Here is the second update to the utility I have been working on to speed up the stored procedure creation process on SQL server. Download installer h...

[Read the rest of this article...]

I don't know why I never though of this before, I guess I never really looked that far into it. But the other day I discovered that you can nest Eval calls for databinding. This came about when we had a need to be able to dynamically change the format of the data in a cell of a gridview. Our solution was to have the query return a column with the .Net format string to be used for the value.

[Read the rest of this article...]

If you have tried to interface with Fiservs Communicator product then you know it's not as easy as they say it is. Communicator is a web product that processes XML queries against a CBS core. One of the biggest challenges is that the documentation is not at the level it needs to be. It often contradicts its self or has the wrong information. There are also no example XML files for you to refer to. Usually you just get 500+ XSD files to validate your request with.

Well in this article I will demonstrate how those XSD files can be turned into .Net objects that you will be able to create your queries with and create a middle tier application that exposes web services to process the queries. The middle tier or RCBCommunicator handles all connection information with communicator and performs logging of the queries and their responses.

We will utilize the RCBCommunicator in a demo application that will display a customers account summary in a web page.

[Read the rest of this article...]

Recently I have encountered the "Why does my website take so long to come up" problem. The problem isn't the website, it's IIS. When IIS determines that a website has been inactive for a while it unloads it to reclaim resources until it is requested again. Now this becomes very aparent if you do any work with DotNetNuke. So what is the solution you ask? Well there are many ways to accomplish this task. A search on the web will reveal several that range from free to subscription based, my ISP even offeres a solution for a scheduled task that keeps the site up (for a fee). A website called Renegade Minds offers a free solution and seems to be the most populare one out there. My only problem with it is that it can only process one website. I already knew how to accomplish this task so I decided to create my own solution with the following requirements:

1. Allow the configuration of multiple websites
2. Allows the user to start and stop the process
3. Allow the ability to configure a downtime for the website so IIS could recover resources

Now I'm not going to go into the step by step process of creating this application but I will discuss the key points of the application in detail. The application is a standard C# windows application created in VS 2008 utilizing a SqlExpress database in the project.  The database contains one table and one stored procedure. The project utilizes two forms and two custom objects.

[Read the rest of this article...]

A simple way to add column grouping to a GridView control. This tutorial will show a simple way to accomplish this effect.

[Read the rest of this article...]

I have been working on a utility to speed up the stored procedure creation process on SQL server. This is the first blush at that effort. What this ...

[Read the rest of this article...]