Mike Borozdin's Blog

Using Live Mesh as a Free Backup Utility

mike.borozdin.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (Mike Borozdin) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:09:38 -0700

Recently I was looking for a free backup tool that would keep my important documents online and in case any problems with my laptop, I could easily recover them.

I could use my own hosting space, but I thought it wasn’t convenient to manually upload the documents I was constantly working on. So, I decided to look for some automatic solution. Basically, I need the following things:

Ability to save the data online
Ability to perform automatic synchronization, i.e. when I change a file on my local computer it should get automatically updated on the remote storage and vice versa.

Thus, such things as the built-in Windows utilities that required you save your data on external devices or network drivers wasn’t the thing I was looking for. Moreover, various online services like SkyDrive was still not the best choice, because they just provided an online storage, but didn’t give any mechanism of automatic file synchronization. I also had a look at Live Sync this service was very close to the thing I was looking for, but unfortunately it could only synchronize data only between connected devices, but it didn’t have any online storage. Anyway, I was given an advice to try Live Mesh.

At a first glance Live Mesh is nearly identical to Live Sync, however it has one, but significant difference – it does provide an online storage of 5 GBs which was pretty enough for me.

So, what do you need to do to start backing up important data with Live Mesh? First of all, you need to sign up with it. After that you’ll get an access to Live Desktop where you can create folders and upload files manually. Sure, manual file uploading isn’t the best thing to do and you can download an utility which reside in the system tray and will monitor all the changes of the files you set to synchronize. However, it’s not very clear how one can download the necessary software, in fact, you should select “Add Device" from the main menu.

After installing the software, you can just select the folder which contents you want to backup in Windows Explorer.

And every file you create or edit will be automatically added to your online storage.

Generally, I’m very happy with Live Mesh and would definitely recommend to give it a try. Also, don’t forget that it’s presently in the beta phase, so many features are to come, for example, software for mobile devices, while now you can install it on Windows and Mac.

Put EntityDataSource Attributes to Code-Behind

mike.borozdin.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (Mike Borozdin) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 08:43:44 -0700

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. For instance, you may end up have code like this one:

<asp:EntityDataSource ID="EntityDataSource1" runat="server" 
    ConnectionString="name=NorthwindEntities" 
    DefaultContainerName="NorthwindEntities" EnableDelete="True" 
    EnableInsert="True" EnableUpdate="True" EntitySetName="Products" Include="Categories, Suppliers" AutoGenerateWhereClause="true">
    <WhereParameters>
        <asp:QueryStringParameter Type="Int32" Name="CategoryID" QueryStringField="CategoryID" />
        <asp:QueryStringParameter Type="Int32" Name="SupplierID" QueryStringField="SupplierID" />
    </WhereParameters>
</asp:EntityDataSource>

That certainly isn’t cool at all. Because it simply shouldn’t be in an .aspx file, not only because it breaks application layers, but simply because it inconvenient. It clutters .aspx files which should be templates only. What if a designer meets code like this? What if accidently change something?

Instead it’s reasonable to move all these lines of code to code-behind.

So, in your .aspx file you just leave this declaration:

<asp:EntityDataSource ID="dsProducts" runat="server" />

While put all the attribute assignments to code-behind:

NorthwindEntities db = new NorthwindEntities();

dsProducts.ConnectionString = db.Connection.ConnectionString;
dsProducts.DefaultContainerName = "NorthwindEntities";
dsProducts.EntitySetName = "Products";
dsProducts.Include = "Categories, Suppliers";

dsProducts.EnableUpdate = true;
dsProducts.EnableInsert = true;
dsProducts.EnableDelete = true;
dsProducts.AutoGenerateWhereClause = true;

dsProducts.WhereParameters.Add(new QueryStringParameter("CategoryID", TypeCode.Int32, "CategoryID"));
dsProducts.WhereParameters.Add(new QueryStringParameter("SupplierD", TypeCode.Int32, "SupplierID"));

In fact, the same technique applies to any other data source control, like LinqDataSource or even ObjectDataSource.

CSS Class Names Instead of ASP.NET Client IDs

mike.borozdin.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (Mike Borozdin) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:32:45 -0700

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. But usually an ID looks like something like this: “ctl00_contentBody_txtStreet”. There are several methods for overcoming that difficulty explained here. However they require writing additional code or even creating your own controls inherited from the original ones.

But there is one simply but yet dirty way of addressing HTML elements rendered by ASP.NET. Do you remember that you can assign the CssClass attribute to any server control? Do you remember the jQuery selector that allows you to retrieve the elements with the specified CSS class? So, we can use it!

The pattern is simple:

<asp:TextBox ID="txtStreet" runat="server" CssClass="txtStreet" />

You just add the CssClass attribute and give it a unique value.

Then you can retrieve the value of the element or perform any other manipulation with jQuery:

alert($('.txtStreet').val());

Pretty simple. Although you must remember that it can take some time in case you have a long page because it will look through all the HTML tags to find the one with the given class name. At the same time for fast execution you can specify which elements to look for, you can simply add a tag name before, for instance “input” or a jQuery attribute – “:input”:

alert($('input.txtStreet').val());

Multiple E-mail Accounts in Outlook 2007

mike.borozdin.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (Mike Borozdin) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 09:25:40 -0700

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 is an indeed great application. But when it comes to adding a new e-mail account one can simply feel frustrated, simply because every message received from that account will still be stored in the default account. I remember I was having a hard time after switching from Mozilla Thunderbird to Outlook when adding my e-mail accounts.

Hopefully, there is a workaround – you have to add a new data file and assign it to your newly created account.

So, if you want to a new e-mail account, go to Tools –> Options, open the “E-mail” tab (it must be open by default)

and click “New…”, the next steps are pretty clear, you just configure your mail account.

However,a very important steps still awaits you.

You must create a data file for your newly created e-mail account. So don’t close the “Account Setting” windows, select the account you’ve just created and click on “Change folder”.

Now click on the “New Outlook Data File…” button and give it a name. WARNING! There is a temptation to give it a meaningful name like “your_name@your-domain.pst”, but don’t do that! Outlook will create a file, but won’t be able to assign it to your account for some reasons, so call it “yourname_yourdomain.pst”.

After that you’ll finally be able to give it a meaningful name.

Then, you can click Ok. And you newly created e-mail account will have a dedicated folder, so all the mail sent to that account will lie in its folder.

NetBeans 6.5 as a Cute and Free IDE for PHP

mike.borozdin.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (Mike Borozdin) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 14:50:35 -0700

Although I mostly blog about .NET and related technologies, tools, etc., this time I’m writing about PHP. I work a lot with PHP as well. And recently I got a small project to do and I was looking for a free but cute PHP IDE. I’m quite aware about Eclipse and PHP Development Tools for Eclipse, but I still was wondering if there is some other free tool for PHP. Eventually, I remembered NetBeans.

NetBeans is mostly known for Java developers as a good and free IDE. At the same time recently NetBeans started supporting other languages, like C/C++, Ruby and finally PHP. Moreover it not only supports plain PHP, but it offers quite good support of HTML and JavaScript.

Ok, what do I mean by the term of “support”? I mean a standard set of features that every IDE must provide:

Project based structure
Code completion
Code navigator
Error checking while typing
Debugging
Versioning

So, NetBeans has it all. Furthemore, it works greatly with JavaScript that was a quite a surprise for me after a while working of with Eclipse. So, NetBeans has a nice code completion feature for JavaScript as well, that will understand your and 3rd party libraries, jQuery, for instance.

Then, NetBeans enables you to interact with databases straight from the IDE. You can connect to MySQL server and create a table for example.

Generally, I feel pretty good about NetBeans. It seems to be working much faster than Eclipse, both in terms of the loading time and in terms of code editing and code completion as well. I guess I’d better draw a comprehensive feature comparison with Eclipse PDT, but I will do that next time.

Now I just want to recommend anyone who is looking for a decent free IDE for PHP to give NetBeans a try. If you don’t need to write Java code, you can download a PHP only package that is just about 25 MB that is far lighter than the mentioned PDT.

Do You Suffer From Information Overload?

mike.borozdin.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (Mike Borozdin) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 11:17:24 -0700

Do you ever feel surrounded by tons of information that you think you don’t have time to consume? I guess everyone remembers that feeling when you are glancing at your RSS reader and say to yourself: “Jeez, that’s really interesting, all that new development tools and useful refactoring patterns, but I don’t really have time for that, I need to finish my project, cause the deadline is coming”. In addition, there are also very interesting things that go around us, including Facebook updates from your friends, new photos from your Flickr pals and fresh tweets from your mates. In contrast to that *serious* news on software development, we always tend to read updates from our friends, moreover we become addicted to that kind of news, so we are constantly checking our e-mails, reply to instant messages and so on. In the mean time we still have to work and have normal rest away from the computer :)!

That’s crazy, I must say. We have so many different things that are meant to make our life easier, but we don’t work less, we don’t have have to absorb less amount of information, in fact that amount increases.

I don’t imply that services like Twitter are bad and only make us addicts, nope. I just think that we should use them smartly in a way that lets us get a benefit from using them, not to become their brainless slaves.

There are already dozens of articles and discussion on this matter on the Net, for instance, there is an article on Wikipedia on information overload that defines it as:

Information overload refers to an excess amount of information being provided, making processing and absorbing tasks very difficult sue to excessive seemingly irrelevant information^[1]. As the world globalizes, more people use the internet to conduct their own research ^[2] and produce and consume in increasing quantities^[3]^[4]. As of 2007 there were over 108 million websites^[5]. Users are active ^[6]editors^[7] in the Digital and Information Age ^[8]. As we are dependant on access to information,^{[citation needed]}^[9]^[10] we are overloaded by a large constant flow of information.

It’s pretty clear, I think. We do really have more information sources and information itself that we can absorb. And information becomes a distracting factor that prevents us from being productive and even puts a stress on us. Sure, we must avoid that and use information sources wisely in a way that enables us to work more efficiently.

Send Your Feedback about Internet Explorer 8 and Other Beta Products

mike.borozdin.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (Mike Borozdin) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 01:09:42 -0700

I must admit perhaps I was too rude when I was describing the glitches with IE8 Beta 2 usability. First of all, it was beta which purpose was to demonstrate new features and gather feedback, but no to present a completely finished product. Second, it were my own thoughts, but still IE remains the most popular browser on the Net and people must find it useable, since they use it.

Anyway, Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 is available now, which means that there won’t be any new functionality in the release, however if they find any bugs in the current RC, they will fix them and make RC2 available for public.

So, if you want to submit any bug report of feature request, I strongly advice you take part in the Microsoft Connect program that allows you to send feedback about their beta products, including Windows Azure, Windows 7, IE8 and many other products. Just navigate your browser to connect.microsoft.com, sign-in with your Live ID and choose an appropriate program. It’s advisable to search through the database before submitting your bug report or a suggestions, because it’s likely that other people have already spotted that bug and complained about it or came up with the same feature request.

Participating in such programs and sending feedbacks allows Microsoft to make better products that you will like ;-)!

Free Entity Framework Learning Guide

mike.borozdin.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (Mike Borozdin) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 02:02:01 -0700

I came across a wonderful learning guide for the Entity Framework that explains many essential and complex things about the Entity Framework, including:

Modeling Entities
Lazy Loading
Inheritance
Working with objects
Performance
Working with Stored Procedures

Moreover this 500 pages long learning guide is absolutely free and can be downloaded here with all examples.

http://weblogs.asp.net/zeeshanhirani/archive/2008/12/18/my-christmas-present-to-the-entity-framework-community.aspx

Thoughts on Internet Explorer 8 Usability

mike.borozdin.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (Mike Borozdin) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 16:08:57 -0700

Well, Internet Explorer 8 is in the beta phase only, so it may be to early to judge it and make any conclusion. Anyway, I have some thoughts I want to share.

I’ve been a long time Firefox user, even though I cannot say anything bad about IE, unlike some other people who always tend to whine about it, I was just used to Firefox, anyway, I decided to try IE 8 Beta 1 and now I’m using Beta 2. It looked very promising to me. It passed the Acid2 Test, it has the Developers Tools and a built-in JavaScript debugger. So, Microsoft intends to release a more developer oriented browser that may surprise many web developers who have a bad opinion about Microsoft as a company that produced a very crappy browser and simply don’t care much about web standards and web at all. It’s not right, of course.

Anyway, this time I’m going to talk about features that are oriented not only for developers but for everybody. And Internet Explorer 8 has something to offer, starting from Web Slices, Accelerators that allow you to get content without loading a new page, for instance, you can easily look up a word in a dictionary or find a place on the map

and InPrivate browsing. But I as a Firefox user was surprised that IE lacked some essential features, at least I got used to them when using Firefox. For example, I cannot simply copy an e-mail address, in Firefox I would right-click on the e-mail and choose “Copy Email Address”, in IE8 I can only copy the full address beginning with “mailto:”. Then, I cannot just copy the URL of a picture,

instead I have to go to “Properties”, select its address and then copy.

Brrr… That’s nasty. I believe there are some other things that drive me crazy, but at the moment I can’t remember them.

Yep, I have just remembered yet another glitch, middle-click that should open a page in a new tab doesn’t work when I open page from the favourites menu…

Moreover, there are the developer tools, a JavaScript debugger, a good source viewer, but there’s no shortcut for source viewing, in Firefox I would simply press CTRL+U, in IE I’m constantly hitting the same combination and realize that I have to right-click and choose “View source”.

Well, these things are just minors glitches, but I think these minor things are very important. If one is used to the same set of convenient features in one browser, then it’s a good idea to implement them in another. I hope, the final version of Internet Explorer 8 will have great usability and it will a really great browser that everyone will enjoy :-)!

Understanding Attaching/Detaching Objects in LINQ to SQL and in the Entity Framework

mike.borozdin.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (Mike Borozdin) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 04:12:31 -0700

LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework are very powerful tools, however as in many other useful tools there are some things you should be aware of when working with them. One of those things is object attaching and detaching. Let’s have a concrete example.

As you already know, you can retrieve an object from the database, update or remove it and all the necessary changes will be submitted to the database.

But what if you don’t want to perform additional SELECT query? Instead, you want just to perform one necessary query, either to update an object or remove it

Well, a quite logical idea is to create an object, set an appropriate ID attribute and then update/delete it:

NorthwindDataContext db = new NorthwindDataContext();

Product product = new Product { ProductID = 1 };

db.Products.DeleteOnSubmit(product);

db.SubmitChanges();

Okay, but it won’t work. The code will gets compiled, but when executed it will throw an exception stating: “Cannot remove an entity that has not been attached.” Well, in fact, it’s quite obvious, because the object context is simply unaware of that object, so let it know about the object. We just need to attach the object to the object context:

NorthwindDataContext db = new NorthwindDataContext();

Product product = new Product { ProductID = 1 };

db.Products.Attach(product); //that necessary line

db.Products.DeleteOnSubmit(product);

db.SubmitChanges();

So, if you compile it now, you will get no exceptions and the necessary product will be removed from the database. You can use the same technique when you need to update an object without having to retrieve it from the database and the same thing applies to the Entity Framework, although the code is slightly different:

NorthwindEntities db = new NorthwindEntities();

Product product = new Product { ProductID = 10 };
product.EntityKey = new EntityKey("NorthwindEntities.Products", "ProductID", 10);

db.Attach(product);

db.DeleteObject(product);

db.SaveChanges();

The List of the LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework Providers

mike.borozdin.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (Mike Borozdin) — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:10:00 -0700

If you are using Microsoft SQL Server you don’t experience any problems, SQL Server are supported by both LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework. Frankly speaking, it couldn’t be otherwise, since they all are made by Microsoft.

However, if you are using a non-Microsoft database engine, it’s certainly worth knowing if you can use LINQ to SQL or the Entity Framework with it. Moreover, it’s always better if there is native support.

	LINQ to SQL (native)	LINQ to SQL (3rd party)	Entity Framework (native)	Entity Framework (3rd party)
SQL Server	Yes	who cares?	Yes	who cares?
SQl Server CE	Yes	who cares?	Yes	who cares
Oracle	No	DBLinq LINQ to Oracle LightSpeed dotConnect	Yes	dotConnect EFOracle
DB2	No	?	Yes	?
MySQL	No	DBLinq LightSpeed	Planned	dotConnect
PostgreSQL	No	Npgsql DBLinq LightSpeed dotConnect	No	Npgsql dotConnect

According to the table, the Entity Framework is natively supported by a greater number of databases than plain LINQ to SQL. Anyway, if you cannot find a native provider, you can always find a 3rd party one, but you must remember that some of them are not free and/or may lack some features.

Feel free to correct this table, if it contains a mistake and comment on individual providers. It’s reasonable to keep this list comprehensive. Although I wish every major database would have native support of both technologies.

Creating Entity Framework Driven ASP.NET Application

mike.borozdin.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (Mike Borozdin) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 06:44:52 -0700

Introduction

I have already written several posts on the Entity Framework where I described the power of this particular ORM tool. I also mentioned the book on the Entity Framework written by a Microsoft MVP - Joydip Kanjila. This time I will publish an extract from the book that shows how you can build ASP.NET application by using the Entity Framework and the EntityDataSource control. It can also give a glimpse of the Entity Framework is, if you have no experience in it.

The tutorial covers the following topics:

Creating the Entity Data Model by using a graphical utility built-in Visual Studio 2008 SP1
Creating the Entity Data Model by using a command line utility
Using the EntityDataSource ASP.NET control
Displaying the data in a GridView

This tutorial uses a particular database, but in fact you can use any database you already have.

Creating an Entity Data Model.

You can create the ADO.NET Entity Data Model in one of the two ways:

Use the ADO.NET Entity Data Model Designer
Use the command line Entity Data Model Designer called EdmGen.exe

We will first take a look at how we can design an Entity Data Model using the ADO.NET Entity Data Model Designer which is a Visual Studio wizard that is enabled after you install ADO.NET Entity Framework and its tools. It provides a graphical interface that you can use to generate an Entity Data Model.

Creating the Payroll Entity Data Model using the ADO.NET Entity Data Model Designer

Here are the tables of the 'Payroll' database that we will use to generate the data model:

Employee
Designation
Department
Salary
ProvidentFund

To create an entity data model using the ADO.NET Entity Data Model Designer, follow these simple steps:

Open Visual Studio.NET and create a solution for a new web application project as seen below and save with a name.
Switch to the Solution Explorer, right click and click on Add New Item as seen in the following screenshot:
Next, select ADO.NET Entity Data Model from the list of the templates displayed as shown in the following screenshot:
Name the Entity Data Model PayrollModel and click on Add.
Select Generate from database from the Entity Data Model Wizard as shown in the following screenshot:

Note that you can also use the Empty model template to create the Entity Data Model yourself.

If you select the Empty Data Model template and click on next, the following screen appears:

As you can see from the above figure, you can use this template to create the Entity Data Model yourself. You can create the Entity Types and their relationships manually by dragging items from the toolbox. We will not use this template in our discussion here. So, let's get to the next step.
Click on Next in the Entity Data Model Wizard window shown earlier.
The modal dialog box will now appear and prompts you to choose your connection as shown in the following figure:
Click on New Connection Now you will need to specify the connection properties and parameters as shown in the following figure:

We will use a dot to specify the database server name. This implies that we will be using the database server of the localhost, which is the current system in use.
After you specify the necessary user name, password, and the server name, you can test your connection using the Test Connection button. When you do so, the message Test connection succeeded gets displayed in the message box as shown in the previous figure.

When you click on OK on the Test connection dialog box, the following screen appears:

Note the Entity Connection String generated automatically. This connection string will be saved in the ConnectionStrings section of your application's web.config file. This is how it will look like:

<connectionStrings> 
<add name="PayrollEntities" connectionString="metadata=res:// *;
provider=System.Data.SqlClient;provider connection string=&quot;
Data Source=.;Initial Catalog=Payroll;User ID=sa;Password=joydip1@3;
MultipleActiveResultSets=True&quot;" providerName="System.Data.EntityClient" /> 
</connectionStrings>

When you click on Next in the previous figure, the following screen appears:
Expand the Tables node and specify the database objects that you require in the Entity Data Model to be generated as shown in the following figure:
Click on Finish to generate the Entity Data Model.

Here is the output displayed in the Output Window while the Entity Data Model is being generated:

Your Entity Data Model has been generated and saved in a file named PayrollModel.edmx. We are done creating our first Entity Data Model using the ADO.NET Entity Data Model Designer tool.

When you open the Payroll Entity Data Model that we just created in the designer view, it will appear as shown in the following figure:

Note how the Entity Types in the above model are related to one another. These relationships have been generated automatically by the Entity Data Model Designer based on the relationships between the tables of the Payroll database.

In the next section, we will learn how we can create an Entity Data Model using the EdmGen.exe command line tool.

Creating the Payroll Data Model Using the EdmGen Tool

We will now take a look at how to create a data model using the Entity Data Model generation tool called EdmGen.

The EdmGen.exe command line tool can be used to do one or more of the following:

Generate the .cdsl, .msl, and .ssdl files as part of the Entity Data Model
Generate object classes from a .csdl file
Validate an Entity Data Model

The EdmGen.exe command line tool generates the Entity Data Model as a set of three files: .csdl, .msl, and .ssdl. If you have used the ADO.NET Entity Data Model Designer to generate your Entity Data Model, the .edmx file generated will contain the CSDL, MSL, and the SSDL sections. You will have a single .edmx file that bundles all of these sections into it. On the other hand, if you use the EdmGen.exe tool to generate the Entity Data Model, you would find three distinctly separate files with .csdl, .msl or .ssdl extensions.

Here is a list of the major options of the EdmGen.exe command line tool:

Option	Description
/help	Use this option to display help on all the possible options of this tool. The short form is /?
/language:CSharp	Use this option to generate code using C# language
/language:VB	Use this option to generate code using VB language
/provider:<string>	Use this option to specify the name of the ADO.NET data provider that you would like to use.
/connectionstring: <connection string>	Use this option to specify the connection string to be used to connect to the database
/namespace:<string>	Use this option to specify the name of the namespace
/mode:FullGeneration	Use this option to generate your CSDL, MSL, and SSDL objects from the database schema
/mode:EntityClassGeneration	Use this option to generate your entity classes from a given CSDL file
/mode:FromSsdlGeneration	Use this option to generate MSL, CSDL, and Entity Classes from a given SSDL file
/mode:ValidateArtifacts	Use this option to validate the CSDL, SSDL, and MSL files
/mode:ViewGeneration	Use this option to generate mapping views from the CSDL, SSDL, and MSL files

Learn to build a better data access layer with the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services

Clear and concise guide to the ADO.NET Entity Framework with plentiful code examples
Create Entity Data Models from your database and use them in your applications
Learn about the Entity Client data provider and create statements in Entity SQL
Learn about ADO.NET Data Services and how they work with the Entity Framework

http://www.PacktPub.com/entity-framework-tutorial/book

Note that you basically need to pass the connection string, specify the mode, and also the project name of the artifact files (.csdl, .msl, and the .ssdl files) to be created. To create the Entity Data Model for our database, open a command window and type in the following:

edmgen /mode:fullgeneration /c:"Data Source=.;Initial Catalog=Payroll;User ID=sa;
Password=joydip1@3;" /p:Payroll

This will create a full ADO.NET Entity Data Model for our database. The output is shown in the following figure:

You can now see the list of the files that have been generated:

You can validate the Payroll Entity Data Model that was just created, using the ValidateArtifacts option of the EdmGen command line tool as shown below:

EdmGen /mode:ValidateArtifacts /inssdl:Payroll.ssdl /inmsl:Payroll.msl /incsdl:Payroll.csdl

When you execute the above command, the output will be similar to what is shown in the following figure:

As you can see in the previous figure, there are no warnings or errors displayed. So, our Entity Data Model is perfect.

The section that follows discusses the new Entity Data Source control which was introduced as part of the Visual Studio.NET 2008 SP1 release.

The ADO.NET Entity Data Source Control

Data controls are those that can be bound to data from external data sources. These data sources may include databases, XML files, or even flat files. ASP.NET 2.0 introduced some data source controls with a powerful data binding technique so the need for writing lengthy code for binding data to data controls has been eliminated.

In ASP.NET, the term Data Binding implies binding the controls to data retrieved from a data source and providing a read or write connectivity between these controls and the data that they are bound to.

The Entity Data Source control is an example of a data control that is included as part of the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 release and can be used to bind data retrieved from an Entity Data Model to the data bound controls of ASP.NET. If you have installed Visual Studio 2008 SP1, you can see the EntityDataSource control listed in the Data section of your toolbox.

If you cannot locate the EntityDataSource control in the toolbox, follow these steps:

Right-click on the Toolbox and select the Choose Items option as shown in the following figure:
From the list of the components displayed, scroll down to locate the EntityDataSource in the .NET Framework Components tab. Refer to the following figure:
Now, check the checkbox next to the EntityDataSource component and click on OK.

The ADO.NET Entity Data Source control is now added to your toolbox as shown in the following figure:

If the EntityDataSource component is not listed in the list of the componentsdisplayed in the Choose Toolbox Items window, you will have to add it manually. To do this, click on the Browse button in the Choose Toolbox Items window, locate theSystem.Web.Entity.dll in the folder in your system where Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 has been installed and click on OK.

Implementing Our First Application Using the Entity Framework

In this section, we will learn how to use the Entity Data Model and the Entity Data Source Control to implement our first program using the Entity Framework. We will use a GridView control to display bound data.

Refer to the solution we created earlier using the Entity Data Model Designer. Now, follow these steps:

Drag and drop an Entity Data Source control from the toolbox onto your Default.aspx web form.
Now, click on the Configure Data Source option to specify the data source. Refer to the following figure:
Specify the Connection String and DefaultContainerName and then click on Next.
Specify the fields you would want to retrieve from the database table and click on Finish when done.
Now, drag and drop a GridView control from the toolbox onto the Default.aspx web form as seen in the following figure:
Next, use the Choose Data Source option of the GridView control to associate its data source with the Entity Data Source control we created earlier. Refer to the following figure:

Here is how the markup code of the GridView control looks with its templates defined. Note how the DataSourceID of the GridView control has been associated with the Entity Data Source control we created earlier.

<asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="False" DataKeyNames="EmployeeID" 
DataSourceID="SqlDataSource1" BorderColor="Black" BorderStyle="Solid" Width="400px"> 
<Columns> 
<asp:BoundField DataField="EmployeeID" HeaderText="Employee ID" ReadOnly="True" 
SortExpression="EmployeeID" /> 
<asp:BoundField DataField="FirstName" HeaderText="First Name" SortExpression="FirstName" /> 
<asp:BoundField DataField="LastName" HeaderText="Last Name" SortExpression="LastName" /> 
<asp:BoundField DataField="Address" HeaderText="Address" SortExpression="Address" /> 
</Columns>
</asp:GridView>

We are done! When you execute the application, your output should be similar to what is shown in the following figure:

Learn to build a better data access layer with the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services

Clear and concise guide to the ADO.NET Entity Framework with plentiful code examples
Create Entity Data Models from your database and use them in your applications
Learn about the Entity Client data provider and create statements in Entity SQL
Learn about ADO.NET Data Services and how they work with the Entity Framework

http://www.PacktPub.com/entity-framework-tutorial/book

About the Author

Joydip Kanjilal is a Microsoft MVP in ASP.NET. He has over 12 years of industry experience in IT with more than 6 years in Microsoft .NET and its related technologies. He has authored many articles for some of the most reputable sites like,www.asptoday.com, www.devx.com, www.aspalliance.com, www.aspnetpro.com, www.sql-server-performance.com, www.sswug.com, etc. Several of these articles have been featured at www.asp.net—Microsoft's Official Site on ASP.NET. Joydip was also a community credit winner at www.community-credit.com a number of times.

He is currently working as a Senior Consultant in a reputable company in Hyderabad, INDIA. He has years of experience in designing and architecting solutions for various domains. His technical strengths include C, C++, VC++, Java, C#, Microsoft .NET, Ajax, Design Patterns, SQL Server, Operating Systems, and Computer Architecture. Joydip blogs at http://aspadvice.com/blogs/joydip and spends most of his time reading books, blogs, and writing books and articles. His hobbies include watching cricket and soccer and playing chess.

Spammers Hit Trackbacks

mike.borozdin.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (Mike Borozdin) — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 05:52:46 -0700

It’s really sad, but true. Spammers hit trackbacks. Recently, you could prevent spam in comments by enforcing registration or adding a CAPTCHA or by simply enabling comment moderation. Now it’s getting harder and harder. Spammers post trackbacks links that lead people to their scummy web sites, most of them are porn web sites. In fact, I don’t think they are going to attract visitors to their web sites in this way, instead they are trying to increase their PageRank, I thinkl.

I’ve been blogging for about a half of a year. Everybody can comment on my posts, however comments have to be approved by me first, but I have never forced people to register or pass a CAPTCHA and I don’t remember receiving any spam posts until the recent times, when some Busby SEO Test started posting comments. I must admit it was a pretty clever bot, but it still generated scum comments.

Anyway, the amount of spam was pretty tolerable besides it has never gone approved. But everything changes. In the past two days, I’ve been getting spam posts disguised as trackbacks that is really nasty, because trackbacks don’t need to be approved, they become visible to visitors after they get posted.

It’s really unpleasant that such a useful service as the trackback can get a bad reputation because of the spam abuse.

After Googling for a while, I found out that this problem isn’t a new one, I came across the mentions of it that dated back to 2005, this basically means that I just didn’t face it, because I wasn’t a blogger.

So, it’s crucial to prevent trackback spamming, I wonder if anybody knows a good solutions that works with BlogEngine.NET 1.4.5. It’s also interesting to know who anyone fights with the trackback spam.

Merry Christmas!

mike.borozdin.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (Mike Borozdin) — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 02:29:26 -0700

It’s the Christmas day today, so I want to congratulate everyone! Be happy :)!

Learning Entity Framework

mike.borozdin.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (Mike Borozdin) — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 02:04:23 -0700

I suppose you have already heard about the Entity Framework, but probably didn’t have a chance to try it in action. So, you want to learn it. Of course, you can start with MSDN that is indeed is the number one resource .NET developers, you can also find a dozen of tutorials on the Net, but you know it’s always pleasant to have a paper book or perhaps its electronic versions that you can read everywhere, not only in front of your computer.

So, I can recommend you a book that will help you start working with the Entity Framework straight away. The book has a simple title of “Entity Framework Tutorial” that suggests that it focuses strictly on practical appliance of the Entity Framework and contains many samples.

That is true. You’ll find a lot of useful samples in this book. In fact, you should really treat the book as a big tutorial that you usually find in the Internet, but this time it’s big enough to cover the most aspects of the Entity Framework and be published as a book.

It is written by Joydip Kanjilal – Microsoft MVP in ASP.NET who is known by his numerous publications on the reputable developers web sites, like www.aspnettoday, www.devx.com, www.aspalliance.com and many others. “Entity Framework Tutorial” is written in plain English and the book is generally not very long, just 228 pages, but is is enough to get started with the Entity Framework.

The book covers the essential topic including the following:

The Entity Framework Architecture
Mapping
Working with Stored Procedures
Ways of querying for data
- Entity SQL
- LINQ To SQL
Object Service Layer and CRUD operations
Finally, there is an example of building an ASP.NET application with the Entity Framework
It also gives an introduction to ADO.NET Data Services

This is a good book in general, although it doesn’t provide the in-depth review of Entity Framework that you can still find on MSDN, instead “Entity Framework Tutorial” enables you to try and realize the power of the Entity Framework.

You can buy the book on the official web site of Packt Publishing.