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A while back Paul Patterson wrote an awesome step-by-step blog post based on a forum question on how to send an automated email using System.Net.Mail from LightSwitch . If you missed it here it is: Microsoft LightSwitch – Send an Email from LightSwitch This is a great solution if you want...

Note: This post has been updated for Beta 2 on 3/24/2011 LightSwitch has a really nice feature on data grids that allow you to export them to Excel if running as a Desktop application (out of browser). This gives you a basic way of getting data out of the system to create reports or do further...

Starting in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1, you can create ADO.NET Data Services to easily expose data models via RESTful web services. So if you are building a remote CRUD data access layer then this is a technology that you're probably using or are looking into. I’ve written a lot about about data...

Yesterday I posted about how we could create a letter generator (mail merge) that took data from a database to create a Word 2007 document using the System.IO.Packaging class. I showed how to take data from Northwind using a single LINQ query to create XDocument objects representing letters to customers...

With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 we can work with a much simpler, standard, XML format called Open XML which opens the door for many types of applications that cannot work via COM. What if you needed to build a scalable web service that processes many documents in high volume? What if you wanted...

This month I have an article on DevProConnections: Taking Advantage of LINQ and XML in Microsoft Office 2007 In this article, I talk about how a lot of applications that need to take advantage of Microsoft Office can do so without going through COM. Many programs that need to process documents...

Last post I talked about how to get WPF data binding to work with master-detail entity collections. I had a couple readers ask me how they could filter the child collection instead of bringing them all down so in this post I’d like to show how you could do that. It’s actually pretty easy. Customer (Master...

The ObservableCollection is a special WPF collection that provides proper notifications to the UI when items are added, removed, or the list is refreshed because it implements INotifyCollectionChanged . It’s common to use this collection (or inherit from it) to contain your business objects you want...

It’s extremely common to have to hook up lookup tables on your data entry forms in order to populate foreign keys in a database. I’ve talked about how to do this in Winforms and WPF with Datasets and LINQ to SQL before: How Do I: Create a Lookup Combobox in WPF? How Do I: Create a Master-Detail Data...

Today I got a question that comes up often in data application programming about how to count rows in a DataSet that matched a condition. The DataSet may be bound to a DataGridView or other list control and it’s tempting to start looking at the control to see if you can coax it into returning what you...

Last few posts I've been building a WPF client against ADO.NET Data Services, if you missed them: Using ADO.NET Data Services ADO.NET Data Services - Building a WPF Client ADO.NET Data Services - Enforcing FK Associations and a Fix for Deleting Entities Today I want to show you how we...

We just released a new community article onto the Visual Basic Developer Center by one of our MVPs, Jeff Certain , called Scaling ADO.NET DataTables . In this article Jeff shows shows us how to query and aggregate data using the built in DataTable methods as well as LINQ to DataSets. He compares the...

I've had a lot of questions lately on how to display data from two separate tables in the database into a single DataGridView for editing. It sure would be nice if all our data was in a single table, but in reality most of the time it's not. Basically the problem is that we want one single table (entity...

Check out the latest news on the VB Dev Center . I'm finally headlining myself ;-) I'm in the October issue of MSDN Magazine . I've been managing the content for the Basic Instincts column for a little over a year now where we rotate writers from the VB Team. This month is my birthday month so I decided...

About a month ago the Open XML SDK 1.0 (June 08 update) was released . The SDK provides strongly typed document part access to Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 documents. The SDK has been a CTP for a while, but last month version 1.0 was finally released. So I installed this baby last week and...

In the July/August issue of CoDe Magazine there's an article I wrote with Avner Aharoni (the Program Manager on XML literals) called Sharpening Your Axis with Visual Basic 9 . (They just opened up online access to even non-subscribers today!) I highly recommend this article which shows you from the beginning...

In my last post on this subject I explored creating WPF UI's dynamically using XML literals. The one part that bugged me a bit was that even though the UI was dynamic, we were using a fixed object model of our customer (using LINQ to SQL classes). I wanted to augment this code a bit more so that we could...

Lately I've been getting my hands deep into WPF with my line-of-business (LOB)/data-based application mind set. I'm taking a different approach to the technology resisting the urge to put on my amateur-designer hat and instead purely focus on data, data-binding, formatting controls, and some basic layout...

I've had many questions lately on how you can query for a specific node in an XML document (or fragment) and change it's value using LINQ. (This must mean that people are really starting to use this stuff so I'm pretty excited.) This is really easy to do because you can modify the values of the selected...

Often times we need to parse HTML for data. Sure in a perfect world everything would have a nice service or API wrapped around it but as we all know this is not always the case. Many times we're left with parsing files or "screen scraping" to get the data we need from other applications. Sure this is...

In my previous posts this week I showed how to build a simple distributed application with a Windows client, a WCF hosted middle-tier and a data access layer that used LINQ to SQL: LINQ to SQL N-Tier Smart Client - Part 1 Building the Middle-Tier LINQ to SQL N-Tier Smart Client - Part 2 Building the...

In my last post we built the service and data access layer for our LINQ to SQL N-Tier application. In this post we'll walk through building a very simple Windows client form that works with our middle-tier. Adding the Service Reference Now that we have our middle-tier built it's time to add the...

In my previous posts on LINQ to SQL I showed how to build LINQ to SQL classes and set up the data binding in your Windows applications. If you missed them: Related Data Binding and ComboBoxes with LINQ to SQL Creating Lookup Lists with LINQ to SQL One-To-Many (Master-Detail) Forms with LINQ...

In the last few posts on LINQ to SQL I've showed how to set up an object model using the O/R designer and how to handle a couple data binding scenarios with Comboboxes here and here . Last post on this topic we implemented a one-to-many data entry form and I showed how to work with stored procs as well...

In previous posts this month I showed how to use LINQ to SQL classes with a couple different Combobox data binding scenarios. (You can read those articles here and here .) Today I'm going to show you how to create a one-to-many data entry form (and we'll use a couple Combobox lookup lists as well). I...