New Technical Articles

Been too busy changing jobs to blog, but there have been 86 articles that have been created or updated in the Jasinski Technical Wiki since Tue, Feb 10, 2009, 10:47 AM (my last post). Here's the highlights.

ASP.NET

I've been doing a bit of ASP.NET lately...

• Using the GridView Web Control - ASP.NET —  A tutorial on using the GridView web control, akin to the 4 Guys from Rolla article on the DataGrid control.


• GridViewExtender Class - ASP.NET — Tired of coding the same things over and over, I developed an extender class to take care of the more mundane and tedious aspects of working with a GridView control


• Validation Controls - ASP.NET — Whenever I work with validation controls in ASP.NET, there's always a few details I can't seem to remember. These are notes on those things.

JavaScript and jQuery

Along with the ASP.NET development, I've been doing some client-side coding as well. Getting aggravated with Microsoft's AJAX controls, I recently turned to jQuery — very cool stuff!

• Cascading DropDownLists - jQuery — A code sample article. Cascading DropDown Lists are a set of drop downs where each one filters the entries available in the subsequent one, allowing the user to quickly drill-down into a specific item of interest.


• Display Current URL with JavaScript — A JavaScript code snippet.


• Display Document Timestamp - JavaScript — Another JavaScript code snippet.

HTML and CSS

• Cascading Style Sheets Quick Reference  — Just like it sounds — most of the more commonly used CSS elements.


• Cascading Style Sheets Reference — A more complete CSS reference adapted from the standard.


• HTML Color Table — A page of color swatches, divided into major color groups. Preview a color before using it.

Visual Studio

• Creating Templates - Visual Studio 2005 — This article is still in "draft mode", but there's still some good information here.

SQL Server

• Generating A Counter Table On-The-Fly - SQL Server — A Counter Table is one that has a single column with a sequence of numbers in it: 0, 1, 2, ... I've used a counter table before when having to generate return address labels, and the number of labels on the printed label sheet is determined at run-time.


• Generating XML from Recursive, Hierarchical Data — I've got a data hierarchy held in a database table that refers to itself with a foreign key (think Employee table with a ManagerID field). Given the root element, I wanted to generate the entire hierarchy as an XML document, and do it on-the-fly. This article shows how I did it.


• List Tables in Dependency (Foreign Key) Order - SQL Server — When deleting data from or inserting data into a set of tables, you have to do it in the right order to avoid violating foreign key restraints. When deleting data, for example, you have to delete the detail records before before the header records; when inserting data, you have to do it in the reverse order. This article presents SQL to list the tables in the order you should delete the data.


• PIVOT and UNPIVOT Syntax - SQL Server — I rarely use the PIVOT and UNPIVOT clauses, and the MSDN article is a little hard to understand, so this is my quick reference notes on the two clauses.


• Transforming a Name from First-Last to Last-First — I had a table of names where some records showed first name first, and others showed last name first. For example, some would show "John Smith", but others might have "Brown, Jane". This presented problems when trying to reconcile the records against an ActiveDirectory database, so I wrote some T-SQL to normalize the data. It works well in most of the cases, but it won't handle a generational suffix like 'Jr.' or 'Sr.'. (I handled those records manually.)


• Using the XML Data Type - SQL Server — Updated my notes on using the XML data type in SQL Server

MS Office Integration

• Hiding Excel Sheets from a Script Task - SQL Server Integration Services — Integration Services doesn't allow you to reference a COM object from within a Script Task without doing some special setup work on the server. This article shows a work-around I used.


• Killing Stray Excel References - Excel Automation — Frequently when calling MS Excel objects from code, the Quit method doesn't work properly, leaving a stray EXCEL.EXE reference in the Windows Task Manager. This was obviously unacceptable on a server context, so I developed a work-around.

Microsoft .NET

• Sending Email Via IIS - .Net Framework — A simple how-to article.


• SqlDatabase Base Class - SQL Server and .NET Framework — A class to facilitate data access to a SQL Server database, encapsulating connecting to the database, executing stored procedures and SQL statements, and filling both typed and untyped DataTable objects. Good for pre-LINQ-to-SQL applications.


• XML Encoding — A snippet showning how to ensure the data you store in an XML document doesnt' break XML rules. For example, it will replace "<" and ">" with the proper escape sequences "&lt;" and "&gt;" — plus ALL the XML escape sequences.

Administrative

• Broke out the Microsoft SQL Server category into SSIS, SSRS, and SS System Tables