- Solving the Problem No One Seems to Care About

I subtitled this post with the tongue-in-cheek phrase "Solving the Problem No One Seems to Care About" because I recently discovered what I would consider to be a flaw in the design of ASP.NET user controls, but I seem to be the only one who cares.

The flaw is that there is no HTML emitted for an ASP.NET user control.  Don't be mislead by my previous statement though.  Certainly the contents of the user control are emitted, but if your user control contains nothing, there will be no HTML emitted by it.  Here is some example ASP.NET markup for a page:

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true"  CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %& ...

As many times as I have googled DB2 and .NET topics and never recall a hit at this forum certainly qualifies it as a secret in my book:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=467

Since I have several posts on interfacing between .NET and the AS/400, and because this type of information is scarce on the internet, I often receive emails from people asking how to do certain things.  As I believe I have stated in every AS/400 related article I have posted, I actually know very little about the AS/400.  I just try to share the little bits that I do know.  Let this paragraph serve as my ongoing disclaimer concerning my AS/400 ignorance.

Recently, I received an email from James Wright asking about calling Stored Procedures on the AS/400.  He was attempting to use the cwbx.dll to call them, but was having trouble.  I informed him that I am not sure cwbx.dll can do that.  I am not saying that it cannot, just that I don't know that it can since I have never done it.  I recommended that instead he use either the ADO.NET DB2 native provider or one of the DB2 OleDb providers and try to call the DB2 stored p ...

In googling for AS/400 and cwbx.dll information, I see what appears to be a pattern of developers unable to find the documentation for the iSeries ActiveX Automation Objects, the API implemented in cwbx.dll.

If you have installed iSeries Access For Windows, it should be on your machine (I think).  In your IBM iSeries Access for Windows menu, select the Programmer's ToolKit/Programmer's ToolKit menu.  When the help system opens, click on the Program Call node.  Click on the ActiveX link for documentation for cwbx.dll.

There are also links in the Program Call node for C/C++ APIs and Java. I expect that these are equivalent APIs for those languages.

...when you create a site dedicated to a specific CSS property and value!

I was doing some reading about CSS and HTML layout when I stumbled on a CSS article that was discussing the float property.  Specifically, it was dealing with float:left.  Since I didn't know what this meant, I decided to google for it.  Googling for "float:left", the third entry on the page caught my attention.  It had a title of float:left at floatleft.com.  I thought this must be the holy grail of float:left knowledge, so I click the link.

http://www.floatleft.com

Why would someone go to the trouble to register the domain and create the page that is there for absolutely nothing?  Worse than that, the best I can tell it isn't even using float:left anywhere.  Come on!  If you are going to have a site for float:left, us ...

Since posting my article titled "Calling AS/400 (AS400) RPG Programs From ASP.NET", I have gotten a good bit of feedback and questions. This is further evidence of how difficult it is to find good information about interfacing with the AS/400. Due to some of the questions and comments posted about that article, I thought I would do a little more research, and post a follow-up article.

There is a downloadable sample project at the end of this article.

Be sure to check out part 1 in this series by clicking here.

The Disclaimer

Again, I provide the disclaimer that I am very ignorant about the AS/400. I come from a C ...

Now would probably be a good time to point out that when I first started creating articles for NetSplore, my intent was not only to share information with others, but to share it with myself...in the future!  I can't tell you how many times I have had to go scrambling trying to figure out what code did something I needed to do again.  So, I thought that if there was something I was having trouble remembering how to accomplish, others may have the same problem, and I should create an article.

I explain all that as a disclaimer as to why this article seems so trivial.  Frankly, I can never seem to remember how to programmtically trigger a breakpoint in my code.  This article tells how.

C#

Add the following code to the location you want to break, and it's just that simple:

Have you ever needed to raise a button-click event programmatically?  I sure have.  Sometimes you end up needing to programmatically simulate that a button was clicked by a user, but how do you accomplish this?  Often, I just call the event handling method that is registered for the button-click event.  And. most of the time this is acceptable.  Or, sometimes I put the actual code I need executed in a common method, and have the button-click event method call the common method, and then I can also call the common method from whereever I need.  However, there is a risk to these approaches.  What if the button-click event had more than one method registered?

If that question confuses you, you should be aware of the multicast delegate.  A multicast delegate allows more than one method to be registered with the delegate.  Button-click events are such a delegate.  This means it is possible to have more than one method get call ...

Have you ever had to wrestle with HTML or CSS rendering issues?  Working in a compiled language environment like ASP.NET can be exasperating sometimes.  The cycle time of edit, compile, and test can get very fristrating when you are making many small changes trying to determine why something is not rendering the way you would expect.

It would speed things up considerably if you could find a way to eliminate the compiling process just to try tweaking some HTML or CSS.  You could save the rendered HTML in your browser to disk.  Then you could directly edit the file to resolve the issue.  Finally, you would edit the ASP.NET source code, compile, and test to make sure it behaved properly.  However, doing this creates the problem of pathing for images.  You may find the paths to the images won't handle the location of the saved HTML file.  If images are missing, it will cause the ...

The C# language has a feature known as the multicast delegate.  Any delegate that has a void return type, is a multicast delegate.  A multicast delegate can be assigned and invoke multiple methods.

You may have seen hints of this in your code.  For example, if you are doing ASP.NET development and have ever looked at a page's InitializeComponent() method, you may have noticed a statement like this: