I was running a test on my Web Server today when a friend of mine IMed me about an interesting question about .NET. He was a new programmer for this company and the old developer that he replaced was running production(oh my) applications right of his desktop. The IT manager was getting worried because they dont have a list of applications that the old guy did because the old developer didnt do any turnover(he was fired =)) and alot of the apps that he did were essential to the business(the company was a small accounting firm). So my friend asked me if theres a way to figure out which applications are running using managed code so that they could check the application and move it to a more secure and dependable server.

In part 2 of our Back To The Basics Series, Keith discusses how to pass parameters to your inline SQL Statements, read a connection string from the web.config and the use of a static class for utilities. He also refactored(a little bit) our original solution to make the code more manageable.

This is the first part our series about ADO.NET which is part of our Back To The Basic Series which is a series designed to teach beginners about the benefits of ADO.NET and to show how easy it is to use the ADO.NET in a short 10 to 15 minute video using Tagalog as the medium.  Our idea is to start from small demo application and build from there by adding new functionalities and refactoring the sample application on each part of the series.

On this demo you'll learn the basics of creating a connection to SQL Server, using a Universal DataLink to automatically generate your connection string to a database server, populating a DataSet using a SqlDataAdapter and assigning a DataSet to our GridView control.

>> Click here to view the video <<

Comments and suggestions are welcome! :)

Read this guys intership adventure with Microsoft, Google and Yahoo(his current job).

He also did a chart which i think would easily spellout where to go if you are looking for a place to go between the 3 giants:

I wish I had the chance to do what he did.. but hey! I had a great time at my intership too.. building Information Systems for a University.. it's not as advance at what he did but still pretty fun it you ask me :)

Don't you just love Generics? I mean, it helps you alot in so many ways that everytime you are asked about why you love Generics all you could say is "Uh, type safety?".. Err! We need to change that! There are alot more things to like about Generics than just type safety... Like code organization... more readable(if you ask me) code... and of course.. type safety(what? i thought you said there's more) :P

Looks like Russ and Shervin blew everyone off their feet :)

well.. except for 1 guy :P

Read more here: http://geekswithblogs.net/shervin/archive/2007/02/22/107001.aspx