Tony Lombardo

I can't believe Dev Connections is already over.  Perhaps it was the self induced memory loss that's saving me from remembering my horrible luck in the casino, but the show did seem to speed by.  All in all, I thought it was a good show - good, but not the best.  I'm not docking points for technical content, I thought that was all superb.  It was the peripherals that I've seen done better in the past.  My biggest gripe was the lack of available refreshments.  Manning the booth for most of the conference, you quickly get a dry throat and there usually wasn't a bottle of water in sight. When I went to TechEd orlando, it seemed that there were more water coolers there than people.  I would suggest making water available for dev connections.  And what was with the air in that hotel?  I've never before had such a dry throat and chapped lips hit so suddenly!  I guess it's the extra oxygen pumped in the air to keep everyone alert.

Viva Las Vegas, or so they say.  I'm here at Dev Connections thru Wednesday;  I'll be spending most of my time at the Infragistics booth, so if you're at the show stop by the vendor area and introduce yourself.  

I don't know about you, but I'm absolutely tired of getting JavaScript errors on 50% of the websites I visit.  It's pretty much become an expectation that if you visit certain sites (http://www.weather.com comes to mind) you're going to get a JavaScript error.  Why?  Is it because no one cares, or because no one notices?  Either way it's out of control, and it seems that everyone has simply accepted this behavior of the WWW at this point.  Being a web developer my browser is always set to show me JavaScript errors and prompt me to debug.  I do this so that I'm made aware when I introduce a JavaScript error into one of my pages, however it also makes me aware when anyone else does too.  I think it's time that we force a change, and hopefully together we can catalyze this change - turning unhandled JavaScript errors into the exception not the rule.

Well, it looks like the dog days of summer are over, and the community is once again hopping with activity.  September and October are going to be busy months for me!  In less than a 30 day period I'll be speaking at 2 code camps and REMIX!  I'm pretty excited about the opportunities, and hopefully I'll get to meet some of you at these events.  Here's a quick list of what and where - you can also look at the Infragistics community calendar to see what other events Infragistics will be involved with.

These days, just about every ASP.NET application has a grid of some sort in it, which is tied to a back end database through some databinding mechanism.  In many cases this is either a DataSet, SqlDataSource, ObjectDataSource, or in some cases a custom business object layer.  Further pushing the envelope, grids are no longer used to display 50 or 100 records, but thousands to hundreds of thousands have become commonplace.  AJAX can be used to boost performance by enabling paging, while not horribly disrupting the user experience.  In this case, getting the data from you DBMS to your application becomes the bottleneck. 

I started working with VS2008 pretty regularly about a month ago.  One of the first things I wanted to try out was LINQ.  I had been to assorted sessions at PDC, TechEd, MIX, and some other shows where they covered LINQ, and I was pretty impressed.  In the past, figuring out how to use a new VS feature was almost like a treasure hunt.  You could pick up clues here and there, but putting it all together was challenging.  I'm not sure if it's due to Scott Gu's blogs, or the intuitive nature of LINQ (or both), but I was pleasantly surprised that I could do it!