Custom ASP.NET DataSource parameters
February 2010
With ASP.NETs DataSource controls you can parameterize your query and have those parameters
automatically fetched from one of a few standard sources. Those include getting a parameter value
from the querystring, a form parameter, a control or from a users session variables, profile or
cookies.
These parameter types enables us to build a lot of functionality without leaving ASP.NET markup.
Still, they don't cover every imaginable scenario. So when someone asked how
to get the username as a parameter in this question on Stackoverflow, it inspired me to
write this article.
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Diving deeper into Windows Azure table storage
September 2009
In a previous post about Windows Azure Table Storage, I relied on the StorageClient project in
the Azure SDK samples. This feels a bit strange, and raises the question: Am I expected to include
references to sample projects and be using Microsoft.Samples.whatever namespaces in my future
projects?
This raises a couple of questions about license, copyright, support and more. Instead of digging
into those questions, I came up with some alternate questions:
- What does this sample project give us?
- How does it work?
- Can we do these things ourselves?
A lot of the searching was done in the sample code, since most of the other articles about accessing
Windows Azure Table Storage depend on the same sample files. I was disappointed to see that even the
Windows Azure SDK help file shows some partial code calling into the sample project. Little help
there…
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What is the fascination with Twitter?
August 2009
Ok, I know this isn't exactly breaking news. Twitter has been out there for a couple of years, but
still many people don't know what Twitter is.
If you're one of them, have a look at this short video explaining Twitter. (Link in the
article)
And even knowing what Twitter is, fewer understand the fascination with it.
I think Twitter with its simplicity has several interresting aspects, and they are different for all
of us.
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Authenticating against Azure Table Storage
August 2009
When searching for articles/blogs/samples about using Azure Table Storage from .NET, it seems most
of them (if not all) depend on the StorageClient sample in the Azure SDK. I read about
authentication with SharedKey or SharedKeyLite, and I always found the magic of these authentication
schemes were wrapped up into several layers of abstractions in this SDK sample.
Hoping that I could get at my data without it (the sample), I needed to research how to authenticate
against Azure Table Storage. So how does it all work?
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How to use Windows Azure table storage
August 2009
I found several great articles showing how to work with Windows Azure Table Storage:
- Rob Bagby's Azure Application Part 2: Access Azure Table Storage
- Jim Nakashima's Windows AzureWalkthrough: Table Storage
- Video tutorials on Microsofts Azure developer portal
All these, however, assume that the table storage will be used from an Azure web or worker role. I
wanted to see if the Windows Azure Table Store could be used with applications running elsewhere,
like on your computer. I'm creating a console application here, but the code can be easily adapted
to a WPF, Windows Forms or even an ASP.NET application too.
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Traverse a hierarchical structure with LINQ-to-Hierarchical
July 2009
RecentIy I needed to find a specific TreeNode in a TreeView control.
I expected that would be easy with LINQ, but quickly realized that there is no method in the .NET
framework that will let me traverse all nodes of a hierarchy.
I decided to create one myself.
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Mythbusters: Unit-testing
July 2009
While I believe most or many developers have heard of JUnit/NUnit/<your testing framework
here>, fewer know how to write a test and running it using such a framework. And from those, even
fewer have a good understanding of how to make unit testing a part of the development workflow.
I've known about unit testing and unit test frameworks for maybe 7-8 years. I first tried using it
in a small project 5-6 years ago, but it is only in the last few years that I've learned how to do
it right. (ie. found a way that works for me and my team…)
For me some of the things learned were:
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The trouble with delimited
June 2009
In this previous article articles about parsing files, I took a very simplistic approach to reading
a delimited file. I used string.Split, which doesn't handle the use of quotes and usage of the
delimiter character inside quotes.
Well, it turns out theres more to reading a delimited file than splitting at the delimiter…
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More parsing textfiles with LINQ
March 2009
In a previous article, I described how to use LINQ when parsing a textfile.
Following that train of thoughts further, I found a more elegant way of splitting the lines from the
file into columns.
Creating extension methods on top of IEnumerable<string> seems like a good idea! Something
that could be used like this for a comma-separated file:
from columns in reader.AsEnumerable().AsDelimited(delimiter)
select ...
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Parsing textfiles with LINQ (or LINQ-to-TextReader)
March 2009
Reading and parsing files is really no difficult task with the .NET framework. The System.IO
namespace has several good classes to aid that task.
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