Well I am heading out to Myrtle Beach tonight at 4am, so I spent today finishing up some cleanup so I could release DoddleImport on CodePlex. It should be pretty feature complete and ready for use, and as always, please let me know if it helps you out! Objective Flexible importing of data via a fluid and fully extensible API to easily add support for new Import Sources and Import Destinations. I will update the documentation and provide some better examples when I get back. Here you can see a quick example of me importing some Excel data into a SharePoint list. As you can see it supports a variety of validation including missing fields and data type conversion problems.   Key Components Importing relies on 2 distinct (and entirely extensible) mechanisms: IImportSource - The import...

A project I am now working on is using the Web Client Software Factory (WCSF) from the patterns & practices team. It is basically an elaborate MVP-based framework that currently sits on top of ASP.NET Webforms. One of the components it ships with is the ObjectContainerDataSource which is a lot like the ObjectDataSource that ASP.NET provides. I admittedly have little experience with either of these controls, since I am not a huge fan of declarative data binding in larger applications. It does however offer better integration with the MVP pattern, simplifying the “bubbling” of DataSource events up to the Presenter to handle them. The Presenter is of course where all of the logic for the view and its services belongs. At first everything was working great: selects, server-side paging, server-side sorting, even inserting. But when I tried some Updates and Deletes with the GridView and the ObjectContainerDataSource...

UPDATE 11/27/2011 Please see the updated version of this helper. It now includes a fluent API and can be added to your project very easily with NuGet. Writing a Fluent ASP.NET MVC Recursive TreeView Helper The following helper will make it easy to create a tree view from a recursive self-referencing table. Below you are seeing a tree of “Locations” where each Location can contain X number of child locations. Dependencies  jQuery TreeView Plugin Rendered Tree Table Definition The table itself is extremely simple, each Location has a ParentLocationId which is a relationship to the same table. If the ParentLocationId is null then it is a root location.   Usage Simple <%= Html.TreeView("locations",...

I encountered a rather frustrating problem with jQuery UI tabs this week. The problem occurs when trying to tabify some content after using jQuery’s $().load method to load the tabs HTML via an ajax request. The following code works perfectly in all browsers except IE6 and IE7 (It works fine in IE8 as well), as can be seen in the screenshot below. $('#deviceDetailsWrapper').load('/device/details/294', null, function() { $('#tabs').tabs(); }); However, here is what renders in IE6/7. For some reason, the jQuery tabs are triggering a GET request of the current URL and loading the content into the tab itself. Below you are actually seeing the entire page loaded inside the tab. I discovered this by inspecting the DOM tree within the tab in Firebug, as well as loading up Fiddler and watching the tab call an entirely separate GET request to the current URL as soon as the tabs were loaded....