...and master of none

I've been using Linq to SQL since it came out. Linq to Entities didn't have any compelling functionality, and it was far less supported in the development community. Nobody seemed to be using it. For whatever reason, when the language group at Microsoft came out with Linq, the data group was slow on the uptake and that left the language group with the need for an actual database query layer, so Linq to SQL was born. There were rumors that Linq to SQL would not continue to evolve, but it certainly worked fine for what I needed. The 2009 Microsoft PDC had all kinds of interesting things, but absolutely nothing regarding Linq to SQL. The language group became enammored with .NET 4 and the dynamic language features and have apparently orphaned Linq to SQL. Not so the data group. The improvements to Linq to Entities seem to breathe new life into what had previously been a "me too" implementation of Linq. Certainly the biggest news about Linq to Entities relates to the new ...

Yea, I know, boring title. But I really want to make sure I can find the code for how to do this one. jQuery is very cool. All the eye candy is nice, the syntax is excellent, but the real benefit is AJAX... The autocomplete jQuery library is extremely nice. It allows you to take a Json result from some url and suggest results to a text box. What I want is for the selected value to populate another input field (hidden) so that I have a real foreign key relationship to the item they selected. here's the html: <input class="location" id="LocationName"> <input id="LocationId" type="hidden" keyFor="LocationName"/> Or alternately you can use Html Helpers <%= Html.TextBox("LocationName", null, new {class = "location"}) %> <%= Html.Hidden("LocationId", null, new {keyFor = "LocationName"})%> and here is the supporting javascript: $(document).ready(function() { $('.loc...

My last post, you may notice has code snippets that look somewhat professional. I found a cool online tool called Code2html It turns this: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.UI; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; using System.Net.Mail; public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { } protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { MailMessage message = new MailMessage("FROM@domain.foo", "TO@domain.foo", "SYNCHRONOUS MESSAGE", "MESSAGE BODY"); SmtpClient smtp = new SmtpClient(); smtp.Send(message); } protected void Button2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { MailMessage message = new MailMessage("FROM@domain.foo", "TO@domain.foo", "ASYNCHRONOUS MESSAGE", "MESSAGE BODY"); SmtpClient smtp = new SmtpClient...

It seems that a lot of websites send users email for lots of reasons. This introduces a bit of a problem when you are developing applications because as developers we don't necessarily want to put an smtp server on our development machine and network administrators are fairly selective about the open SMTP relays that they want on their network. ASP.net has a solution, and I have a solution. The asp.net solution is that the web server where your application will eventually live can (will) have a single machine configuration for the smtp settings. Every application can override this setting in the web.config file, but should actually just comment out the < mailsettings > section. During development, however, this configuration is useful: < configuration > < system.net > < mailSettings > < smtp from= "admin@foo.bar" deliveryMethod= "SpecifiedPickupDirectory" > < specifiedPickupDirectory pickupDirectoryLocation= "C...