Event handler not firing? AutoPostBack

I keep running into people having this problem, so I’m going to put this out there in the hopes that someone will find this BEFORE they pull out their hair…

If you have an event handler that is not firing in your ASP.NET page and the control that is supposed to be firing it is a textbox, drop down list, checkbox, etc. (events like OnChanged would be what you would most likely have this problem with) then you MUST set the “AutoPostBack” property of the form control(s) to true… If you don’t do this, it will never fire your events because it will not come back to the server for anything until you click a button or something else that causes a postback happens.

Keep in mind that causing a postback on events like these could cause a good bit more traffic than you think and it will also cause the page to jump back to the top if you don’t use the tip from my next blog entry…

DevDays – Whidbey

I attented Microsoft DevDays 2004 on Tuesday over in Atlanta, GA and I must say I am really quite impressed with the everything I saw there. The day started out like it was going to be a very high level overview of how to do this and that but after about the first 3 slides, it turned into exactly what I was looking for. I chose the “Smart Client” track which basically explained how to create applications that are as easy to deploy and maintain as web applications but have the rich user interface and power of a traditional fat client application. After seeing what they showed us, I must say that smart clients will be the way of the future. I’m planning on doing more exploration into smart clients on my own and I will make posts on TheSpoke with any interesting information or tips/tricks I run into along the way. But now the for main reason for this post….Whidbey.

If you haven’t heard of Whidbey, it is Visual Studio .NET 2005 and it is going to be one of the greatest IDEs known to man for .NET development. I haven’t had a chance to install the Alpha build I got from DevDays but from the 1 and a half hour presentation at the DevDays closing keynote, I can honestly say that I could not have been more impressed with what is already added in this alpha version. It’s not really stable and that’s what you expect from an alpha build, but it does have a good number of the new features added in and working as I type this. I’m going to be posting each of these features and how they work and why I think they are wonderful as I have time to try them myself. But to get you interested, here are a couple of the more impressive features:

* Master Pages – Site wide templates for ASP.NET websites enforced by VS.NET

* Code completion like you’ve never seen it before (you’ll just have to wait for the blog on this one)

* Automation everywhere (want a login box here? just drag and drop it onto the form because VS.NET has it prebuilt and will take care of everything for you)

* Personalization (if you don’t like the layout of the site then change it and the site will remember it automatically with NO CODE from the developer)

Plus a ton more…hopefully next week I will be able to find time to start blogging again and start getting some of the material I promised online. Until then, thanks for reading and don’t forget to check back here in a couple of days.

IN / OUT in VS.NET 2K3

Just a quick tidbit of information for those of you using Visual Studio.NET 2003 (and possibly other versions)… The words “IN” and “OUT” are #defines in VS.NET. I had a friend that was trying to do something like: enum MyEnum { UP, DOWN, IN, OUT, LEFT, RIGHT }; and intellisense would only show those values in the enum above IN and the program would fail to compile. If you hover the mouse over either of the two words, you will see that there is a define for them but if you don’t, you can easily start pulling your hair out trying to figure this one out if you didn’t already know about it. Just thought I would share. 🙂