Wrapping up Tech∙Days by posting the live sessions I watched:

• DEV307 Starting Test Driven Development with Mock Objects   
• DEV320 Debugging managed code using WinDbg   
• OFC302 SharePoint Workflow for the Masses   
• OFC400 Enterprise SharePoint Workflow: Building and Managing a High-Performance Workflow Environment   
• DEV300 ASP.NET Model-View-Controller: Separation of Concerns and Unit Testing   
• WIN300 Scripting the Microsoft .NET Framework Using Windows PowerShell   
• WEB401 In-depth MVC   
• DEV309 Automating Task and Other Productivity Improvements for Windows Presentation Foundation Development

At PDC 2008 we got a nice Freescale JM badge board to test with Windows 7 and its Sensor API. I definitely wanted to try it, but didn't have the luxury to re-pave a machine just for this.

VirtualPC doesn't support USB (a lack that annoys me immensely, not only now, but also for Windows Mobile development), so I had to look for another option: VirtualBox. It supports USB. I decided to give it a try (VMware was on my list too, but when I saw their registration requirement for a trial version I balked).

Installed the x64 version of VirtualBox, and inside it the 32 Bit version of Windows 7. First stumbling block - the virtual machine additions. In default mode, they refuse to install on Windows 7 (too new). But you can help it see the "light":

The additions are required, otherwise no USB support (or easy network, but you could work around that one via emulating a different NIC).

Next, plug in the sensor development kit badge and tell VirtualBox to route it into the VM:

The "CMX Systems USB HID sensor demo for HC9S08JM devices" is what you are looking for. At least that's what Vista calls the device.

Now all you need to do is boot up your Windows 7 VM again and install the SDK from the supplied disc. Note that I achieved the best results by following the guideline at the end of the document entitled "Sensor Development Kit Driver and Firmware.rtf", to be found in the Documentation folder.

When done, you can try the MSDN reader demo (nope, Marbles not going to work inside a VM). As a proof, here is a screenshot of everything running in VirtualBox (yes, the light sensor works):

By the way, there is a MSDN forum Development with the Windows Sensor and Location Platform just for this topic. If you don't know what I was talking about, check out the session recording Windows 7: The Sensor and Location Platform: Building Context-Aware Applications.

During PDC2008, aside from the keynotes and pre-conference “Performance by Design” I went to the  following sessions:

• TL02 – Under the hood: Advances in the .NET type system
  
• TL16 – The future of C#
  
• TL52 – Team Foundation Server 2010: Cool new features
  
• TL09 – Agile development with Microsoft Visual Studio
  
• TL23 – A lap around “Oslo”
  
• TL27 - “Oslo”: The language
  
• TL20 – Entity Framework futures
  
• TL26 – Parallel programming for managed developers with the next generation of Microsoft Visual Studio
  
• TL18 - “Oslo”: Customizing and extending the visual design experience
  
• TL28 - “Oslo”: Repository and models
  
• TL15 – Architecture without big design up front
  
• TL36 – Microsoft .NET Framework: Declarative programming using XAML
  
• PC49 – Microsoft .NET Framework: CLR futures
  
• TL31 - “Oslo”: Building textual DSLs
  
• PC32 – ASP.NET AJAX futures
  

I was rather disappointed this year by the varied quality of the sessions, plus the not-so-matching session descriptions / session levels.

Today is the last leg of a total of four stations of this year's Big>Days (Helden von Heute) event from Microsoft Austria. I am speaking in the developers track on ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) with Visual Studio Team System (and beyond) together with Georg Drobny from MS Consulting Services. We only have seventy minutes to get this topic across, which really is a challenge when covering such an important topic. But so far, we managed to overrun our alotted time only very little. Let's see how it works out today.

It's been quiet on this blog recently, one reason being that it is conference season again. Last week, I was in Munich for VSone, where I did three talks:

• LINQ to SQL
• ADO.NET Entity Framework
• ADO.NET Data Services

At this very moment, I am at the airport in Frankfurt waiting for my flight back from the ready.for.take.off Visual Studio 2008 / Windows Server 2008 / SQL Server 2008 launch event here in Germany. It was the biggest developer event in Germany so far (7000+ conference participants), and Microsoft gave away quite a nice package of software: VS Standard, TFS with one CAL, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise with 5 CALs plus a voucher for SQL Server 2008 that will be available later this year.

I was staffing ATE (Ask the Experts) at this event, initially for IIS7. However, we were very pleasantly surprised that the attendees showed great interest in TFS / VSTS, so I switched duties to that area (VSTS / TFS is a growing business for me as I do training and consulting for those products). Hopefully this free license will trigger more adoption because Team System is such a great tool!

TechEd Developers 2007 is over, and before moving on (and flying back to snow in Austria), here is the list of sessions I attended this year:

• TLA201 - A Tour of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5
• OFF401 - .NET Developers Advanced Introduction to SharePoint 2007
• TLA324 - What's New in Team System for Software Testers
• SEC301 - CLR Security in .NET Framework 3.5
• DAT201 - Entity Framework Introduction
• WEB401 - Building Highly Scalable ASP.NET Web Sites by Exploiting Async Programming Models
• TLA304 - Building Services with the Service Factory: Modeling Edition
• DAT303 - Entity Framework: Application Patterns
• TLA305 - Continuous Integration With and Without Team System
• TLA307 - Improving Code Performance with VSTS 2008 Team Edition for Software Developers
• DAT304 - Managing Unstructured Data in SQL Server 2008: Introducing the FileStream Datatype
• TLA403 - Loose Coupling in Practice: CAB in the Real World
• ARC401 - Designing High Performance, Persistent Domain Models
• TLA407 - Dealing with Concurrency and Multi-Core CPUs with Today's Development Technologies
• SBP307 - Modeling and Composition of Applications
• TLA319 - The Joins Concurrency Library
• TLA405 - Parallel and Async Functional Programming on .NET with F#
• WEB403 - Securing your High-Risk ASP.NET Web Applications - A Case Study

Compared to last year, I managed to attend more sessions, however, there were also more duds. The last session (WEB403) turned out to be the one that earned the raspberry this year (a close runner-up: TLA403). Coming out on top I decided to nominate three: OFF401, TLA307 and DAT303.

Tuesday June 19th I will be doing two sessions on IIS7 - administration and programmability.

Yesterday was the last day of VSone, the German .NET conference featuring almost all  well-known German speakers. As I had hinted at earlier, I did three talks there, and I still owe the audience of my VSTE DbPro talk a couple of resource links:

• Sachin Rekhi's blog
• Samples project for Microsoft Visual Studion Team Edition 2005 for Database Professionals
• A Security Overview of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals
• Introducing Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals (if you weren't awake at this time in the morning <g />)

Michael Howard has all the links in this blog entry Online Security Sessions from TechEd IT Forum Available. Topics include: malware cleaning, UAC internals, social engineering, Vista kernel changes, Vista firewall and IPSec enhancements. Which reminds me that the post-conference DVDs should tip up in my mailbox rsn.

At next year's VSone in Munich (a German developer conference taking place in February), I will be doing three talks:

• Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals
• User Account Control (UAC) in Your Applications
• Advanced Code Access Security (CAS)

Two security topics, one team-development focused. See you in Munich!

Another week, another ATE (Ask the Experts) assignment. Aside from the keynote, I got around to watching to these sessions:

• ARC202: Design for Operations using VSTS and MOM 2005
• DAT309: SQL Server Analysis Services 2005: Integration with 2007 Office System
• WCL403: Windows Vista System Integrity Technologies
• CSI401: Microsoft.com Operations: Solutions for Highly Available and Secure Web Sites
• MGT310: Microsoft System Center Essentials (SCE): Technical Overview and Drilldown
• ARC301: Microsoft, Open Source and Interoperability
• INF303: How to Virtualize Infrastructure Workloads
• IAM403: Monitoring Active Directory (AD) Security with MOM 2005
• MGT320: Using Application Virtualization to Decrease Your Application Management TCO
• DAT401: SQL Server Always On Technologies: Disaster Recovery Strategies for Isolated Damage and Human Error
• SEC402: Securing your Certification Authorities (CAs) Private Keys
• WCL402: Windows Vista Kernel Changes
• CSI303: Building a Custom Log Analysis Solution with Log Parser 2.2 for Internet Information Services (IIS) 6
• DAT402: SQL Server 2005: Advanced Indexing Strategies
• MGT311: Performance Modelling: A Powerful Tool for Planning Deployments

The dud-of-the-week award goes to IAM403 which didn't live up to its level. Enjoyable as ever was Steve Riley in his security sessions. I didn't get around to watch "Windows Vista User Account Internals" by Mark Russinovich because of ATE duty, but will do so once the conference DVDs turn up in mail!

Another noteable tidbit from the "Achieving High Availability with SQL Server 2005" preconference session: the whitepaper Partitioned Tables and Indexes in SQL Server 2005.

Currently listening to the half-day preconference session "Achieving High Availability with SQL Server 2005" by Kimberly Tripp. Interesting tidbit for decreasing downtime for operational tasks (like create database or restore): Instant File Initialization. The figures really point to huge time savings! Quite a selling point for Enterprise Edition of SQL Server.

It's two weeks in Barcelona for me - and for IT Forum, I am really doing ask-the-experts for Visual Studio Team System!

Being ATE (Ask the Experts) means that you cannot go each and every session you would like to. As a reminder for myself here is the list of sessions I made it to:

• ARC305: Connected Systems Part 2: Logic
• OFF303: VSTO 2005 SE
• SQL402: Implementing the Service-Oriented Database Architecture with SQL Server
• ARC304: Connected Systems Part 4: Data
• ARC201: Patterns and Anti-Patterns for SOA
• DEV314: Building Rule-Based Systems in WF
• ARC302: Connected Systems Part 5: Identity and Access Management
• DEV322: Unit Testing Best Practices
• DEV360: Windows PowerShell
• DEV302: Microsoft XNA and the Future of Game Development
• DEV366: Boost Your Data-Driven Application Development using SQL Server Centric .NET Code Generator (Olymars)

The only session to be rated "eminently forgettable" was DEV322. Well, at least I got to read my emails... The top-rated session definitely was Bob Beauchemin's SQL402, which kind of was an interesting session to go to before ARC304. Great fun was Rob Miles' XNA talk (this session doesn't fit the pattern of my interest, does it?).

There are a couple of sessions I missed, but I'll watch those once the post-conference DVDs have landed.

From the nuggets page: Don't have the time to read a 10-page how-to article or watch a full length webcast? Try an MSDN Nugget, a webcast that takes you step-by-step to discovering new functionality or exploring a hot developer topic, all in 10-15 minutes. If you haven't seen this yet, check it out!

I will be in Barcelona next week for Tech·Ed: Developers. You can get in touch with me at the Team System booth (Tuesday afternoon & Friday morning) of the Ask the Experts pavilion.

Update Actually, I am assigned to the ASP.NET booth as it turns out.

In case you were wondering why there is no new content on this blog - I am pretty busy, including preparing for my sessions at ADC06:

• Architecture Jumpstart 1 & 2
• Full-day VSTS / TFS Jumpstart

See you next week in Frankenthal / Germany!

Today, Daniel held a talk comparing AJAX frameworks for ASP.NET. He limited the scope to indirect frameworks, which means: those AJAX frameworks extend ASP.NET, and you don't necessarily need to know much about AJAX. On his Web site, you will find a comparison of AJAX frameworks for ASP.NET (direct as well as indirect).

As promised, here is the list of links / articles / samples that I used for preparing my talk "Build Provider in ASP.NET 2.0":

• Provider Toolkit
• Extending ASP.NET 2.0 Part I: Creating Custom Build Providers
• Jaw-dropping experience with custom build providers
• DLINQ ASP.NET Build Provider and DLINQ DataSource (Andres sent me a newer version for the May CTP)
• RSS Toolkit (sports two build providers, one for .rssdl, the other for .rss)
• Web Services Contract First: Drop Schema in app_code with a Custom Build Provider

Hope you will find those useful.

Half an hour ago, I completed my talk "Windows Workflow Foundation & ASP.NET 2.0". As promised, here is the list of links to sites / documents that I used to prepare this talk & accompanying samples.

• Coming improvements to ASP.NET hosting of Windows Workflow Foundation after WF Beta 2.2
• Cutting Edge, Windows Workflow Foundation Part 1, Part 2
• Examples of using Persistence and Tracking in ASP.NET
• Using WF to run a page-flow
• Of course, http://wf.netfx3.com/ (Webcasts et al)

Also, see my last post on ASP.NET PageFlow CTP. This was the last part on "future technologies".

Update A foto from my talk on Monday (debugging a workflow in ASP.NET):

In less than ten days, this year's ASP Konferenz will take place in Burghausen, Germany. This time, I will be presenting four topics: Windows Workflow Foundation & ASP.NET 2.0, Build Providers in ASP.NET 2.0, IIS 6.0 & ASP.NET 2.0 Secure Deployment and finally Health Monitoring in ASP.NET 2.0.

Next week, I am doing the first in a series of security on-site briefings for Microsoft Austria. Mario has blogged about our TTT event in two entries Security Technical Briefings - Train-The-Trainer... a looong evening (Part 1) and Security Technical Briefings - Part 2. Thanks to the workshop character, no two briefings will be alike.

Will be there Wednesday & Thursday as ATE (Ask the Experts), so drop by in the experts zone and say hello!

Next week, I will be in Rosenheim, Germany for the ADC 2005. I'll be teaching the Visual Studio 2005 Team System Hands-on workshop (Tuesday as well as Friday), plus doing two talks during the main conference: IIS 7 and ASP.NET 2.0 Health Monitoring. See you there!

The only way for me to not come home with tons of books is to give bookstores a wide berth. This is not an option at a PDC where so many new books are presented, and so many other ones are deeply discounted. Hence the list:

• Threat Modeling We got that book during Monday's Attack and Defense preconference session. Free, of course.
• Coder to Developer That was on my list for a (too) long time.
• Presenting Windows Workflow Foundation I didn't make it to any of the giveaway sessions, so I bought a copy.
• Programming Windows Presentation Foundation I wonder why I couldn't resist <g />
• Visual Studio Tools for Office Since I saw VSTO 2005 for the first time at an event in Redmond this year, I was looking forward to playing with it. Here's my ticket.
• The best of Verity Stob Special thanks to Gary Cornell from Apress for giving me a free copy! A real classic. Shame on you if you don't know Verity Stob, however, about everyone I told about the book so far was like "Verity Who?". You're definitely reading the wrong rags.
• Mastering Windows Server 2003 Affectionately know as "the Minasi", I simply could not pass up on that book on Friday - 42 USD! Compare that to the regular selling price of 55 Euro...

A hopefully luggable list of books...

The conference is over, and my brain is full - full of (semi)stupid ideas what I'd like to try with all those new technologies I saw this week. Task #1 for next week is to set up a VPC with Whidbey Beta 2, because I no longer have such an image, but need it for LINQ, Atlas et al. So plenty of good reasons to go back in time.

What did I see today? The obligatory session list:

• Using the .NET Language Integrated Query Framework with Relational Data
• Using the .NET Language Integrated Query Framework with XML Data
• Tips & Tricks: Developing and Testing with Virtual PC
• Windows Presentation Foundation ("Avalon"): Going Under the Hood to Understand the Architecture

The day started with Luca Bolognese's talk on DLINQ (Luca was PM on ObjectSpaces, so it is your guess...). His samples contained a few "references" to James Gosling, and it was a fun session to start with on the last day (whoever came up with deadlock victim had some humor too) Luca weighed in on the top three questions on DLINQ:

1. Do you support stored procedures?
2. Do you support database xyz?
3. How's your performance?

For #1, this is an unqualified yes. For #2, a provider needs to be written. And last but not least: at runtime, you only incur conversion to SQL, and the generation of objects. So no significant hit should be expected.

The day started out with one of those famous spoof videos - this time about a "variation" of Windows error reporting, dubbed WE-SYP (we share your pain). Error reporting tied to a - let's call it - "multimedia" chair. Fun to watch.

Right after that, Bob Muglia showed off what we can expect from Windows Server in the next couple of year. Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Solution was demoed together with Excel Services - impressive. TxF (transactional NTFS) wasn't any less exciting, just like the identity solutions - and, of course, IIS 7.0. We got the bits for the latter today. 

Sessions I attended today:

• Windows Communications Foundation ("Indigo"): A Deep Dive into Best Practices Using the Windows Communications Foundation
• ASP.NET: Future Directions for Developing Rich Web Applications with Atlas (Part 2)
• ASP.NET: A Sneak Peek at Future Directions in Web Development and Designer Tools
• Windows Vista & "Longhorn" Server: Under the Hood of the Operating System—System Internals and Your Application
• ASP.NET: Deep Dive into the ObjectDataSource Control

The under the hood session for Longhorn server had one interesting tidbit - they aim to require mandatory signing for kernel mode drivers on x64 platforms - bye bye kernel root kits!

Bradley Millington quite overshot his allocated timeslot for the ObjectDataSource control, but he covered interesting areas: filtering and master details, custom sorting and paging, updates inserts deletes as well as transactions and caching. Seeing realistic examples is a welcome change. A good place for you to start: the Advanced Data Scenarios section of the Quickstarts. (Note: those links point to http://beta.asp.net, and I don't think that Whidbey docs will be up and running there forever, given that "Orcas" starts appearing on the horizon).

Today's first keynote speaker was Eric Rudder. He unveiled the Expression Suite, which contains Acrylic, Quartz and Sparkle. For the latter, go to Channel 9 and watch this video. Also, the Windows Workflow Foundation saw the light of day during the keynote, as well as (last but not least) VSTA (Visual Studio Tools for Applications). You can learn more about VSTA in this blog post.

Eric was followed by Steven Sinofsky, who focused on Office 12. He demoed SharePoint, InfoPath, the new Access and more. I have to say again what I said previously - this is the first time I'm interested in an Office beta program. Good news is that all PDC attendees are signed up, steak knives being strictly optional <g /> (and even more limited than that phone fiasco from day one, 'nough said).

Now, without further ado(.net), the sessions I attended today:

• Windows Vista: User Account Protection—Securing Your Application with Least Privilege Administration
• The .NET Language Integrated Query Framework: An Overview
• C#: Future Directions in Language Innovation
• ASP.NET: Future Directions for Developing Rich Web Applications with Atlas (Part 1) 

Anders Hejlsberg did the LINQ (Language Integrated Query Framework) and C# 3.0 sessions. Highly impressive stuff, and I am looking forward to the DLinq session to learn more about the relational access model. I do like to know what is going on behind the scenes, various OR mappers made me wary. In closing: at least now I know why ObjectSpaces made a rapid disappearance...

Yesterday, I was reflecting on the PDC's I have attended so far - here is a graphical list:

and finally this year's:

Wow - my sixth PDC.

Want to know what Atlas is all about? On the Atlas site you will find hands-on labs, live quickstarts demoing Atlas features, documentation, and VSIs for creating your own Atlas apps with Visual Studio 2005. What are you waiting for? Check it out now!

The PDC today officially kicked off with a keynote by Bill Gates. To me, the more interesting parts came later in Jim Allchins keynote: Atlas, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation as well as C# 3.0 & LINQ. However, Office 12 does look very promising too. Can't wait to get my hands on that beta (never expected to say that about Office, ever).

In the afternoon, I attended the following breakouts:

• Behind the Scenes of Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server
• Windows Server “Longhorn”: What's New for Developers
• Windows Presentation Foundation ("Avalon"): A Lap around the Windows Presentation Foundation

Looking forward to tomorrow, because Windows Workflow Foundation will be revealed at the keynote (aka general session).

Today was preconference day at the PDC. I opted for Keith Brown's talk Attack and Defense: The Art of Secure Coding. Of course it contained a couple of well-known "friends" such as SQL Injection, but there were other interesting tidbits that made it worthwhile.

Speaking of which, including (four) product demos was a good idea, here is the list of products in order of presentation:

• DevInspect & SecureObjects
• DevPartner SecurityChecker
• Holodeck
• Source Code Analysis for Application Security

Definitely worth checking out, might save a headache or two when using those tools.

Keith also briefly discussed SDL (Security Development Lifecycle) vs Security Engineering Guidelines. You could also cast that as ideal world (ie lots of cash for security available) vs real world. Therefore: go for patterns & practices stuff to make your projects secure.

If there's one thing I could do without then it is travel, especially when you fly in from Europe. But PDCs have always been worth it - I attended every single one since the ´96 PDC "Building Internet Applications" in SF. Funny enough, I still have the tote bag from that conference, and it made to this years PDC (again, the bag is a frequent traveller in its own respect). The most durable and useful product I ever got from MS <g />. No patches applied so far.

I spent a good portion of the twelve hour flight watching the 2.2 gig Channel 9 videos I brought with me on the plane. It pays off to have two spare batteries for your laptop (did I mention that I really, really like my X31?). I did resist using the Connexion WLAN that was available on this flight. Somebody else couldn't.

Back to PDCs, especially this year's. Originally, I had planned to pay a visit to the Mono user meeting on Tuesday night, however, they scheduled it during the expo hall reception. In a hotel away from the conferene center. Too bad.

Although the files for this TechTalk repeat are identical to the TechTalk downloads, I noticed that the download location has been moved. For your convenience, here are the direct download links to the three respective files:

• Aktuelle Linkliste für alle Teilnehmer des TechTalks (Microsoft Word-Datei) (50,69 Kb)
• PowerPoint-Slide zum Vortrag (162,09 Kb)
• TechTalk Demo Files (6142,77 Kb)

Hot off the press: on 8^th of September, I will be doing a rerun of my TechTalk Tools zu erfolgreichen Softwareentwicklung mit .NET (~ Tools for successful software projects in .NET) in Graz at the monthly .NET User Group Styria meeting (sign up here). So if you didn't have a chance to attend my TechTalk in Germany, this is your ticket in Austria.

I promised two things during today's webcast The build system of Visual Studio Team System: links to get started with MSBuild as well as the samples I presented. Let's get started with the easy part, the samples:

VS05BetaExperienceWebcastMSBuildSamples.zip

And here are some useful links for your start into MSBuild:

• MSBuild Wiki
• MSBuild Wiki External Links and Resources
• The Road to MSBuild
• TaskSchema, a XSD schema generator for MsBuild tasks

That's it. You might also want to check out my link list for last week's webcast, Profiling for Visual Studio 2005 Team Systems Beta Experience.

Just minutes ago, I finished my Webcast on Profiling with Visual Studio Team System, which is one in a series of Webcasts for MSDN Connection Service: Visual Studio 2005 Team Systems Beta Experience (MSDN Deutschland). As promised, here is a list of links that prove to be invaluable when navigating the "bits":

• The Profiling Team’s Greatest Hits: Volume One
• The Profiling Team’s Greatest Hits: A Few More Hits
• Make Your Apps Fly with the New Enterprise Performance Tool
• Rico Mariani's Articles and Recommendations
• Select team member blogs: IanWho, Angry Richard, SCarroll
• Enterprise Performance Tools Team Blog
• And last but not least the most important newssource for Team System in general - Rob Caron's Blog

That should get you started with profiling. Next week's topic is "The build system of Visual Studio Team System".

On 12th of August, the Austrian .NET community is hosting a one-day conference on security, targeted at developers (no surprise here). The topics for NCC 2005 A include:

• Threat Modeling
• What's new in .NET 2.0 Security
• What's new in SQL Server 2005 Security
• What's new in Windows Vista Security

Quite a nice line-up I'd say. This event is supported by Microsoft Austria, so attending this event is free, except for your time, but I am sure security does warrant a day of your time! Sign up here

Script Callbacks were also part of my "Advanced ASP.NET 2.0" day at the Community Bootcamp 2005 in Bad Ischl. Aside from showing the usual callback sample, I decided that something more useful was in order. That is why I went a tad further by showing off the controls introduced in the RefreshPanel GotDotNet workspace. I came across those a while back when reading articles on Bertrand Le Roy's blog:

• Fun with callbacks Part 1: What's in the ASP.NET box?
• Fun with callbacks, Part 2: The RefreshPanel
• Fun with callbacks Part 3: Strongly-typed callbacks
• Fun with callbacks Part 4: What about postback events?

Of course we did labs on CallbackProxy and RefreshPanel, the latter one is described in this blog entry (again, a streamlined version of the lab done by Alexander Schoeppl).

Let's start with the result we wanted to achieve:

The render date only acts as a "proof" that no Postback happened, the dropdown control lists all customers in Northwind and is also populated up front. The GridView control, however, is filled using out of band calls. Instead of hacking your own ugly JavaScript, we did that using the RefreshPanel control.

Step 1: Copy RefreshPanel.dll

First, copy RefreshPanel.dll to the \bin directory of your site. You can get it here.

Step 2: Set up a connection string in web.config

We will use that later both in markup and code beside file:

<connectionStrings>

 <add name="NorthwindConnectionString" 


connectionString="Data Source=cbc05vpc\cbc05;Initial Catalog=Northwind;User=sa;Password=P@ssw0rd"/>

</connectionStrings>

Step 3: ShowCustomerOrders.aspx

Basically, "organized" in three sections (separated by a blank line):

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" 


CodeFile="ShowCustomerOrders.aspx.cs" Inherits="Show_Customer_Orders" 


Title="Callback Demo" %>

<%@ Register TagPrefix="rp" Namespace="MyControls.RefreshPanel" 


Assembly="RefreshPanel" %>

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
>

<head runat="server">

    <title>Untitled Page</title>

</head>

<body>

    <form id="form1" runat="server">

    <div>

        Render Date: <asp:Literal ID="Literal1"
runat="server"></asp:Literal>

        <br />

        


        <asp:DropDownList ID="DropDownList1"
runat="server" 


DataSourceID="SqlDataSource1" DataTextField="CustomerID" 


DataValueField="CustomerID">

        </asp:DropDownList>

<asp:SqlDataSource ID="SqlDataSource1" runat="server" 


ConnectionString="<%$ ConnectionStrings:NorthwindConnectionString %>"

            SelectCommand="SELECT
[CustomerID] FROM [Customers]">

</asp:SqlDataSource>

        <rp:RefreshButton ID="MyButton" RefreshPanelID="RFPanel1" 


            runat="server" 


            ClientRefreshArgument="this.form.DropDownList1.options[this.form.DropDownList1.selectedIndex].value" 


            Text="Show Orders"/>

        <br />

        


        <rp:RefreshPanel runat="server" ID="RFPanel1"
OnRefreshing="FillData">

            <asp:GridView
ID="GridView1" runat="server">

            </asp:GridView>

        </rp:RefreshPanel>

    </div>

    </form>

</body>

</html>

Register imports the RefreshPanel control suite for us, the Label and DropDown are also very straightforward. The RefreshPanel control itself contains a single GridView control, and it is linked to the server-side method FillData which we will examine in the next step. The RefreshButton is responsible for activating the out of band call back to the server - that's also where we get the value from the dropdown control, and pass it as an event argument to FillData.

Note that the control names are hardcoded, in the real world we'd build that string dynamically, because otherwise we'd get into trouble, eg with master pages.

Step 4: ShowCustomerOrders.aspx.cs

Page_Load is trivial, we are only interested in FillData:

public void FillData(object sender, RefreshingEventArgs e)
{
string connectionString = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["NorthwindConnectionString"].ToString();

string sqlCmd ="Select * from Orders where customerID = @CustomerID";

SqlConnection conn =new SqlConnection(connectionString);

SqlCommand cmd =new SqlCommand(sqlCmd, conn);
cmd.Parameters.AddWithValue("@CustomerID", (string)e.EventArgument);

conn.Open();
SqlDataReader reader = cmd.ExecuteReader();

GridView1.DataSource = reader;
GridView1.DataBind();
reader.Close();
conn.Close();
}

No magic in our code, but: RefreshPanel takes care of giving us a GridView control to work with, and shipping the resulting HTML to the client - and inserting it into the page. Very, very neat indeed.

CallbackDemo.zip (43.51 KB)

Just registered for PDC05. I will be in LA Sun-Sun, and attending the black belt security preconference session on Monday, which I consider a must - especially given that Michael Howard is one of the presenters.

If you are wondering why there's so little activity on this blog recently: I'm still touring Germany with my Techtalk. The last three legs are next week, and then I am almost on the plane to Amsterdam for TechEd Europe...

This Thursday afternoon I attended the rerun of the VSTO session (Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Office System - quite a mouthfull, I'll stick with VSTO) in the Smart Client track (my main track was VSTE - Visual Studio Team Edition). Wow! The 2003 version didn't impress me at all when I saw it back then. But 2005 really rocks. Catherine Heller (Technical Evangelist) did a nice demo in Excel. The way the document is design- and programmable, access to the action pane and rolling your own smart tags is almost too easy. Forget about VBA, serious Office development is now on the horizon.

VSTO 2005 Blog

VSTO 2005 Beta Page

What's New in Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office

The following dates and locations have been announced for my TechTalk Tools zur erfolgreichen Softwareentwicklung mit .NET:

06.06. Karlsruhe
07.06. Stuttgart
08.06. München
09.06. Nürnberg
14.06. Dresden
15.06. Hannover
16.06. Berlin
20.06. Frankfurt a.M.
21.06. Düsseldorf
22.06. Bremen 

See you!