Paul Brown

My applications have the Business and Data Access Layers in a separate DLL from the presentation. This makes it so that everything that wants to do a certain function uses the same library. I also like to pre-compile my web sites which means that I can't get at the app.config if I need to make changes to the connection string (moving around dev, test, prod, etc). I found this from Jason Gaylord that worked quite well. As I worked with it, I began to think that there might be a better way to handle it. My answer was a simple factory pattern class to create my datacontext. I'd like to claim the idea but I really got it from the Enterprise Application Block's DatabaseFactory. Instead of adding an additional constructor I simply create a class that has the responsibility for creating the datacontext. The CreateDataContext method determines the correct connection string and then uses the predefined constructors. I place this class in the code file for the LINQ To SQL since ...

Since I'm old school and so are most of my users, I wanted to create a simple Silverlight app that had a title bar across the top, nav menu on the left side and a content area on the right. You can modify this for mutiple zones and do some pretty slick stuff. Note: This is Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and VS 2008. The key is to create a Canvas that gets changed when you want to make changes. Here's the code for the above -- notice the Canvas named ContentHolder. < UserControl x:Class ="SilverLightMasterPageTest.Page" xmlns ="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x ="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:local ="clr-namespace:SilverLightMasterPageTest" > < Grid x:Name ="LayoutRoot" Background ="#FF5C7590" > < Grid.RowDefinitions > < RowDefinition Height ="30" /> < RowDefinition Heig...