ASP.NET

Cool CSS buttons

Steve Gray — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:45:00 GMT

Last night I did a search on 'Cool CSS buttons', to find a technique that would allow me to code buttons that I can change in CSS later if I need too. This particular site has been around for a while, it's nice to be able to give it a face lift every year or so to keep interest. So... I landed on http://www.jankoatwarpspeed.com/post/2008/04/30/make-fancy-buttons-using-css-sliding-doors-technique.aspx and found exactly what I was looking for. His technique was intended for <a> tags, but lends itself nicely to my mileau which is ASP.NET coding.

This tag:

</asp:LinkButton ID="lnk" runat="server" Text="<span>linkbutton</span>" CssClass="button">

Gets marked up by this css:

 /* css for buttons */
a.button {
    /* Sliding right image */
    background: transparent url('../images/button_right.jpg') no-repeat scroll top right; 
    display: block;
    float: left;
    height: 35px; /* CHANGE THIS VALUE ACCORDING TO IMAGE HEIGHT */
    margin-right: 6px;
    padding-right: 16px; /* CHENGE THIS VALUE ACCORDING TO RIGHT IMAGE WIDTH */
    /* FONT PROPERTIES */
    text-decoration: none;
    color: #FFFFFF;
    font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
    font-size:12px;
    font-weight:bold;
}
a.button span {
    /* Background left image */ 
    background: transparent url('../images/button_left.jpg') no-repeat; 
    display: block;
    line-height: 21px; /* CHANGE THIS VALUE ACCORDING TO BUTTONG HEIGHT */
    padding: 7px 0 5px 18px;
} 
a.button:hover span{
    text-decoration:underline;
}

and the end result is a really nice looking button. You'll want to look at Janco's blog entry for the images that you'll need and for a full explanation. I'm disappointed that I couldn't get the RSS subscription to that site to work... I need it to hook up in Outlook 2007. Maybe someone else can help me with that?

Connection Pooling with the Microsoft Data Access Application Block

Steve Gray — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:04:00 GMT

Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to obtaining a connection from the pool. This may have occurred because all pooled connections were in use and max pool size was reached

I've been using the DAAB for some time with no issues at all, until today. I had a customer go live and within a few hours I had the above error.

I fixed it by editing my connection string to explicitly specify connecion pooling, that fixed it.

   <add name="PHSB" connectionString="Pooling=yes;Max Pool Size=100;Min Pool Size=5;server=HS-GODZILLA;database=PHSB;Integrated Security=true" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/>

Latest data access paradigm

Steve Gray — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:34:00 GMT

I really liked the way that the Subsonic scaffolding worked when I started testing it, but it had several drawbacks that made it unworkable - it insisted on scaffolding the entire database (I work on databases with 25000 objects) and that just took too long. And, I could not get it to bind to so types of grids.

So, I copied everything good about it into my own data access classes. This is based on the Microsoft Enterprise Framework 3.1

You need two classes:

Imports Microsoft.VisualBasic
Imports System.Data


Public Class commandParameter
    Public ParamName As String
    Public ParamValue As Object
    Public ParamType As DbType


    Sub New(ByVal paramName As String, ByVal paramValue As Object, ByVal paramType As DbType)
        Me.ParamName = paramName
        Me.ParamValue = paramValue
        Me.ParamType = paramType
    End Sub


End Class

Imports Microsoft.VisualBasic
Imports System.Data.SqlClient
Imports System.Data
Imports Microsoft.Practices.ObjectBuilder
Imports Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Data
Imports Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Common


Public Class storedProcedure
    Dim _storedProcName As String
    Dim _db As String
    Public commandParameters As System.Collections.Generic.List(Of commandParameter)


    Sub New(ByVal StoredProcName As String, ByVal DB As String)
        _storedProcName = StoredProcName
        _db = DB
        commandParameters = New System.Collections.Generic.List(Of commandParameter)
    End Sub


    Sub execute()


        Dim db As Database = DatabaseFactory.CreateDatabase(_db)
        Dim dbCommand As Common.DbCommand = db.GetStoredProcCommand(_storedProcName)


        For Each cp In commandParameters
            db.AddInParameter(dbCommand, cp.ParamName, cp.ParamType, cp.ParamValue)
        Next
        db.ExecuteNonQuery(dbCommand)


    End Sub
    Function getReader() As SqlDataReader
        Dim db As Database = DatabaseFactory.CreateDatabase(_db)
        Dim dbCommand As Common.DbCommand = db.GetStoredProcCommand(_storedProcName)


        For Each cp In commandParameters
            db.AddInParameter(dbCommand, cp.ParamName, cp.ParamType, cp.ParamValue)
        Next
        Return db.ExecuteReader(dbCommand)



    End Function
    Function getTable() As DataTable
        Dim db As Database = DatabaseFactory.CreateDatabase(_db)
        Dim dbCommand As Common.DbCommand = db.GetStoredProcCommand(_storedProcName)


        For Each cp In commandParameters
            db.AddInParameter(dbCommand, cp.ParamName, cp.ParamType, cp.ParamValue)
        Next
        Return db.ExecuteDataSet(dbCommand).Tables(0)



    End Function
End Class

And you call it like this:

oDR = DLL.FP_blog_SEL_byBlogID(BlogId, "mydbname").getReader

DLL class:

Public Class DLL


Public Shared Function FP_blog_SEL_byBlogID(ByVal BlogId As Int64, ByVal DB As String) As storedProcedure
        Dim sp As New storedProcedure("FP_blog_SEL_byBlogID", DB)
        sp.commandParameters.Add(New commandParameter("@blogID", BlogId, DbType.Int64))
        Return sp
End Function


End Class