have you any wool?

I attended my first Findlay Area dot Net User Group meeting today and I must say, it was pretty cool. They had a Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 Launch Event with guest speaker Brian Prince, an Architect Evangelist from Microsoft.

There are oodles of cool new features in VS and SQL 2008, most exciting I think is LINQ. I’ve heard all this talk about LINQ in the past and just thought it was a new way to write SQL and I was like “no way, I’m not changing, I love my T-SQL”. Boy, was I awakened. LINQ looks like it rocks!

A couple of the guys from work went and 2 of em walked out with a software bundle of VS 2008, SQL 2008 and Windows Server 2008. Nice! Brian also gave out a $1,000 Expression Studio package and gave a great presentation. I’m definitely going to have to start attending this regularly.

I just got home about 30 minutes ago from my trip to IndyCodeCamp with some of the guys at work. This is the second conference we’ve been to, the last being IndyTechFest last year. I really enjoyed the presentations they had to offer and appreciate the time these people donated out of their day to cover some of the emerging technologies in my field.

By far, from an entertainment and an “I can relate to that” standpoint, I felt that Alan Stevens‘ presentation was the best. Not necessarily regarding the specific direction of his talk, but most in the way he relates to issues developers face on a day to day basis. He had two sessions back to back on the MVC framework and Test Driven Development (TDD). While some the TDD stuff was over my head, primarily because the company I work for doesn’t really do TDD, the way in which he presented and interacted with the group made it very entertaining. Not to mentioned, I’ve already blogged about some of my interests in the MVC framework, so it was nice to see it covered, discussed, picked apart etc.  If you’d like to take a look at the slides he used during his presentation, which are sparse since it was a lot of conversation outside of the slides, you can check them out on Google code, here.

I ended up winning a single developer license for Telerik Reporting which I might look into once I get the package. Keep checking back if you’re a fan of Telerik .NET controls and reporting packages as I may auction this off on eBay if I find it’s not on the path I’m going down.

Everyone else did a great job as well including Chad Campbell’s overview of SilverLight 2 and Jeff McWherter with his talk about ASP.NET optimization.

Thanks guys!

Update: Oops! I also wanted to give a shout out to Michael Neel who had a pretty awesome intro with his “Zen” presentation. Very original and it hit home for me. I really enjoyed his style of speaking.

I spent a few hours last night trying to get a Custom Validator working on a ListBox in asp.net where the listboxes’ SelectMode was set to multiple. I haven’t had too much experience with these items since our WebApp at work mostly uses DropDownLists and RequiredFieldValidators.

After sratching my head for a while, I finally realized that if the first item in your list box has an empty value, for something such as a “Select All” or “Choose an Option” type scenario, and it’s selected…… the Custom Validator will not fire unless you set the ValidateEmptyText property to true.

Looking back, this seems logical enough since CustomValidators are really used for single string values being passed in and since a ListBox.Value always the returns of the lowest selected ordinal, if that value is blank the validator doesn’t fire by default. What a pain!

On a side note, I’ve put together a simple class library that extends the ListBox control so that you can easily access all the selected items if it’s mode is set to multiple. I’m sure someone else has already done this, but I thought it was fun to do. I’ll try to get the dll posted soon if anyone is interested in using it.

Along with the online regular expression tester I submitted a few posts back, I got this link from del.icio.us which is  cheat sheet you can print out for a hardcopy reference. Check it out.

http://www.addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/regular-expressions-cheat-sheet/

Another pretty interesting blog post from ScottGu about the upcoming MVC Framework. I imagine the uses of this framework will extend far beyond simple URL Rewriting, but is still looks very appealing to me, even if that’s all it did.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/13/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-1.aspx

I just stumbled onto this gem a couple of minutes ago. Essentially it allows you to evaluate the left side of an expression to see if it’s null and if so, executes some code on the right hand side of the expression. I know it sounds trivial, but it could really save you some time by using this short hand method.

ScottGu’s Blog // References the ?? operator and how to use it with LINQ as well.

DotNet Tips // Super quick example of the ?? operator in action

Since my 5+ yr old desktop is on it’s last legs, I started using my laptop tonight to work. I quickly realized I was missing quite a few bookmarks even though I try to keep them in sync. Solution? Del.icio.us. Why didn’t I do this sooner?

Want to post your newly bookmarked items on your WordPress blog every day? Enjoy.

My understanding of regular expressions is still very shady at best, however I’ve found a tool that I think is going to change all that. RegExPal highlights your regular expression as you type it in, and also highlights the matches it finds in your input string. It’s just a really great tool to have in your bookmarks. Check it out.

http://www.regexpal.com/

Update: Found another one that’s possibly even better. http://gskinner.com/RegExr/

Please! Donate!

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/dd756ca44d

URL Rewriting always seemed like a foreign language to me when I would try to understand how it worked and how to impliment it on a webserver that doesn’t support it natively. However, I decided to try my hand at it again the other night and it’s surpisingly easy. I’m linking a few articles just to help spread the word in case anyone else is trying to Google there way into an answer.

 http://www.aspnettutorials.com/tutorials/network/web-URL-aspnet2-csharp.aspx

http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/022603-1.aspx

Enjoy!