WPF DataGrid has a very annoying behaviour of forcing users to click twice on a checkbox in order to check or uncheck it. There are a number of solutions proposing handling mouse preview events and switching a DataGrid into the edit mode manually. The problem with such solutions is that the require writing quite a lot of extra code that seems to be an overkill for such a minor, yet irritating problem. I propose a better option, to use a DataGridTemplateColumn instead of DataGridCheckBoxColumn. Indeed, you can easily place a CheckBox inside a DataGridTemplateColumn, bind it to a corresponding property and it will be checkable/uncheckable with a single click.

Often you need to make a full copy of a database, for example, if you you want to change something and see how it goes without ruining a production database. And if you happen to use SQL Server Express edition you are not so fortunate because famous Copy Database Wizard does not seem to be unavailable in SQL Server Express Management Studio. There is a simply solution, however. It is using the backup and restore features.

When I was writing my introductory post about the newly released version of SQL Server or more precisely about just a CTP (Community Technology Preview) version, I complained about an apparent lack of graphical tools similar to SQL Server Management Studio or at least similar to Visual Studio Server Explorer. Such a lack made an exploration of indeed promising features of SQL Server CE 4.0 a slightly tricky task. However, as I pointed out in my previous post that shouldn’t actually prevent programmers from playing with this database, because in spite of non-existence of GUI tools there was already an API released, thus it was possible to interact with the database system by just issuing SQL statements from C# or any other .NET language. However, I was wrong in my statement about a lack of GUI tools, in fact they do exists.

When I came across a story on the newest version of SQL Server CE by Scott Guthrie, as well as a blog post in the SQL Server CE team blog, I was amazed that it was possible to run on a web server for ASP.NET application in the Medium Trust mode without any installation. This literally means that finally one can use SQL for storing data even though their hosting plan, for example, doesn’t allow having a SQL Server database.

Facebook has recently released a new tool for accessing its vast amount of data. The name of the tool is the Graph API. The Graph API allows you to literally interact with any Facebook object, including users, their photos, posts, groups, pages, as well as connections between object, i.e. listing people’s friends, group members and page fans, etc. Moreover, this interaction isn’t only single-directional, in fact you can also modify object, add and delete them

Design patterns are not a universal tool that can be applied to any project or be used with any programming language. Quality code can be produced without implementing any pattern or even without using OOP. One shouldn’t think of their colleagues as of bad developers if they don’t know the names of fancy design patterns. Moreover, not any single programming project is a business application.

Finally, it has become possible to easily add AJAX file uploading capabilities to ASP.NET applications. The newly released version of the AJAX Control Toolkit ships with two new controls, one of them is called AsyncFileUpload control which was designed specially for the above mentioned purpose.

Recently I have been working on a project where I needed to make use of some geographical data and I decided to use Google Maps for that. So, in this particular tutorial I will explain how one can start working with the Google Maps API in ASP.NET.

The EntityDataSource control is a very powerful one. It allows you to rapidly create database driven application. You don’t have to manually write code for extracting, modification and deleting records from the database. Moreover since this code is backed by Entity Framework, you are not tied up with a particular database schema and can easily change it or even choose other database application. However when working with EntityDataSource sometimes I feel like I using plain old SqlDataSource and simply have too much unnecessary code in my .aspx files

In ASP.NET the client IDs of controls are often really unpredictable. When you need to add some JavaScript code that works with rendered controls you have to know their IDs