Looks like I get to hold onto the MVP title for another year. WooHoo!

Being an MVP has a lot of great benefits, but you need to contribute a lot of time to the community to earn the title. In case people are wondering the kinds of things you can do to qualify, I gave about 35 talks at major conferences in the last year, 14 user group talks, 3 webcasts, wrote a book (Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0), published about a half dozen articles in various publications, helped run the Captial Area .NET User Group, and participated in 6 Microsoft partner events (SDRs, readiness events, etc.). This is all extra-curricular activity that does not directly earn me any significant money. On top of that I had to continue to earn a living as an architect and trainer with IDesign, which is a lot of fun in itself. Sounds exhausting, but I gotta say I feel pretty lucky to have found something that I love to do so much.

This year I have been moved to the Visual Developer - Solution Architect category instead of ASP.NET because that aligns more with where my primary focus is these days. I'm all about smart clients, but they don't have a category for that yet. I still can hold my own with ASP.NET, but just don't spend as much of my time in that space as with architecture and smart client technologies anymore.

Cool, cool, cool. I feel privileged to count myself part of a very talented community of Microsoft recognized experts!

I posted all the sample code for my book Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0 on the book Web site at http://www.softinsight.com/databindingbook. The samples are available in both C# and VB, even though all the code in the book is in C#. The book should be hitting the shelves very soon and is already selling well on Amazon.

I also posted instructions for running the samples if you do not have a non-default instance of SQL Server or don't have Northwind on your machine yet, also how to run the samples with SQL Server 2005 Express, Visual C# 2005 Express and Visual Basic 2005 Express.

Happy Data Binding!

I am the vice president of the Capital Area .NET Users Group, and help coordinate our speakers and sponsors. If you are interested in speaking at CapArea, or know someone who might be, I am trying to get our speaker line up for 2006 rolling. We need a speaker for Feb 2006, and April-Dec.

Like most user groups, we have no budget for paying speakers or covering travel expenses. This is just a chance for you to share your expertise with fellow community members and teaching them something new about .NET development.

If you are interested, please contact me at brian.noyes(AT)idesign.net.

Thanks

A common requirement and question that is very easy to solve with the DataGrid is the need to have a column or columns in a grid that contain a drop down list of lookup values from a related table. For example, in Northwind, we have the Products table with a foreign key column SupplierID that relates the to Suppliers table. The values in the Suppliers table could be treated as a list of lookup values for editing the supplier associated with a product:

When a supplier is selected from the drop down list, it should set the SupplierID column value for that row in the products table. This is very easy to achieve through the Windows Forms designer and the smart tag for a DataGridView control.

Do the following to try it out:

1. Create a Windows Forms Project.
2. Add a data source to a data set that contains Products and Suppliers tables from the Northwind database. This could be any kind of Data Source (Database, Object, Web service), but for simplicity for trying out the designer, just use a database one which adds the typed data set into the Windows Forms project. Products is the table of data we will display in the grid, and Suppliers is the lookup table related through a foreign key column in the Products table that we want to display as a combo box of selectable values in the grid.
3. Drag and drop Products from the Data Sources window onto the form. This will generate the grid, a data set instance, a table adapter to fill it, a BindingSource component hooked up to the data set and the Products table within it, a grid hooked up to the products binding source, and a binding navigator hooked up to the binding source.
4. Click on the grid smart tag (little triangle on upper right border of control).
5. Select Dock in Parent Container.
6. Select Edit Columns.
7. Select the SupplierID column in the list on the left.
8. Select the ColumnType property and set it to DataGridViewComboBoxColumn.
9. Select the DataSource property and navigate down through the data source tree through Other Data Sources > Project Data Sources > NorthwindDataSet > Suppliers table.

10. Select the DisplayMember property and select CompanyName.
11. Select the ValueMember property and select SupplierID.
12. Click OK to close the Edit Columns dialog.
13. Run the app and observe that you get the drop down list of suppliers. Selecting a supplier actually changes the SupplierID column value for that row in the products table to the appropriate foreign key value.

You can download a completed sample that was generated with these steps here.

The question came up from several attendees at my MSDN Webcast on ClickOnce yesterday:

"Can I launch a XXX application using ClickOnce?" (fill in XXX with VB6, MFC, etc. - non-.NET applications)

The answer is yes, you will just have to employ a little trick.

What you need is a simple little launcher application that IS a Windows .NET application. So do the following:

1. Create a new Windows Application project with VS 2005.
2. Delete the Form1 from the project.
3. Add the unmanaged EXE and any supporting files to the VS 2005 project, which makes them part of this application from a ClickOnce perspective. As a result, they will get deployed with this application to its cache folder and can be executed by this launcher app.
4. Edit the Program.cs file Main method and delete the current method body (which launches the application and the form) and replace it with code to launch the unmanaged executable. This just requires a single line of code: Process.Start("MyUnamangedApp.exe");

Note: You will need to give the launcher app full trust in the ClickOnce security settings.

Note2: If the unmanaged app relies on ActiveX or COM objects, those need to be added to the project as well, and you will need to add a reference to the COM DLL's to the project to get their reg-free COM information added to the manifest. See this article for more details.

You can download a sample implementation here.

For those who attended or are interested, here are the demos from my MSDN Webcast on ClickOnce yesterday.

You can find the webcast link for on-demand viewing here.

For the demo that went awry demonstrating on-demand updates, the little mistake I made was that I said that if you turn off automatic updates (Check for updates option at top of Updates dialog), then you need to put in an Update location, which is true. But what I was doing was fully qualifying the path to the deployment manifest, which is incorrect. What you need to put is just the URL to the root folder where the deployment manifest resides. VS will automatically append the deployment manifest file name. So when I was putting in:

http://localhost/ClickOnceOnDemand/ClickOnceOnDemand.application

I should have just been putting

http://localhost/ClickOnceOnDemand/

Another little tidbit I didn't mention is that you will need Full Trust for on-demand updates, which is unfortunate because it means the app has to request full trust even though it may not be doing anything privileged beyond on-demand updates.

In previous builds of WCF (Indigo), you had to have a particular namespace included in your config file. Specifically, instead of the default root element of:

<configuration>
<!-- The rest of your config settings -->
</configuration>

You needed to have:

<configuration xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0">
<!-- The rest of your config settings -->
</configuration>

By doing that in previous builds, you got intellisense for the schema elements and attributes of the <system.serviceModel> element, letting you discover the right entries to get features like transactions, security, bindings and so on correctly configured.

When I installed the Nov CTP, I was immediately lost because my intellisense seemed to have gone away. If you add a WinFx Service from the Web Site templates, the web.config still has the namespace shown in the second config snippet above. But the trick is that it is no longer needed, and in fact confuses VS on what schema elements to expose through intellisense. The system.serviceModel schema elements are now merged with the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Xml\Schemas\DotNetConfig.xsd schema as part of the VS extenstions install, so they are there by default now in the config file intellisense.

Thanks to my colleague Juval Lowy for discovering this fact and giving me back my intellicrack!

Here are the demos from my MSDN Webcast today on the DataGridView control.

You can find the sample DataGridView chapter for my book here.

You can view the webcast on demand through the links here.

My friend Clyde Barretto has started blogging. He has been giving some great talks to the local area user groups on developing custom Windows Forms controls. Hopefully we will see some good technical content there sharing his knowledge. Welcome to the blogsphere, Clyde!

I gave a talk on connecting smart clients with WCF on Tuesday at Boulder .NET. Had a good turnout desipte the proximity to the holiday and had a good time.

The talk covered the fundamentals of connecting applications with WCF since most of the people there had never seen anything on WCF. Then I moved into some of the specific client concerns when using WCF, similar to my talk at VSConnections.

You can get the slides and demos here:  Slides   Demos