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Custom ASP.NET DataSource parameters

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. Continue reading “Custom ASP.NET DataSource parameters”

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Diving deeper into Windows Azure table storage

In this previous posts 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… Continue reading “Diving deeper into Windows Azure table storage”

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Authenticating against Azure Table Storage

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? Continue reading “Authenticating against Azure Table Storage”

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How to use Windows Azure table storage

I found several great articles showing how to work with Windows Azure Table Storage:

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. Continue reading “How to use Windows Azure table storage”

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More parsing textfiles with LINQ

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 ...

Continue reading “More parsing textfiles with LINQ”