PeterKellner.net

It seems I’m always forgetting how to show hidden files in the solution explorer of vs2008.  I know it’s someplace in one of the menu’s but I can’t seem to find it.  For now, the way I turn on and off this feature is by clicking the button right above the Solution explorer as shown below.  For everyone’s (including mine)  information, below are the two views of solution explorer.

So, technically, String and string mean exactly the same thing in C#.  string, is an alias for String (aka a shorthand) for System.String.  So, when should use which?  It seems that the convention is to use string when you are referring to an object and String when you are referring specifically to the string class.

This is basically what is said at this URL:  http://en.csharp-online.net/CSharp_String_Theory%E2%80%94string_versus_String

Juval Lowy has some coding standards at http://www.idesign.net that says basically the same thing.  From the document on IDesign’s web site the following examples show what is best practices (which I completely agree with).

That’s it for now. 

So, nothing extraordinary here, but I’ve finally taken the dive into LINQ.  I’ve got a great book that helping me a lot that I recently review called Pro LINQ by Joseph Rattz (his humor is a little odd, but the book is great).  At anyrate, moving right a long, all I did was right click on my web projects app_code directory, choose LINQ to SQL classes,

Then, choose some tables from my database. Then, in my code, all I had to write was the class in my c# code (part of my database layer classes).  Here is what the code looks like (sorry about the jpg, I’m still trying to figure out how to get Copy SourceAsHTML working in vs2008)

Many of you know that my favorite technical book in the world was Pro ASP.NET 2.0 and C# 2005 by Mathew MacDonald.  Well, Mathew has done it again.  I can’t believe I didn’t know it was coming, but there I was in the book store looking for books on LINQ and right in front of me was his new book with a nice chapter on LINQ.  So, it’s now mine!  It’s also got a large section on all the new Ajax stuff that I’m looking forward to reading.  I’m mostly a back end database kind of guy but I know I need to learn the javascript stuff better.  I can do it, but not as well as I’d like to be able to.

Run don’t walk.  go buy this book!

Amazon.com: Pro ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008, Second Edition

Now that Visual Studio 2008 has RTM’ d, I’m very motivated to learn LINQ.  Like most of us, I’ve read articles, seen presentations, talked a lot about it, but now, it’s time to begin in earnest.  What does that mean?  Time to get the books and start doing some serious examples myself.  I just bought the book "Pro LINQ Language Integrated Query in C# 2008" and so far am very impressed.  Because I’m a total newbie to link, I started with the first chapter (very unusual for me).  That was a good overview of the different types of LINQ.  One thing I learned was that all those names like dlinq,xlinq, etc. are no longer valid.  I kind of thought that, but couldn’t find it written explicitly anywhere’s else.  I think it’s one of those things everyone knew but me.

So, I guess I should have know the answer to why the following does not work.  Basically, the scenario I have is that I have a foreign key column in my GridView that I want to show as a DropDownList of values.  The code below shows me the values in the DropDownList, but when I update it with the “edit” of the GridView row, the value does not get saved.  Here is the code and what it looks like running:

This is just too exciting not to share with the world so here it is.  My base development system is a Quad Pentium with 8 Gig of ram running Vista-64 (recently update (with angst and worry I might add) from Vista-32).  I’m running VMWare Workstation 6.02 software.  So, just out of curiosity, I tried upping the amount of memory available to the VM to 4096 Megabytes.  I expected to see at most 3000 Megabytes, but to my surprise, 3.67 Megabytes shows up as available.

Yesterday, one of my friends who is still using XP asked me if there were any compelling reasons to switch to Vista.  Well, I’ve been using Vista for so long, it’s hard to remember what I didn’t have before.

Today, while searching for email, it occurred to me this is one of those things (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong in the post comments).  I can say "Start / Search as follows: