Rick Strahl's Web Log

Weblog Posts in December 2009

LINQ to SQL and missing Many to Many EntityRefs
December 24, 2009 @ 2:05 am

LINQ to SQL expects every table to be mapped to have primary keys which is reasonable. However, today I ran into a problem with an existing database and a many to many relationship which did not have a Pk in the link table. The model and underlying XML seemed to map this just fine, however, the actual generated code did not approve of this arrangement.

12 comments

Making Sense of ASP.NET Paths
December 21, 2009 @ 1:20 am

ASP.NET includes a plethora of functions and utilities to retrieve information about the current requests and paths in general. So much so that it's often hard to remember exactly which path property or method you are actually looking for. This update to an old and very popular post from this blog summarizes many of the paths and path related operations that are available in ASP.NET.

38 comments

SmtpClient and Locked File Attachments
December 18, 2009 @ 3:00 pm

Ran into an easily overlooked problem a few days ago where SmtpClient messages with attachments would keep the attached files locked on the local machine. Email would send fine with attachments but the local files remain locked after sending. It's easy to miss as the files are locked for writing only so subsequent read operations actually work, but the file is still locked. The solution is easy enough by applying a .Dispose() in the right spot, but nonetheless unexpected.

9 comments

A free standing ASP.NET Pager Web Control
December 14, 2009 @ 12:15 am

Although there's decent Pager support in ASP.NET controls the way paging works is inconsistent and not very generic. After a recent experience of creating a small pager component for MVC I decided having a generic non-data or control dependent Pager WebControl would be useful. In this post I cover a custom Pager control implementation that addresses some of the shortcomings with the stock paging functionality for me.

15 comments

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Startup Failures
December 05, 2009 @ 6:25 pm

I’ve been working with VS 2010 for a while now and while it works Ok most of the time it seems the environment is very, very fragile when it comes to crashes and installed packages. Specifically I’ve been working just fine for days, then when VS 2010 crashes it will not start. Instead I get the good old Application cannot start dialog: Other failures I’ve seen bring forth other just as useful...

7 comments