Steve Wellens

This question popped up on the Asp.Net forums where I moderate:

Like most developers, I love finding tools that do my work for me and make me look good. And, like most developers, I am extremely wary of adding too much outside crap to a project which can make maintaining it a nightmare. You may end up not only maintaining your own code but someone else's code, or worse, not being able to update the project because a third-party control won't let you.

I needed to create a dynamic PDF document based on user selections for a system I created this summer. Rather than use a 3rd party tool and learn a new API, I decided to try the ReportViewer control since it had the capability of exporting to PDF (and Excel).

I didn't think it was possible, but .NET surprised me yet again with a cool feature I never knew existed: The ObservableCollection. This became available in .NET 3.0.

Over on the Asp.Net forums where I moderate, a user had a problem calling a Web Service from a web page asynchronously. I tried his code on my machine and was able to reproduce the problem. I was able to solve his problem, but only after taking the long scenic route through some of the more perplexing nuances of Web Services and Proxies.

Often, there are many ways to do the same thing in .Net. You can do things the hard way or the easy way. By hard, I mean you can type a lot of code by hand. By easy, I mean you can click and drag and drop. Guess which method I am going to demonstrate…go on guess…it's OK, I'm grading on a curve…

I never pass up a chance to look at jQuery code.  It’s amazing so much power can come from such a tiny package. 

In an earlier post here, I wrote two functions to Serialize and Deserialize objects to XML strings.