This past Saturday was the Atlanta Code Camp.  I want to be make a point of thanking Cliff Jacobson, Dan Attis, Doug Ware, Glen Gordon, Jeff Ammons and all the other organizers who made this a brilliant event.

My company, Magenic Technologies, presented at seven of the sessions this year. 

Sergey Barskiy, who was a developer on the CSLA-Lite team, presented on Building Silverlight Business Applications using CSLA.NET for Silverlight.

Whitney Weaver, another of our principal consultants and a master of all things data, spoke on What’s my data doing while I sleep? Tracking data changes in SQL Server 2008.

Colin Whitlatch presented an Introduction to ASP.NET MVC, and is planning to extend his presentation over the next few weeks on his blog, where he will be digging deep into ASP.NET MVC and helping others to do the same.

Jason Rainwater needs a blog, because he is currently one of the best WPF experts in Atlanta and there aren't enough venues at this point for him to show off everything he knows.  He did two presentations this year: WPF Custom Controls and WPF DataBinding.

I presented on REST-ful WCF (the hyphen is a personal grammatical quirk rather than any attempt to make a philosophical point) and Mocking with Rhino Mocks and TypeMock: A Head-to-head Comparison.  I also got to make a short app-dev appearance in Tejas Patel's Use of data mining controls with ASP.NET presentation.

As promised to the attendees, I'm making the code samples and slide-decks available.  Please excuse the lack of organization in the code -- it's pretty much just what I was writing while I was on-stage, but should be helpful if anyone is looking for samples.  All the code uses Visual Studio 2008.  The mocking samples will require that you have the appropriate dll's for Rhino Mocks, which is free,  and TypeMock Isolator, which has a 30-day trial.

I am indebted to Pedram Rezaei for getting me started on the WCF-to-Flikr sample.

The Rest-ful WCF slide-deck and code can be downloaded here.

The Mocking powerpoint and samples are available here.

A Gibsonesque cyber-word, meatware refers, somewhat contemptuously, to those aspects of information processing that are neither software nor hardware.  Programming is a grueling mental activity, and there is a tendency among software programmers to, shall we say, not look after themselves.  There is an old adage that one should never trust a thin cook, and this might be extended to programmers also.  The most consummate technologists spend so much of their time in virtual worlds that their bodies often get neglected.  The state of their bodies becomes, consequently, an ironic badge of their devotion to their craft.

It has been said, mainly by its critics, that Modernism in philosophy since Descartes is distorted by the implicit assumption that object of philosophy is strictly rational, conscious, and intellectual.  This trend was turned back, somewhat, by Heidegger's discussion of Mood in his masterpiece Being and Time.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, which at times reads like a rewriting of Being and Time much as Sartre's Being and Nothingness does, takes this battle further by placing himself within the heart of the intellectual tradition, Husserl's Phenomenology, and emphasizing the point that all perception, all experience, occurs through the medium of our bodies.  This was, strangely enough, a revolutionary insight at the time.

Eventually Feminism (or at least certain branches of Feminist thought) took up this controversy and used it as a central template for understanding the misunderstandings between men and women.  Men misunderstand humanity as a primarily intellectual (and phallic) being.  Women, on the other hand, implicitly understand the role of the body in the same way that tides understand gravity.   It is an inescapable aspect of a woman's existence, which the scholars of women's issues tend to call "embodiment".

It can't be said that software programmers really learned anything from the insights of Feminism other than the fact that they would prefer to have very little to do with the body.  If there is such a thing as human nature, software programming tends to distort it and encourage anti-social behaviors such as distractedness, obsessiveness and self-medication.  Exemplary programmers need not be exemplary human beings, and perhaps ought not to be, to Aristotle's dismay.

Stephen Dubner at Our Daily Bleg suggests an economic explanation for the rise in American obesity.  He suggests that the elimination of outhouses and dramatic improvements in indoor plumbing may have led to the rapid increase in median weight.  Our improved ability to vacate our own waste, he avers, has lowered the inconvenience of indulging in the gastronomic pastime, and so we do.  It depends, I imagine, on whether one seeks answers in the superstructure or in the base. 

Vanity Fair, on the other hand, has a series of articles currently online which may provide a glimpse at what the unhealthy have to look forward to.  Though not himself a programmer, Christopher Hitchens has drunk, smoked and eaten himself to the point that he can be mistaken for one.  At 58, he attempts to turn back the clock of desultory living with a check-in at a spa, and writes about it. 

The articles are accompanied by illustrative photos which highlight this cautionary tale about the importance of maintaining your meatware.

download source code

ASP.NET has been missing a good, free tab control for a long time.  With the ACT Tab Container, we were finally given one.  It typically runs in client-side only mode, but can interact with server-code if we set its AutoPostback property to true.

Compared to what we had before, it is a huge improvement.  The peculiar thing about it, however, is that it isn't actually an Ajax control.  It doesn't use asynchronous postbacks or web service calls to talk to the server -- instead you just have these two mode: run it using client script only, or run it using server-side events and code-behind only.

So a few months ago I rectified this for a project, and only found out afterwards that Matt Berseth had already outlined the technique on his blog.  You basically run the tab container in client-side mode, and add update panels to the tab panels that you want to be ajaxy.  You then hook up the client-side ActivePageChanged event in such a way that it spoofs the Update Panel contained in the tab, causing an asynchronous (or partial) postback.

Matt also gave this technique a cool name.  He called it 'lazy loading the tab panel'.  Like lazy loading in OOP, using this technique the update panels inside each tab panel only do something when its tab is selected.  Information is loaded only when its needed, and not before.

I must admit that I hold some resentment against Matt for coming up with this first, and for coming up with the cool moniker for it.  On the other hand, the solution I came up with encapsulates all of the javascript needed for this into a nice simple extender control that you can drop on your page, which his does not, and I'm rather proud of this.

The VS 2008 project for this extender is linked at the top of this post.  To use it, you need to compile the project and add the compiled assembly to your project, or else just add the project to your solution and add a project reference.

1. Drop the TabContainerExtender control into your page.

2. Set the Extender's TargetControlID property to your TabContainer's ID.

3. In the RegisterUpdatePanels element of the Extender, map your tabs to your update panels.  This mapping tells the extender which Update Panels to activate when each tab is selected.

Your markup will look something like this:

    <cc2:TabContainerExtender ID="TabContainerExtender1" 
    runat="server" 
    TargetControlID="TabContainer1" OnActiveTabChanged="ActiveTabChanged">
    <RegisterUpdatePanels>
    <cc2:UpdatePanelInfo TabIndex="0" UpdatePanelID="UpdatePanel1" />
    <cc2:UpdatePanelInfo TabIndex="1" UpdatePanelID="UpdatePanel2" />
    <cc2:UpdatePanelInfo TabIndex="2" UpdatePanelID="UpdatePanel3" />
    </RegisterUpdatePanels>
    </cc2:TabContainerExtender> 

4. If you want to add some code-behind to your active tab changed event, add set the OnActiveTabChanged property of the Extender to the name of your handler.  The thrown event will pass the correct Index number for the active Tab, as well as the ID of the mapped Update Panel.  The handler's signature looks like this:

        protected void ActiveTabChanged(int index, string panelID)

        {

            ...

        }

I highly encourage you to read Matt Berseth's blog entry (which I have to admit is pretty good) to get a clear idea of the techniques being applied in this ajax extender.  If you just need a quick solution, however, feel free to download this code from the link at the top and use it any way you like with no strings attached.  There is a sample project attached to the solution that will demonstrate how to use the Tab Container Extender, in case you run into any problems with lazy loading your panels.

For reference, here is the code for the sample implementation, which loads controls on the fly based on the tab selected:

    <cc1:TabContainer ID="TabContainer1" runat="server">
    <cc1:TabPanel ID="TabPanel1" runat="server" HeaderText="Tab Panel 1">
    <ContentTemplate>
        <asp:UpdatePanel ID="UpdatePanel1" runat="server">
        <ContentTemplate>
        Content 1 ...
        <br />
            <asp:PlaceHolder ID="PlaceHolder1" runat="server"></asp:PlaceHolder>      
        </ContentTemplate>
        </asp:UpdatePanel>    
    </ContentTemplate>
    </cc1:TabPanel>
        <cc1:TabPanel ID="TabPanel2" runat="server" HeaderText="Tab Panel 2">
    <ContentTemplate>
        <asp:UpdatePanel ID="UpdatePanel2" runat="server">
        <ContentTemplate>
        Content 2 ...
        <br />
            <asp:PlaceHolder ID="PlaceHolder2" runat="server"></asp:PlaceHolder>      
        </ContentTemplate>
        </asp:UpdatePanel>    
    </ContentTemplate>
    </cc1:TabPanel>
        <cc1:TabPanel ID="TabPanel3" runat="server" HeaderText="Tab Panel 3">
    <ContentTemplate>
        <asp:UpdatePanel ID="UpdatePanel3" runat="server">
        <ContentTemplate>
        Content 3 ...
        <br />
            <asp:PlaceHolder ID="PlaceHolder3" runat="server"></asp:PlaceHolder>      
        </ContentTemplate>
        </asp:UpdatePanel>    
    </ContentTemplate>
    </cc1:TabPanel>
    </cc1:TabContainer>
    <cc2:TabContainerExtender ID="TabContainerExtender1" 
    runat="server" 
    TargetControlID="TabContainer1" OnActiveTabChanged="ActiveTabChanged">
    <RegisterUpdatePanels>
    <cc2:UpdatePanelInfo TabIndex="0" UpdatePanelID="UpdatePanel1" />
    <cc2:UpdatePanelInfo TabIndex="1" UpdatePanelID="UpdatePanel2" />
    <cc2:UpdatePanelInfo TabIndex="2" UpdatePanelID="UpdatePanel3" />
    </RegisterUpdatePanels>
    </cc2:TabContainerExtender>