Mikesdotnetting: on ASP.NET and Web Development
Latest Entries
Posted by: Mikesdotnetting, 17 May 2008 09:48
There are a variety of options for connecting to Access databases within ASP.NET pages. This article attempts to cover the choices and offer recommendations for getting the best out of Access. More...
Filed under: ADO.NET ASP.NET 2.0 MS Access as Article
Posted by: Mikesdotnetting, 01 May 2008 10:02
Quite often, I see questions asked about creating a simple login page for use with Access from people who don't want to take advantage of the built-in Forms Authentication framework within ASP.NET. The following samples show how relatively easy this is to accomplish. More...
Filed under: ADO.NET ASP.NET 2.0 MS Access as Article
Posted by: Mikesdotnetting, 30 April 2008 22:48
This unbelievably cryptic error is the bane of developers who are just starting out with Access and ASP.NET. You've done your code, plopped your database file in the App_Data folder, and try to run a page that INSERTs or UPDATEs records, and it all stops dead. This brief article explains the cause of the error, and the steps required to stop it recurring. More...
Filed under: ADO.NET ASP.NET 2.0 MS Access as FAQ
Posted by: Mikesdotnetting, 05 April 2008 10:26
I was delighted to find out on April Fool's Day (?) that I have been awarded the 2008 Microsoft® MVP Award. More...
Filed under: General as General
Posted by: Mikesdotnetting, 28 November 2007 13:19
There are a whole bunch of articles, blog entries and tutorials that seek to explain how SQL JOINS work. Some of them are excellent, and others are just confusing. The reason I am adding my go at trying to clarify JOINS to the mix is to highlight how proper use of the tools available to you can seriously reduce the chances of getting the JOIN syntax or type wrong. Since JOINS are all about how to relate data from one table to another, I thought it appropriate to illustrate the subject using Parents and Children (who may, or may not be related to eachother). So let's meet the families. More...
Filed under: ADO.NET SQL SQL Server Express as Article
Posted by: Mikesdotnetting, 20 November 2007 22:54
The main problem I find with the built-in paging functionality offered by the GridView control is that the paging links are managed by Javascript. This is a bit awkward for people who disable, or don't have Javascript in their browser, but more importantly, the links can't be triggered by search engines. If you rely on the GridView to paginate links to content, this can prove disastrous, and much of your content will be inaccessible to search engines. Motivated by Scott Guthrie's series of blog entries on LINQ to SQL, available in the .Net 3.5 framework, I set about getting some custom paging working with html paging links. More...
Filed under: ASP.NET 2.0 LINQ to SQL as Article
Posted by: Mikesdotnetting, 16 November 2007 10:45
Yes, you did read that correctly. Here's the situation: you know that Sql Server is by far the superior database system (if indeed MS Access can be called a database system). You also know that MS Access databases are not recommended as a data store for web applications. You are comfortable with Sql Server, and haven't really looked at Access for years - if at all. But now, your boss or your client wants you to use it in the next project. More...
Filed under: ADO.NET ASP.NET 2.0 MS Access as Article
Posted by: Mikesdotnetting, 13 November 2007 12:33
If you have just been directed to this page, it may be because you have just thread-jacked. If you are not sure what that means, read on for an explanation, and some guidance. More...
Filed under: ASP.NET 2.0 as FAQ
Posted by: Mikesdotnetting, 12 November 2007 15:15
Creating a search interface for one user-supplied value is pretty straightforward: a TextBox for input, a Button and some SQL that searches one or more fields where the values are LIKE '%' + @searchterm + '%' is all that is needed. While it works, this approach is not very flexible. For example, what if you wanted to search for an Employee whose last name contains "a", and don't want those where the first name or city contains "a"? The traditional solution to this is to dynamically construct the SQL statement based on what values were passed by the user. However, building the SQL string can get repetitive, boring and messy. Here is a cleaner way to allow the user to narrow down searches across multiple criteria with the use of optional parameters, and just 3 lines of programming code. More...
Filed under: ADO.NET ASP.NET 2.0 MS Access as Article
Posted by: Mikesdotnetting, 09 September 2007 21:20
The Jet 4.0 OLEDB driver is a remarkable beast. Not only will it allow connections to MS Access .mdb files and MS Excel spreadhseets, but it will also allow you to connect to and query a variety of text file formats. Here are some examples that illustrate this capability when applied to importing text based data into Access. More...
Filed under: ADO.NET MS Access as Article
Posted by: Mikesdotnetting, 30 August 2007 10:29
If you want to find which CheckBoxes were selected in a multiple record DataBound control, the way that you you do it depends on the type of control you use. These examples demonstrate a CheckBox control being added to a GridView, Repeater and a DataList. For simplicity, I have placed all three controls on the same page, and used the Access version of theNorthwind database. One AccessDataSource control is used to bind the results of "SELECT [CategoryID], [Description], [CategoryName] FROM [Categories]" to all three controls. More...
Filed under: ASP.NET 2.0 as Snippet
Posted by: Mikesdotnetting, 25 August 2007 12:34
An interesting question came up on the ASP.NET forums asking why a TextBox which has its value changed by client-side Javascript persists those changes across postbacks, while a Label does not. And in a nut shell, this question covered two of the biggest causes of confusion among newcomers to ASP.NET: the difference between ViewState and IPostBackDataHandler; and the difference between client-side operations and server-side operations. More...
Filed under: ASP.NET 2.0 Javascript as Article
Posted by: Mikesdotnetting, 25 August 2007 10:32
Label controls in ASP.NET don't have a smart tag that allows you to select a data source, so at first glance, it is not easy to see how to bind a value returned from a SqlDataSource or AccessDataSource control to the label. Here's how to programmatically access the data returned by such a DataSource and apply it to a non-databound control. More...
Filed under: ADO.NET ASP.NET 2.0 as Article