built filters to use. These filters are used like class or method attributes, but they give functionality similar to some page directives and more. Scott Guthrie announced this release last week, and with the release he included information about these Filter Interceptors.

Filter interceptors are extensible and you can create them to do whatever you want, but some of the built-in ones provide commonly needed functionality: Output Caching, Error Handling, and Security. These filters can be applied to controllers or to the controller actions.

Download the ASP.NET MVC Preview 4.

Steve's Blog

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Visual Basic 2008 contains more new features than its previous version. In this review, Anand voices his opinion about the book Murach's Visual Basic 2008 by examining the content provided under each section. He also provides suggestions and recommendations to improve the quality of the book.

This article displays the development and deployment of code that builds a Word Document List by way of activating a feature we have previously constructed. Part 1 of this article series showed how the feature is developed and, once installed, a blank feature was then enabled and disabled. In this article, Steven Barden builds on that by adding code designed to build an empty and fairly sparse Word Document List. He demonstrates the differences between one component and the other, in this case the Feature and the Word Document creation code that uses information from the FeatureActivated method of the FeatureReceiver:SPFeatureReceiver class.

In this video Mohammad Azam demonstrates how to convert a user control into a reusable custom server control. He walks through how to create this control in a step-by-step manner, explaining as he demonstrates. [5:02]

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ASP Alliance Authors' Recent Blog Entries

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Sometimes you need to create reports quickly. You might not always have time to format fancy reports containing graphs. Or maybe you have to create reports that do not need graphs. Reusing one ASP.NET web page you can display many reports.

In this article the author presents a comprehensive solution to build a GridView with template fields generated at run time with in-place Insert, Delete and Edit operations with a full description of an effective implementation and usage of ITemplate interface.

This article shows how the page and user controls within the page can communicate together with a little more work. It shows how the use of interfaces or custom page classes can make the application more efficient and reduce code.

Determine if a user's Session is still active.

Store viewstate information on the web server to avoid corrupted viewstate and browser limitations.

Crystal Alliance Recent Articles

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This article demonstrates the creation of sub-reports using Crystal Reports. After providing a short overview of the database design, the author delves deeper into the report building process in a series of steps with associated screenshots. Towards the end of the article, he shows us how to display the report on a web page.

Many times beginning Crystal Reports authors overlook the powerful feature of cross tabs, in this article we discuss the basics of creating and formatting cross tabulations in Crystal Reports 2008.

In this video, Mohammad Azam demonstrates how to create sub-reports in crystal reports. He walks you through the steps required to display hierarchical data using crystal reports. [8:40]

SQL Server Reporting Services Recent Articles

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In this second part of the series, Eric shows the reader how to create a burndown chart using Reporting Services, Visual Studio 2008, and Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2008 for an agile project. After giving a short introduction and the requirements, he examines the creation of burndown reports with the help of relevant SQL statements and screen shots.

In this first part of the series, Eric shows the reader how to create two reports using Reporting Services, Visual Studio 2008, and Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2008 for an agile project. After giving a short introduction and the requirements, he examines the creation of scenario story report with the help of relevant SQL and screen shots.