Unhandled Exception

A while ago I blogged about using external templates in an asp.net application. The problem with that was it wasn’t natively supported, so I had to create a derived SpecialRepeater in order to take advantage of the external template system.

Last time I tried to solve one of the deficiencies of data binding by taking advantage of expando attributes. Today I want to throw an idea out there that I’ve been playing with since that blog post.I was looking at WPF’s data binding and wondered what it would take to have data binding in ASP.NET be as first class as data binding in WPF.

There was a post on our internal discussion group recently where a customer pointed out one of the weaknesses of 2 way data binding not working within user controls. Consider the following page:

Wow, I haven't blogged in a while...but that will end soon. Watch me talk about the QueryExtender control. It's a new control we added in ASP.NET 4.0 to make Linq queries even simpler. The new control works with LinqDataSource and EntityDataSource. We also built all of the new DynamicData filters on top of this new control.

Check it out here

Today I'm excited to share that we've released DynamicData Preview 4 on codeplex. Check out the latest bits here.

This release is particularly interesting not only for people that have been using Dynamic Data for a while now, but anyone that has an existing application today who wants to use some of the niceties Dynamic Data offers without having to take all the junk associated. Take a look at the SimpleDynamicData project for examples.

Existing Sites

Ever wish you could declare a template outside of the control you were defining the template for? We always get requests to have FormView's InsertItem template fall back on the EditItemTemplate and vice versa. That would be easy if we could do what was mentioned above.

I'm sure many of you have seen this error message when developing your web application:

The Problem 

I've been thinking alot recently about the problems with data binding (and they're alot). There are some patterns that play well with ASP.NET (and are repeated everywhere) and some that don't quite fit the model. One of those patterns that don't mesh well is, setting the DataSource property of any of the DataControls. Before ASP.NET 2.0 and DataSource controls we'd have to set the DataSource property and manually call DataBind.