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

Do you ever feel surrounded by tons of information that you think you don’t have time to consume?

It’s really sad, but true. Spammers hit trackbacks.

Book review