"Peter and the case of the ASP.NET developer"

In my recent posting “What do you think of Dynamic Data?”, users have offered many views on what ASP.NET Dynamic Data is and is not. In general, they feel like it’s for simple cases, mockups, and where customization isn’t needed. Everyone seems to agree it makes for very fast development, when limited to those situations.

This is part of a series of posts offering ideas to improve ASP.NET.

I have been heavily invested in ASP.NET Dynamic Data since pre Beta 1 of ASP.NET 3.5 SP1. To me, this technology is significant and clever, although with its flaws. (My products DES Dynamic Data and Versatile DataSources are intended to address those flaws.)

Finally I’ve built code using Generics. Sure Generics has been around since .net 2.0. But my thing has been to code my commercial products. Peter’s Data Entry Suite had its origins in ASP.NET 1.0 and still can be compiled for ASP.NET 1.x customers. (There still are a few.) The new Versatile DataSources project allowed me to work with Generics and I had a blast. Yet I ran into some challenges that I’m sure everyone runs into. I figured I’d write about how I solved them.

Telerik has changed a few client-side APIs since their RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX 2009 Q2 release. They break some of the DES validation support as defined in the Telerik_web_ui.config file found in your /DES folder.

I’ve encountered a new exception when using ASP.NET 4.0 Beta 2.

Each web control offers a SmartTag. It’s that little arrow on the right edge of the control and pops up a list of commands. Here’s how to add a command where the user can pick from a list of types. This is an extension of the Using ITypeDiscoveryService in a TypeConverter post.