First of all forget that you have Visual Studio, SSMS or anything so big and fancy. You just want to get a connection string baked up pronto. I usually end up creating a .udl file. UDL which stands for Universal Data Link allows you to establish a connection and then stores the connection string in text format. Doing this is very simple. Create a file in any folder or desktop and call it test.udl.

Now double click the file and you’ll get a window where you can enter your connection properties.

You can also select different providers.

Once you have filled in the information about your server, security and database just click on Test Connection to verify connectivity. Click OK to close the window.

To get a connection string with information you just entered just open the test.udl file in a text editor and you’ll see the connection string.

That’s it. Simple and easy ninja style.

Easiest Way to Generate Connection String And Verify Database Connectivity is a post from: Therefore Systems

A list of data providers can also be retrieved by code. This sample shows you how to retrieve a list of data providers in code.

DataTable dataProviders = DbProviderFactories.GetFactoryClasses();

foreach (DataRow provider in dataProviders.Rows)
{
  Console.WriteLine(provider[0].ToString());
}  

In the code above I am displaying the name of provider. Here is my output.

Find All Data Providers Installed On A Machine is a post from: Therefore Systems

Download link for Productivity Power Tools.

Download Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools is a post from: Therefore Systems

Visual studio displays Car in red because it cannot find a Type named Car. Put your cursor on Car and hit Ctrl + .

The smart tag gives you two options:

1. Generate class for ‘Car’
2. Generate new type…

If you select the first option, a new class is created for you in a new file and appropriately named Car.

The second option which is “Generate new type…” gives you more control over the code which will be generated.

In the dialog box you can choose Access (public or private) and you can also select if you’d like to generate a class, struct, interface or an enum. An option also exists down below to either add the newly generated code to an existing file or create a new file.

Pretty neat I think.

Visual Studio 2010 Code Generation With Intellisense is a post from: Therefore Systems

Step 1

Run dcomcnfg. This will open MMC with Component Services snapin.

Step 2

Expand Distributed Transaction Coordinator folder

Step 3

Right click on Local DTC and click Properties. Click on Security tab. Here you can modify DTC settings.

Turn On MSDTC Windows 7 is a post from: Therefore Systems

1. Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Evaluation Edition x64, running as an Active Directory Domain Controller for the “CONTOSO.COM” domain with DNS and WINS
2. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition with Analysis, Notification, and Reporting Services
3. Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 R2
4. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
5. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition
6. Microsoft Office Web Applications
7. Microsoft FAST Search for SharePoint 2010
8. Microsoft Project Server 2010
9. Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010
10. Microsoft Visio 2010
11. Microsoft Project 2010
12. Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2

So fireup your free download manager and download this absolute SharePoint 2010 nirvana. If you are contrained on bandwidth then just to let you know that full download will set you back by approximately 18GB.

Here is the download link.

Mother Of All SharePoint 2010 Virtual Machines is a post from: Therefore Systems

A good news for me and others who are in same boat is that Microsoft has released a patch which removes this requirement. Seriously, I cannot thank Microsoft enough for this. Good stuff guys, I owe you a beer.

Download the patch here.

Download patch for 64bit here.

Remove Hardware Virtualization Requirement On Windows 7 is a post from: Therefore Systems

Download HippoEDIT and see it for yourself.

My New Favorite Text Editor HippoEDIT is a post from: Therefore Systems

ClientIDMode can be set at Page level or at Control level. Let’s follow with an example of a GridView control. We will set it’s ClientIdMode property to all available options and view the markup. We will bind our GridView to a collection of cities. A city class looks like this.

public class City
{
  public string Name { get; set; }
  public string Country { get; set; }
}

The collection itself can be initialized using this code.

List<City> cities =
        new List<City>
        {
            new City{ Name = "Sydney", Country = "Australia" },
            new City{ Name = "New York", Country = "USA" },
            new City{ Name = "Paris", Country = "France" },
            new City{ Name = "Milan", Country = "Spain" },
            new City{ Name = "Melbourne", Country = "Australia" },
            new City{ Name = "Auckland", Country = "New Zealand" },
            new City{ Name = "Tokyo", Country = "Japan" },
            new City{ Name = "New Delhi", Country = "India" },
            new City{ Name = "Hobart", Country = "Australia" }
        };

Source for our GridView looks like this.

<asp:GridView runat="server" ID="gridViewCities" AutoGenerateColumns="False">
  <Columns>
    <asp:TemplateField>
      <ItemTemplate>
        <asp:Label runat="server" ID="Label1" Text='<%# Bind("Name") %>' />
      </ItemTemplate>
    </asp:TemplateField>
    <asp:TemplateField>
      <ItemTemplate>
        <asp:Label runat="server" ID="Label2" Text='<%# Bind("Country") %>' />
      </ItemTemplate>
    </asp:TemplateField>
  </Columns>
</asp:GridView>

ClientIDMode = “AutoID”

Using this mode will generate the IDs as it has in earlier versions of ASP.NET.

<asp:GridView
        runat="server"
        ID="gridViewCities"
        AutoGenerateColumns="False"
        ClientIDMode="AutoID">

HTML generated by AutoID (showing only relevant part).

ClientIDMode = “Static”

Static mode outputs the same ID in HTML as specified in ASP.NET source.

<asp:GridView
        runat="server"
        ID="gridViewCities"
        AutoGenerateColumns="False"
        ClientIDMode="Static">

Static Mode is not the best for controls such as GridView or any other data control which displays lists of data. As you can see above that all span tags have same IDs. Static Mode is best to be used with other common controls or User Controls.

ClientIDMode = “Predictable”

Predictable mode concatenates the ID of parent control with the bound value supplied by assigning ClientIDRowSuffix property.

<asp:GridView
        runat="server"
        ID="gridViewCities"
        AutoGenerateColumns="False"
        ClientIDMode="Predictable"
        ClientIDRowSuffix="Name">

Here we see that our span elements have been named by concatenating the name of GridView + value of Name property. Rather than setting ClientIDRowSuffix to Name property a better candidate would have been an ID property which could be some sort of unique field. But you get the idea, right?

ClientIDMode = “Inherit”

Inherit is the default mode for all controls. Assigning this mode a control will use the same setting as its parent control. This gives us an idea that we can have different settings for parent and children. Here we are setting ClientIDMode for our first label to be static while the GridView is using AutoID.

<asp:GridView runat="server" ID="gridViewCities" AutoGenerateColumns="False" 

  ClientIDMode="AutoID">
  <Columns>
    <asp:TemplateField>
      <ItemTemplate>
        <asp:Label runat="server" ID="Label1" Text='<%# Bind("Name") %>' 

          ClientIDMode="Static" />
      </ItemTemplate>
    </asp:TemplateField>
    <asp:TemplateField>
      <ItemTemplate>
        <asp:Label runat="server" ID="Label2" Text='<%# Bind("Country") %>' />
      </ItemTemplate>
    </asp:TemplateField>
  </Columns>
</asp:GridView>

We see that our first span uses static client ID but the second span uses inherited scheme for client ID.

Conclusion

In this post we saw a new feature of ASP.NET 4 which let’s you customize IDs generated in HTML elements. This feature is useful when we need to access controls from client scripts. ASP.NET has been lacking such a feature. Not any more.

Working With Client ID In ASP.NET 4 is a post from: Therefore Systems

1. Managed Languages
2. ASP.NET 4.0
3. Data Platform
4. WCF & WF
5. Parallel Computing
6. ALM

Link to Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework Training Course.

Learn .NET 4.0 And Visual Studio 2010 On Channel 9 is a post from: Therefore Systems