Matt Berseth

This past week I finally set aside some time to take a look at Silverlight.  I started with ScottGu's digg demo application and continued on to silverlight.net to check out what some of the early adopters have already built.  I didn't get too far before I bumped into a control on the Silverlight showcase homepage that thought was pretty interesting.  The control is a datagrid of sorts that allows you to filter the contents of the grid using a tag cloud.  So I took a crack at creating a similar looking grid using ASP.NET 3.5 (the screen shot is below). Notes: The icon images used in this sample are transparent PNG's, so the demo page looks a little goofy in IE6. Live Demo (IE7, FF and Opera 9.26) | Download (.Net 3.5) Update (3/4/2008):  Mark Grubner posted the following comment: A question about this one though - could you comment...

LinkedIn has a nice looking address book widget that displays all of your connections partitioned by last name.  To the left of the contact listing is an index that allows you to jump right to a section.  This control isn't overly fancy, but I was curious what HTML/CSS/JavaScript was used to create it.  So I took it apart using the IE Developer Toolbar and rebuilt it using ASP.NET 3.5 - making use primarily of LINQ to XML, the LinqDataSource and a couple of ListView's.  Feel free to browse the source code by following the download link.  And, of course I recommend checking out the live demo as well.  If you are interested in how I created the sample, a quick description of the implementation details can be found just below the screen shot.  And the best part - excluding the CSS, only 115 lines of markup/code are required to build...

Last November Josh Stodola wrote a detailed post discussing how great looking fluid-width rounded corners can easily be created using Paint.NET, a handful of DIV tags and a small amount of CSS.  The basic technique Josh outlines isn't new, but he does a great job walking through the steps with just the right amount of detail.  I remember reading the article sometime after I struggled through creating an AjaxControlToolkit control based on NiftyCorners (being completely uncreative, I called my custom extender control the NiftyCornersExtender) and I found it very interesting.  I recently went back through and re-read Josh's article this past week and went through his tutorial again. It turns out this was great timing - I am working on a project where the client has requested a sleek, soft and simple interface - those were their exact words.  So I used Josh's tutorial to frame a couple of my...

Lately, I have been playing around with ASP.NET's new LinqDataSource.  Most of my data resides in a SQL Server database, so I always configure the LinqDataSource to work with the LINQ to SQL DataContext and Entity objects.  These components are still pretty new to be, so I am still kind of in awe at how it all works together so seamlessly.  I guess maybe I am a little paranoid, but I don't like that using LINQ to SQL seems like magic.  Sooner or later something is not going to work, and I am going to have to figure out why that is.  Maybe it's a performance problem, maybe it's a data integrity issue, but sooner or later I am going to have to understand (at least a little bit) about how LINQ to SQL works so I can effectively debug my problem.  I found that displaying the SQL statements the...