Hisham Baz apparently had a very busy weekend. He's worked on three great Enterprise Library tutorials complete with screenshots. Check them out:
This time it's for real! I will be giving my Exception Handling and Enterprise Library overview presentation on the Microsoft Campus next week. This free event will be held on 2/7/05 in Microsoft Building #40, Steptoe Room #1450. Arrive at 6:30 for pizza and socializing. The presentation starts at 7pm. Visit
the .NET Developers Association website for more information. This will probably be the last time I'm giving this presentation in the area as I've exhausted the subject. If you haven't seen it yet this might be your last chance!
Enterprise Library Product Manager
Tom Hollander launches blog! It's about time! Tom also alludes to other projects that he may "talk about soon". Hmmm....
Scott Densmore has
just announced the Enterprise Library will hit MSDN on January 28th. Steve Maine provides an
insightful warning that this release is barring any disaster, or a rewrite of the configuration block. Come on Steve, we only broke the API six times!
In my vast amount of spare time I've been working on a little program to keep track of my poker games winning and losses (emphasis on
losses). The project started initially as an excel spreadsheet, but I quickly outgrew excel and started writing the application in C#. Since my application utilized strongly typed collections that would be visibile to the user, I was looking for an easy way to provide sorting and filtering like one could do with a DataView object. After some Googling, I found that
Brendan Tompkins came up to with a clever approach to this very problem.
His blog entry tells all. The solution is quite elegant. He created a class called CollectionView. This ~1,000 line class will take any strongly typed object and turn it into a DataView that can be bound to a DataGrid
(for example) in which a user can sort all of the properties of your strongly typed object. Here's the example code from Brendan's entry:
CollectionView view = new CollectionView(MyCollectionClass);
this.DataGrid1.DataSource = view;
this.DataGrid1.DataBind();
Very simple indeed. Thanks to Brendan for this great contribution!