TwistedNerve

Thanks everyone! What do u guys think about Microsoft's recommendation. They say you should have a component which houses your business entities, which is basically just a thin object exposing public attributes. Then, there is another component, let's say business services, which handles all the communication with the data access layer and performing the actual business logic. The business enties are created and populated in the data access layer and passed back up the chain to the BL. The UI also creates this business entity objects, and passes them to the business services layer. I guess I am just trying to figure out whether to go this route or just have one business component, that performs the validation and business logic. Any thoughts about this?

Just want to see how many of you guys use datasets or custom business objects in your application. I can't decide which one I want to use yet. Any thoughts would be great!

Sure it could work for you, the project I'm currently working on has around 1000 pages and we use this type of solution. All your pages are using css stylesheets right (not inline)?

You could wrap the link tag in a usercontrol and set the href attribute in your code behind: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<%= StyleSheetUrl %>" /> All the code does here, is when the asp.net page parser runs into this section, it will call the property in the code-behind (StyleSheetUrl) and set the href attribute. In your code behind, you can pull the stylesheet url from a config file, database, etc. Also node, the property needs a public or protected access modifier in order for the code-behind to access it. HTH

Just by glancing at the code you supplied, everything looks ok (assuming your x object is properly declared and initialized). Are you sure y contains a value?

Derek Stone: Yes, I am aware that it only works when invoking Server.Transfer (I stated, "duration of the current request"), and the reason I mentioned Context.Items collection is because his code example is using the Server.Transfer method. Also, just out of curiosity, what type of problems have you run into with the transfer method? I personally dont use it, but would like to hear your thoughts.

I think it would help if you would post a small code snippet so we can see where you are having troubles.

Assuming you are not able to wait for the next release of ASP.NET (where *skining* is natively supported), there are two routes you an take. The easier, is to provider multiple stylesheets for the user, and load up the stylesheet the user has choosen. The more robust and involved is building a custom server control that all your controls inherit from. This guy is responsible for determining the theme and the other plumbing. Take a look at the open source asp.net code base. They implement their own skinning engine.

You can take advantage of the Context.Items collection to pass/persist information for the duration of the current request.

If I understand your question correctly, the datagrid exposes a DataKeys property, where you can set the name of your primary key column. When you catch the datagrid's edit event, you can pull the key right off the 'e' arguments, CommandArgument property. HTH