Great trilogy. It starts off kind of slow but then it builds momentum with each page and goes towards a great ending. What surprised me to this book is that it's between the few Forgotten Realms novels in which i couldn't guess the plot unfolding. The plot line simply jumps on and off, back and forth. Really good. Recommended.

There's seems to be a little misunderstaning between ASP.NET developers on what to use for skinning : ASP.NET skins or CSS ? The answer is, of course, both. That's because each each of them is good at it's own thing. ASP.NET can be used to give the same look to server side controls while CSS is used for the rest of the design.

Here's a simple, yet very effective, tip for integrating these 2. Create a theme (let's call it "spring") and inside the folder create a CSS file with the same name as the theme (spring.css). Now if the theme is associated with the site pages (you can do that from we.config) the spring.css is applied automatically without referencing it from the master page.

I'm currently reading "Framework Design Guidelines" and enjoying a lot. The book is tight packed with great information for designing solid APIs. While reading the book it happens that a lot of times i nod my head while thinking "yeah....yeah...that's exactly how it should be implemented". Some other times i don't really agree with the framework designers. For instance here is a quote about ref and out parameters in the context of returning multiple results from a function.

Anders Hejlsberg As a rule, I am not too crazy about ref and out parameters in APIs. A such APIs compose very poorly, forcing you to declare temporary variables. I much prefer functional designs that convey the entire result in the return value

Unfortunately i can't agree here because this recommendation conflicts with one of the most important guideline in software development : less code. . Here is an example. Compare :

public struct ResultInfo
{
private string name;
private int age;

public string Name
{
get
{
return name;
}
set
{
name = value;
}
}

public int Age
{
get
{
return age;
}
set
{
age = value;
}
}
}
ResultInfo info = this.GetMyStuff();

to this :

string name = string.Empty;
int age= 0;
this.GetMyStuff(ref name, ref age);

Less code = simpler = better solution from my point of view.

I have released a small demo application (running on MS Access) for DataBlock. It's available here. The app dmonstrates basic data binding and CRUD operations.

I have released a small quickfix for DataBlock. A code generation bug which affected string types slipped in DataBlockModeler. Just visit the site to get the update.

...or Entity validation Library is a nice attribute based validation library. I hope to integrate it with DataBlock's mapped objects (TableMetadata).