August 2005 - Posts

it's good to googletalk

Seems they've launched the google appraoch to IM. Gonna check it out

http://www.google.com/talk/

 

New blog home

I'm moving across to my company's blogs. You'll find my new blog here.

I'll certainly keep posting content here at DNJ but you will see a gradual move fully across over the coming weeks and months.

SPUnit

Adding to the Unit testing family I was pointed to this, which is a testing framework for your stored procs. Nice.

Simulating Http Context For Unit Tests without using a server.

Interesting approach from Phil. Something I'll certainly be looking to take advantage of.

Composite UI Application Block

Picked up from Scott who is currently attending Techready.

Composite UI Application Block for smart clients

I'm yet to dig too deeply into smart clients but it's definately on the "to do" list and I think these UI app blocks will be interesting to play with. If anyone has used them i'd be interested to hear feedback.

MCMS sorting PostingCollection workaround

I've been working on a fairly major MCMS2002 project and one of the things I've come up against is creating a PostingCollection. Now MCMS doesn't allow you to create a PostingCollection type so the only way around this is to store your collection of posts in an ArrayList. This is a shame as you lose the sorting functionality that is baked into the PostingCollection.

Having looked into this issue I've found a nice way to get sorting on the ArrayList that contains your posts. I actually used the CollectionView class which I mentioned previously in my blog. Using this I can pass in my ArrayList that has my posts in it and I can sort on any of the properties of the MCMS Posting type.  I think this technique is extremely powerful when you are building up a custom collection of posts to give you powerful sorting and filtering options.

 

Edit:

The code for the CollectionView can be found here

www.mustblogagain.com

Ok it's been a fair while since I've posted, this has been down mainly to starting my new job at Conchango and life being very hetic as well as getting upto speed with technologies like Biztalk, MCMS Infopath etc. which is all new to little ol me. Anyway now I'm acclimatising I hope to get back on the blogging band wagon.

I'll use my first post back to big up my colleagues who have written a nice paper on How SQL Server 2005 Integration Services Compares with Informatica.

Well worth checking out!!!