Ever use a repeater or a grid view an can't remember how to append some other string to the databound value and finding it hard to search for? I always forget the syntax for this one..don't know why, it's just one of those things I always have to look up.

Normally when i just need the value straight from the item i use one of Bind or DataBinder.Eval :

Text='<%#Bind("Name") %>'
Text='<%#DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "Name) %>'

When i need to do some sort of additional string formatting, then I need to use Eval:

Text='<%#Eval("Name", "FullName: {0}")%>'

I can't believe 1/4 of the year has gone by already!  It's been a fun and exciting month for us...so what have we been up to:

• We finished our Aussie Usergroup tour, with sessions 8 and 9 at the Gold Coast and Brisbane this month.
• We went to the Brisbane Heroes Launch as superheroes
• John did a VE map of all the MVP summit atten ... Read More »
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9 presentations, 8 cities and 9 giant tennis balls later, we've concluded our series of SQL Spatial and Virtual Earth talks.

There were a few questions that kept occuring around the funding for our "tour".  We paid for all the flights, accommodation and transport ourselves (except for the flights to the Melbourne group..which were kindly funded by the usergroup).

Then the next set of questions were around why did we do it if we didn't get paid for it.  For us, there were a few opportunities. 

• There was the fact we got to see a new new places..like Perth and Adelaide.
• We got to meet lots of people we "talk to" onlink but had never met.
• We got to talk to people ... Read More »
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  Virtual Earth

It will be my first MVP summit next month. The summit is at Microsoft Campus in Redmond Seattle. The event sounds pretty cool with presentations and social activities.

So to contribute I teamed up with the event organisers to create an Attendee Map using Virtual Earth.

http://mvp.soulclients.com/

It is very cool to see how international the event is and just how many community focused people will be there.

We went to the Heroes Happen launch event today in Bribane.  We thought we'd be funny and go dressed up as "super heroes" Batman and Batgirl.  We got lots of weird looks and people wanted to have their photo taken with us. 

Learnt a few things about being a super hero:

• Rubber and vinyl are VERY hot so we had to get changed into street attired half way though.
• Wearing high heals make your feet really sore..so didn't take long before i needed to find a seat.
• The batmask cripples your ability to hear and kills periferal vision

We did get our Heroes pic in costume:

And J ... Read More »

We have both been invited to the Heroes Happens event in Brisbane this Wednesday. As MVPs we will be answering questions on Visual Studio and SQL 2008 around the place.

But why not make it a *super* event we said... what if we had more famous heroes to answer your questions.....

... Read More »

Ever wanted some Geeky Girls to speak at your event and didn't know where to find them?  I found a post here: http://coffee.geek.nz/2008/03/23/registered_com.html about geekspeakr.com. 

To quote:

What is geekspeakr.com

We help you find technical women to speak at your events.

ABOUT
Many organisers of technical conferences, meetups, and dinners want to have more gender-balance in their lineups, but they don't know where to find technical women speakers.

Enter geekspeakr.com, a simple directory and connections system to help technical women speakers ... Read More »

Have had "fun" with the SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayerl today..haven't found the solution..just all the symptoms.

So i've got a SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer, I've set it to point to an application on Silverlight Streaming, with autoplay OFF so it doesn't start playing as soon as you load the page...all works well.

Then I added a GridView which displayed thumbnails of all the videos I want to play, and when the user clicks on one i update the video and play it using the following javascript:

        function updatevideo(url)
    {
        var slMediaPlayer = $find("<%=CurrentSilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer.ClientID %>");
        slMediaPlayer.set_mediaSource(url);
        slMediaPlayer.set_autoPlay(true);
        return false;
    }

This also works ... Read More »

After touring the country, this week we are visiting the Brisbane SQL User Group to give our presentation on SQL 2008 Spatial and Virtual Earth.  This is our 9th and final performance of this talk around Australia. Make sure you pay attention as we have some questions at the end to give our some swag.

Location Details: Microsoft Brisbane Office, Level 9, Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle Street

Start Time: 6pm

Registration HERE

SQL Spatial with Virtual Earth

In t ... Read More »

The Expression team have posted about how to manipulate collections within the Silverlight 2 multiscaleimage control. So what a great time to revisit my little sample code and make some improvements. Let make sure we have mouse, mouse wheel, keyboard, bounds checks and resorting.

See my updated sample here. Use the "R" key to resort the collection.

First up you should ... Read More »