I have some related entities in my EF model, as show below in the form of “Reader” and “Category”, and the relationship between them, i.e. many to many.

When it came to proucing a view and action to perofrm the Create Reader action, I was somewhat puzzled as to how I could allow the user to select one or more categories for a reader. 

I started by having a view model that contained a list of all possible categories and then looping around these in my view and writing a check box out for each one.  When the form was submitted I looked through the form collection to find if any of the category check boxes had been selected.  I didn’t like this one bit and so I set out to find a cleaner way of carrying it out.

After some (quite a lot actually) searching, I stumbled accross the MultiSelectList type, which I could use in my ViewModel and then allow the default model binding to step in and do the leg work for me Great!

So, I created a view model, a simplified version of which you can see below;

    public class ReaderCreateViewModel : CustomViewModelBase
    {

        public ReaderCreateViewModel()
        {
            ReaderDetails = new Reader();
            CategoriesList = GetCategories(null);
        }

        public Reader ReaderDetails { get; set; }
        public MultiSelectList CategoriesList { get; private set; }
        public int[] SelectedCategories { get; set; }

        public MultiSelectList GetCategories(int[] selectedValues)
        {
            var te = new myEntities();
            List<Category> categories = te.Categories.ToList();
            return new MultiSelectList(categories, “id”, “Name”, selectedValues);
        }
    }

 As you can see from the code above, the view model contains my Reader entity, a list of type MultiSelectList, which is a list of available categories and an array of integers which represent the Id of any selected Categories.

Then to add a listbox to my view that will bind the MultiSelectList, I simply insert the following into my view.

            <p>
             <label for=”SelectedCategories”>Categories:</label>
        <%= Html.ListBox(“SelectedCategories”, Model.CategoriesList) %>
            </p>

Finally in my controller, I can simply check the SelectedItems object in my model for any selected Ids and add them to the Reader Categories list like this;

            if (model.SelectedCategories != null)
            {
                foreach (var selectedCat in model.SelectedCategories)
                {
                    int selectedCatId = selectedCat;
                    Category category = DataContext.Categories.Where(c => c.id                  == selectedCatId).FirstOrDefault();
                    reader.Categories.Add(category);
                }
            }

And that’s it.  Now there is probably a much better way of doing all or some of the above, but this worked perfectly for me when I needed it, so I hope it helps someone else out as well.  The final multi-select list box looked something like this;

When I first started using MVC, I simply passed the ViewData required for the MasterPage along with every action, but even with a small site, this was a lot of code replication.

To solve this problem, we can create an ApplicationController class which inherits from the Controller class we all know and love.  Your applications’ controllers then in turn simply inherit from this new ApplicationController.

Below is a simple example of an ApplicationController.

namespace MvcSite.Controllers
{
    public abstract class ApplicationController : Controller
    {
        private MyEntities _dataContext = new MyEntities();

        public MyEntities DataContext
        {
            get { return _dataContext; }
        }

        public ApplicationController()
        {
            ViewData["categories"] = DataContext.Categories.ToList();
        }

    }
}

Hope this helps someone else as well. Certainly removed a headache for me!

Because of the move, I currently dont have a landline and consequently, there is no broadband! I didn’t this that this would be a problem because I have borrowed a mobile broadband USB dongle from 3……not a problem that is until I plugged it in! 

Once I had plugged in the USB modem and installed the software, I simply got the message “No Network”, but the light on the device was green??  After several more tries of re-installing the device drivers and a few more ideas I decided to visit a friend a use their wi-fi to look for a solution. 

Turns out that if you want to use your 3mobile broadband device on windows 7, you need to download drivers BEFORE you upgrade!  Alternativly, if you are like me and are on Windows 7 already, you too can find a friend with an internet connection and download the updated Windows 7 Only drivers from Three here.

Beta 2 brings many improvements to the table, including improvements in Sharepoint, WPF, ASP.NET, WinForms, as well as improvements to the core IDE and testing tools. I saw some of these IDE improvements at an event with Scott Gu in Manchester a couple of weeks ago and they look pretty cool.

Visual Studio now comes in several flavours, namely Premium, Professional and Ultimate and the good news is that TFS 2010 comes out of the box with all three.  Apparently it only takes 20 minutes to setup source control, bug and issue tracking and automated build with it.

Finally, another great piece of news is that this release also ships with a Go-live license, so this can be used for production projects if you wish

If you are a member of MSDN and want to download the beta now, you can get it from here.

For more information on the release visit Scott Gu’s blog where you he has started a series of posts on the new features in 2010 Beta 2.

Have any of you been using Beta 1? Will you be using Beta 2? What do you think of the way 2010 and .Net 4.0 are shaping up?

According to the Silverlight team, they are totally commited to having Silverlight work on all mediums, from desktop PCs, TVs and mobile devices.

This comes at a time when Flash is likely to appear on more and more mobile devices soon, but with the success of Flash Lite…well…not really being a success, it remains to be seen how well the next wave of Flash mobile will be accepted.  It certainly looks like Silverlight might have the upper hand here if things continue as they are.

There has been talk about Silverlight coming to the mobile platform for some time, with a lot of people for a while, myself included, expecting it to arrive in time for Windows Mobile 6.5, which is due for release in around a month.  However, 6.5 is only an interrim release until the complete overhaul that is Windows Mobile 7 is released.

So, are you excited about seeing Silverlight on mobile devices? do you think it will be a good thing or a bad thing? or could you not care less?

Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice Presedent and all round .Net Guru is coming to Manchester, UK, later this month to talk about what’s new with Visual Studio 2010, ASP.Net 4.0, Silverlight 3 and upcoming improvements to the MVC Framework!

Seating for this event, entitled Guathon 2009,  is very limited and as such you can only join the wait list at the moment, but I have been lucky enough to secure a place at what promises to be a fantastic workshop.

The announcement on the event home page over at DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper also has a funny section of “things you might not know about Scott Gu”, such as;

When Scott Guthrie throws exceptions, it’s across the room.

All arrays Scott Guthrie declares are of infinite size, because Scott Guthrie knows no bounds.

Scott Guthrie doesn’t have disk latency because the hard drive knows to hurry the hell up.

Scott Guthrie writes code that optimizes itself.

Scott Guthrie can’t test for equality because he has no equal.

Scott Guthrie doesn’t need garbage collection because he doesn’t call .Dispose(), he calls .DropKick().

For the rest of this amusing list and more info on the event or to add yourself to the wait list, visit the event home page.

Anyway, if you want to get your hands on it you can download it from here .  To install it just make sure the extension is .Vsix, IE seems to download and save this as a zip so you may need to rename it, and the Visual Studio 2010 extension manager will take over from here and take you through the short installation.

Once it is installed, open Visual Studio, where you will need to enter the licence information provided on the download page.  It is telling me that it is going to expire on the 22nd September at the moment, but this may be extended further until VS 2010 beta 2 is released later in the year.

Anyway, as you can see, I now have mine ready to rock and roll so enjoy!

Firstly, here is a full screen shot of the new Outlook 2010 interface.  I suppose I must state that this is only a technical preview and this may still change a lot before the final version is released.

The Ribbon

As you can see from the screenshot above, the biggest change to the Outlook interface is the introduction of the infamous Ribbon, with four main tabs. Lets look at these tabs in a bit more details and see what they bring us;

Home - This contains many of the standard buttons you are used to seeing at the top of an outlook window, such as “New Mail”, “Reply”, “Forward” and a plethora of options relating to email rules and categorising your items.

Send / Receive – As you would expect, this tab contains……the send and receive button!   Along with some of the more commonly used items, such as buttons for marking items for download or triggering the download of headers only.

Folder – From here you can control your mail archiving, mark items as read, create and modify your folders and run your mail rules.

View – This is one of my most used tabs.  Here you can set different views for each of your folders.  The most notable introduction here is the “Conversation” view, which will attempt to group your mail into conversations.  This is not for everyone and certainly not for every folder (I switched it on in a folder to receive Facebook messages and it created one huge conversation as all the subjects were the same), but I like it in the right circumstance.

Contact Actions

One feature I really do like in Outlook 2010 is the new contact action popups.  If you hover over a name in the from or to fields on an email, you now get a popup giving you several actions you can perform on this person, such as adding them to your Outlook contacts, scheduling a meeting, viewing their stored contact information if they are already in your contacts, sending an instant message or even starting a telephone call.

Quick Steps

Quick Steps are a set of very useful buttons on the Home tab. They include ways of replying to a team of people or your manager, both of which are customised tasks to suit you.  There are a standard set of buttons here and you can also create custom quick steps to suit yourself. Very nice!

Quick Bar

Ok, here is something I didn’t even notice until a couple of days ago, the Quick Bar.  Until recently, every time I wanted to send and receive my email I have been switching to the Send / Receive tab and click the S & R button.  This was ok, but got a bit annoying having to switch tabs every time, as most of the time I use the Home tab for functions like “Reply” etc.  Then I noticed the Quick Bar.  This handy little addition allows for a constant set of buttons that are displayed either above of below the ribbon (your choice) and by default contains a send and receive button with more being added as you see fit.  This is a nice feature, but it is quite small, so that’s why I didn’t notice it for so long!!!

The “Office” Button

The “Office” button sits in the top left hand corner of every Office 2010 application. When clicked, this button allows access to all the features you would normally have seen under the standard menus (file, edit, tools, etc) in Outlook 2007.  You can see Microsoft have spent a long time designing this feature and it works well.  As you can see from the screen shot below, there is plenty of room for each task, much more space for explanations and it just ‘feels’ like a better way of doing things to me.

The Windows 7 Task Bar Context Menu

Ok, so you have probably seen this before, but I thought it was worth a mention anyway.  Outlook 2010 now gets it’s own context menu on the Task Bar in Windows 7, which gives a very nice shortcut to common tasks.

Verdict To Date

So far I have found the improvements made in this latest incarnation of Outlook to be very useful and have increased my productivity, which is always good, especially with an integral everyday task such as email management.  But, of course, please feel free to disagree with me as this is just my opinion after all!

What I did not love though was after installing Office 2010, my Visual Studio 2010 Beta stopped working, simply displaying the message “Cannot Create The Window”.

Microsoft claimed not to be able to recreate the issue and I was quite happy to wait until another version of VS 2010 was released, but luckily for me, Microsoft have now found the issue.  Apparently, there is a version msvcm100.dll in C:\windows\system32 which is different in office 2010 than in vs 2010.  It also seems that office and vs play nice when using the VS version of the dll, but that VS falls over when using the office version.

Ok, so to the workaround……

You have two options;

1. Replace the msvcm100.dll with this one, msvcm100.zip, I took from my system32 folder. 

or

2. If you would prefer not to use a randomly downloaded dll from here, you can rename the msvcm100.dll in system32 to msvcm100.dll.old and then run VS 2010 setup and choose to repair.  This will recreate the dll.

The working version of msvcm100.dll has a datetime stamp of 6th May 2009 7:20AM.

Well, now my Visual Studio is working again, I am off to have a play!

Enjoy!

Anyway, I reached the end of my tether last night and decided to try and find the cause.  After some digging around it appeared that some people had found the Google toolbar to be the cause.  So I uninstalled the toolbar…….and sure enough, the problem stopped!

Anyway, just wanted to post this in case anybody else was having the same problem.