I just finished up the C# 2.0 Programming course at Interface Technical Training and wanted to get some of the code posted that we did today covering events and delegates and ADO.NET.  Thanks to everyone who attended.  It was a really fun week.

I'm really digging WPF these days.  While there are a lot of cool technologies out there, WPF seems to offer a lot of promise for desktop apps or even apps running within Internet Explorer when .NET 3.0 is installed on the client. 

Simon Allardice (one of the cool/smart people I work with at Interface Technical Training) showed me a great WPF application today from the British Library that allows people to inspect some really old books and documents.  I've always enjoyed Mozart's compositions (I enjoy writing music on an amateur scale) and have been checking out some of his manuscripts. 

--  2/25/2007: Added user driven carousel movement to the albums  --

I've always dreaded handling the situation where I need to pass an array of values to a stored procedure.  Yeah...there are several ways to do it, but none of them are really pleasant IMHO.  I came across the following post by Jon Galloway that puts to use SQL Server 2005's XML capabilities to allow an XML fragment containing multiple values to be passed in as a single parameter and parsed.  Sure, there are pros and cons to this approach, but this technique makes reaching the end goal faster and easier than some of the alternatives.  Especially if you consider using the XML serialization capabilities in .NET to automatically serialize object properties to XML that is then passed to a sproc.

Microsoft recently released the final build of their awesome Live Search for Windows Mobile application.  It's probably the coolest and most useful application I have on my Mobile 5 phone since it does the following types of things:

Microsoft recently announced several different free Webcasts and virtual labs for those interested in learning to develop ASP.NET 2.0 applications.  Available tracks include ASP.NET 2.0 for existing ASP.NET developers, ASP.NET 2.0 for PHP developers, ASP.NET 2.0 for JSP developers and ASP.NET 2.0 for ColdFusion developers.  More details on the training can be found here.

WPF/E is getting better and better as new CTP releases come out.  The February CTP includes several nice additions including a new downloader that allows resources used by a WPF/E application to be downloaded dynamically.  As the resources are downloaded their progress can be monitored and displayed.  This can be useful when images, movies or music need to be downloaded "on the fly" so that the end user can see the progress of the download.  More information on the downloader API can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb232904.aspx.

In this video tutorial I walk through the fundamentals of creating an N-Layer ASP.NET application.  What's "N-Layer" you ask?  N-Layer can be interpreted many different ways, but I generally use the term to mean separating presentation, business and data code into individual code layers.  Doing this allows code to be re-used throughout an application and prevents unnecessary clutter in ASP.NET code-behind classes.  This video covers creating presentation, business and data layers and also covers another layer I normally add to projects that I refer to as "Model".  The model layer contains data entity classes that are used to pass data between the different layers. 

If you're currently embedding all of your code directly in ASP.NET pages, this video will help get you started on the road to recovery.  I'm kidding of course, but if you want to build more re-useable and maintainable applications you'll want to segregate your code into different layers at a minimum.  Other types of architectures can certainly be applied as well.