Searching MSDN with FireFox and IE

Did you ever notice this linkbutton on the MSDN site?



I didn't, until today. I tested it with Mozilla FireFox 3.0.11 and Internet Explorer 7, and it worked with both browsers.



This might help you save a few seconds a day ;)

GridView with Sort Indication: Change backgroundColor of row Onmouseover

I blogged on writing a custom control which inherits from the GridView to support sort indication here.

Today I added another feature: Change the color of a row when you hover your mouse over the row.

I added two extra properties: OnMouseOverBackgroundColor and OnMouseOutBackgroundColor. All it took were four lines of code in the OnRowCreated method.



Adding simple javascript attributes did the trick.

This is the result.



Learn more about ASP.NET Controls in the book Pro ASP.NET 3.5 Server Controls and AJAX Components.

GridView with Sort Indication: Change forecolor headercolumn on sorting

This is something which gets asked pretty often by customers: 'Can you add some kind of sort indication to the headers of this column?'.

I've seen a few solutions on the web. Some use CSS to fix this, some handle the OnRowCreated event.. These are both good solutions, but these solutions aren't very reusable and might end up in a copy-paste fest.

Because I'm reading Pro ASP.NET 3.5 Server Controls and AJAX Components, I thought it would be a good idea to create a custom control which inherits from the GridView to put a chapter of the book into practice.

I extended the GridView so you can set a HeaderColorSortedColumn. I added the property HeaderColorSortedColumn and overrode the OnRowCreated method.



The most important part in this code snippet is finding the LinkButton and comparing it's CommandArgument to the SortExpression of the GridView.

I implemented my custom control in default.aspx by adding the register tag on top of the page.



And here is the result..



Next up is adding an image to the headers.

Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (Free E-book)

Microsoft Press is releasing this E-book for free! All you need is a Windows Live ID.



You can download it here!

I haven't read it yet, but when I scrolled through the introduction the title "T-SQL: Still here to stay" caught my eye. This is something I was wondering about a while ago.. Should we still be using stored procedures? If even Microsoft is still using stored procedures, we can be pretty sure we should.

A while ago I asked a few professionals their opinion on stored procedures. You can find that article here. What are your thoughts?

I hope you enjoy this free e-book!