Wow! We’ve recently moved to Visual Studio 2008 at work and I’ve been moving one of our larger products to resource files and multi-language support. In doing so, you have to look at the Design view (or Split View) in the IDE to be able to generate a local resource file.

Every time I go to Design View and generate the file, all my beautifully formatted markup is destroyed by Visual Studio. This has happened ever since I started using Visual Studios and I succumbed to the inevitability of formatting failure…

Until today…

Fed up with the formatting, after fruitless online searching, I found the answer myself very quickly and I’ve been kicking myself since.

1. Head to the top menu and select Tools
2. Choose Options
3. Expand Text Editor
4. Expand HTML
5. Choose Format
6. Uncheck Wrap tags when exceeding ...

Easy! You might want to stay in that screen and fix any capitalization or auto insert close tag issues you may have.

I’ve had tons of people ask me how to Select DISTINCT rows from a DataSet. Why not use SQL? Well sometimes you just can’t, and sometimes its much more efficient to do it webserver side then database side.

For some reason Microsoft has an article on how to write your own helper class, which is fine and dandy, but you don’t need to bother. While this implementation isn’t exactly the same as a SQL call, its very simple and works extremely well when working with medium to small datasets.

Say we have a DataSet ds like so:

So to select distinct groupIDs we simply:

DataTable distinctDT = ds.Tables[0].DefaultView.ToTable(true, new string [] { "groupID" });

This returns:

We can now use this distinct DataTable to make our queries on our original DataSet:

ds.Tables[0].Select("groupID = " + distinctDT.Rows[0]["groupID"].toString());

That looks a little more complicated then it actually is… oh well, its actually quite a nice solution when you can’t use SQL to do your DISTINCT selects for you because you can use the same DataSet over and over reducing time to your SQL Server or FileIO.

Instead of writing about whats been going on, I’m going to delay again by adding a little programming nugget.

In my paying job, I do a lot of work with Microsoft and ASP.Net (Alkaloid members be quiet). I’ve recently started using the AJAX library for ASP.Net 2.0 and, while it has gone surprising well for the most part, there was one problem in general I couldn’t find an answer for online so I thought I’d post my solution.

Working with a GridView in an Update Panel is awesome for many reasons, but when you require a full postback instead of an asynchronous one you can run into some trouble. If the actual object to cause the full postback has a set ID, no problem simply add:

<asp:UpdatePanel ...>
   <ContentTemplate>...</ContentTemplate>
   <Triggers>
      <asp:PostBackTrigger ControlID="CONTROL_ID" />
   </Triggers>
</asp:UpdatePanel>

The PostBackTrigger defined there will issue a full page postback. The problem arises on run-time controls such as a TemplateField or ButtonField within the GridView. There is no (easy) way to assign them as PostBackTrigger as either you don’t know the ID (in a ButtonField example) or the ID changes based on any MasterPages or panels. The solution is simple though.

Basically all we have to do is add the control to the Trigger collection in the code behind on the DataBind event of the item. This will work with any type of control you want to put in your GridView. In this example, I’ll use a LinkButton in a TemplateField.

... UpdatePanel definition etc. ...
<asp:GridView ...>
   <Columns>
      <asp:TemplateField>
         <ItemTemplate>
            <asp:LinkButton CommandName="Select" ID="PostBackButton" 
                  runat="Server" Text="Do PostBack" 
                  OnDataBinding="PostBackBind_DataBinding">
            </asp:LinkButton>
         </ItemTemplate>
     </asp:TemplateField>
     ... Any other Columns ...
   </Columns>
</asp:GridView>

Then in the codebehind:

protected void PostBackBind_DataBinding(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
   LinkButton lb = (LinkButton) sender;
   ScriptManager sm = (ScriptManager)Page.Master.FindControl("SM_ID");
   sm.RegisterPostBackControl(lb);
}

The script manager has a handy RegisterPostBackControl method and the link buttons are dynamically set as full postback calls.

Note: If you aren’t using a Master Page, you can just get the scriptmanager via its local reference: this.SM_ID.RegisterPostBackControl(lb);

Hope this helps someone out!