Recently had a requirement to disable a command button inside a DevExpress grid based on role permissions. In DevExpress prior to 9.1 HtmlCommandCellPrepared event would have been my only option to change the settings of individual command column cells. This applies the logic to every row bind which is not what I want to do. I want to disable ALL rows based on role permissions at once. Google recently found me a NEW event, CommandButtonInitialize event allows you to change command button controls visibility and also enable/disable them easily. [More]

In my application the DAL layer leverages ADO.NET heavily, everything is a DataSet, DataTable or DataRow under the hood. The problem is Silverlight 3 out of the box does not support DatTable/DataRow. There are a few open source projects providing this functionality but I was not sold. Off to find a method to convert a DataTable or DataRow to something my Silverlight Application could consume via a web service. I considered a custom DataTable/DataRow JSON Serialization in JSON.NET, converting DataTable/DataRow to IDictionary or IDataReader to IDictionary and serializing the dictionary, creating custom entities. [More]

I hit this error the other day when attempting to debug why my save logic was not working. It turns out this error shows itself when debugging in my override of the CommandExecutionListenerService. It only raises its ugly head during debug mode. I simply moved the break point from within the BeginCommandExecution overridden method and all was good. I did see a few points related to this but it dealt with explicitly leveraging the OpenDialogBox natively. In my case DevExpress AgRichEditor is calling this on my behalf, still causing the security error. This leads me to another issue, not being able to prevent the OpenDialogBox call from the command services, at least I do not see how to. I believe I could override the event handler on the Save As to get around this but I decided to simply disable default Save As and create my own Save menu item to implement my custom save logic to persist the document to the database. [More]

If you are developing a Silverlight Application before long you are eventually going to run into caching, updating, deployment issues. What do I mean? You update your SL application, perform some internal debugging/testing, chase your tail to figure out why you are not seeing the updates. Lets say you understand what the issue is, resolve it, then proceed to deploy your SL application. You get a few complaints from the test team, hey, where are the updates you promised in the release? Even better yet, the complaint comes from the client. Do you I have your attention yet? [More]

Currently working with an application that is leveraging DevExpress Silverlight Rich Text Editor to provide rich word like processing in an ASP.NET application. In doing so, I need to override the “Save As” functionality. In DevExpress 9.3.4 toolset everything is a service, yes even commands. To provide custom save logic I need to override service commands. [More]

Working with the DataContractJsonSerializer is simple, this is a new namespace ( System.Runtime.Serialization.Json ) in .NET 3.5 for JSON serialization. However, do not be fooled, the namespace is contained in the following reference, System.ServiceModel.Web not in System.Runtime.Serialization. Creating my CxJSONHelper was a snap, took a few minutes. I did end up performing a Google on this topic to ensure it was as simple as it appeared ( 1, 2, 3 ), plus added a verification unit test. There are JSON frameworks to support this and more advanced features but that this point Microsoft’s implementation is enough. If you need more advanced features checkout JSON.NET and AutoMapper. [More]

I recently leveraged ILMerge to create single assemblies of featured libraries for easier deployment. There is a good article explaining .NET Modules and ILMerge here. I was tipped off by this after looking more closely at the AutoMapper open source deployed as a single AutoMapper.dll even though it references other assemblies. Following an inspection of the build script, ILMerge is used to produce the single AutoMapper.dll. [More]

I’ve been developing a Silverlight application referencing DevExpress’s Silverlight Rich Text Editor control. The last few days have been painful trying to debug from the ASP.NET Development Server. After reading and trying several things to get it working, I resorted to running against my local IIS and things are fine. I switched back to ASP.NET Development Server and it worked for about an hour, then my ability to debug vanished into thin air! I’m now back to running against my local IIS and debugging seems fine. [More]

Fixing Error 2104: Could not download the Silverlight application. Check web server settings. If you have not already setup your Mime Types, you can follow this post and try again. If that does not solve your issues you likely are getting a masked error message, an error that is not really the issue. After looking at the IIS logs I noticed I was getting a path error when attempting to load the .xap file. Notice the 404 0 3 – which means the file can not be found with the given path. [More]

Since getting my iPhone I’ve gotten back into listening to podcasts as I now have them at my finger tips at all times. Here is my current list. I’d be interested in hearing any recommendations. [More]