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About Brian Mains

Brian Mains is an application developer consultant with Computer Aid Inc. He formerly worked with the Department of Public Welfare. In both places of business, he developed both windows and web applications, small and large, using the latest .NET technologies. In addition, he had spent many hours studying .NET and object-oriented programming.

Articles by bmains (60)

  • ASP.NET MVC 2.0 and ADO.NET Entity Framework - Part 2

    Published: 28 Jul 2010 Views: 504 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Out of the .NET framework 4.0 comes many great enhancements, the ADO.NET entity framework (ADO.NET EF) is among the top. The framework has improved upon some of the previous bugs (in version 1), as well as enhanced the API, including many new LINQ-to-SQL-like improvements. We're going to examine using these API features to create a generic version of of a data repository.
  • ASP.NET MVC 2.0 and ADO.NET Entity Framework - Part 1

    Published: 23 Jul 2010 Views: 1,510 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 1

    In this article, we'll examine using the ADO.NET Entity Framework (ADO.NET EF). The 4.0 version has received some major upgrades, with some major API enhancements and fixes for most of the pain points within the designer.
  • ASP.NET MVC 2.0 and AJAX Part 2

    Published: 21 Jul 2010 Views: 1,130 Avg Rating: 5/5 Votes: 1 Comments: 2

    In this article, we are going to look at how you can utilize AJAX in your views, and utilize a concept called unobtrusive JavaScript to take advantage of a variety of situations. ASP.NET MVC provides AJAX features very easily as we previously saw, but this comes with a caveat, and it has mostly to do with the planning of the implementation. We’re going to examine these concerns in this article.
  • ASP.NET MVC 2.0 and AJAX Part 1

    Published: 23 Jun 2010 Views: 3,745 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    ASP.NET MVC makes working with AJAX really easy; it’s quite impressive how powerful the framework can be. JQuery adds extra features and makes AJAX calls really easy; we’ll see that all here soon.
  • ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Areas

    Published: 16 Jun 2010 Views: 7,678 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    A look at ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Areas.
  • Book Review: ASP.NET 3.5 Enterprise Application Development with Visual Studio 2008

    Published: 09 Jun 2010 Views: 847 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Brian mains reviews the ASP.NET 3.5 Enterprise Application Development book
  • ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Validation

    Published: 28 May 2010 Views: 3,955 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    An overview of validation in ASP.NET MVC 2.0.
  • ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Attributes

    Published: 19 May 2010 Views: 5,124 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    An overview of ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Attributes.
  • ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Templating

    Published: 28 Apr 2010 Views: 9,778 Avg Rating: 5/5 Votes: 2 Comments: 2

    Templating is now in the ASP.NET MVC 2.0 framework, for .NET framework 3.5 and 4.0. We are going to take a look at these features.
  • ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Using Multiple Actions

    Published: 22 Apr 2010 Views: 9,410 Avg Rating: 5/5 Votes: 1 Comments: 1

    Brian Mains explains how to use multiple actions in ASP.NET MVC 2.0.
  • ASP.NET MVC 2.0 User Interfaces

    Published: 09 Apr 2010 Views: 12,041 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    The next part to this article series on MVC 2.0 is the user interface. We saw in the last article some basics on the changes of the user interface, which we'll delve into more in this article series. Here we will begin to look at how developers can construct the view user interface.
  • Introduction to ASP.NET MVC 2.0

    Published: 19 Mar 2010 Views: 12,386 Avg Rating: 5/5 Votes: 2 Comments: 3

    In this article, we'll begin examining the new features of ASP.NET MVC 2.0 by comparing what ASP.NET MVC offers against its predecessor, ASP.NET web forms.
  • Book Review: Professional Twitter Development

    Published: 18 Dec 2009 Views: 1,015 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Review of the book "Professional Twitter Development" by Daniel Crenna.
  • Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework Review

    Published: 23 Oct 2009 Views: 1,349 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Brian Mains reviews the Pro ASP.NET MVC framework book.
  • Jquery Ajax

    Published: 30 Sep 2009 Views: 7,168 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    JQuery makes communicating with the server very, very easy. JQuery uses get(), getJSON(), and post() methods as a way to retrieve data from the server. We’ll examine how it’s used here, and how it differs from how ASP.NET AJAX has done web requests.
  • Development Commonalities

    Published: 31 Aug 2009 Views: 975 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Brian Mains discusses code reusability in windows and web environments.
  • TypeMock’s Arrange-Act-Assert

    Published: 08 Jun 2009 Views: 2,680 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Brian Mains discusses how to implement the Arrange-Act-Assert pattern in TypeMock.
  • Book Review: Pro JavaScript Design Patterns

    Published: 01 Jun 2009 Views: 1,390 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Brain Mains reviews Pro JavaScript Design Patterns.
  • Practical JQuery

    Published: 25 Mar 2009 Views: 8,609 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    An example-driven tutorial on the JQuery library by Brian Mains.
  • Book Review: Professional ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX

    Published: 10 Mar 2009 Views: 1,850 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Review of the book “Professional ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX” by Bill Evjen, Matt Gibbs, Dan Wahlin, and Dave Reed
  • Introduction to JQuery

    Published: 04 Mar 2009 Views: 8,682 Avg Rating: 4/5 Votes: 1 Comments: 1

    Brian Mains introduces the JQuery library by example.
  • Book Review: Practical JavaScript, DOM Scripting and Ajax Projects

    Published: 02 Mar 2009 Views: 1,489 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Review of the book “Practical JavaScript, DOM Scripting and Ajax Projects” by Frank Zammetti
  • Understanding Telerik’s Scheduler Recurrence

    Published: 05 Feb 2009 Views: 5,858 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Brian Mains continues to explore the Telerik’s Scheduler control.
  • Book Review: Professional Outlook 2007 Programming

    Published: 31 Jan 2009 Views: 1,286 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Review of the book “Professional Outlook 2007 Programming” by Ken Slovak
  • Using Telerik’s Scheduler Component

    Published: 15 Dec 2008 Views: 8,938 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 3

    Brian Mains reviews the Telerik’s Scheduler component.
  • Tips for using the RadGrid

    Published: 05 Dec 2008 Views: 36,047 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Brian Mains continues his overview of the Telerik’s RadGrid Component.
  • Using Telerik’s Grid Component

    Published: 03 Dec 2008 Views: 12,068 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 1

    Brian Mains reviews Telerik’s Grid Component.
  • Calling Web Services in ASP.NET AJAX

    Published: 30 Nov 2008 Views: 6,749 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Brian Mains talks about calling Web Services in ASP.NET AJAX
  • Introduction to Telerik’s AJAX Capabilities

    Published: 25 Nov 2008 Views: 8,036 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Brian Mains reviews the Telerik’s AJAX controls.
  • Book Review: Code Leader

    Published: 27 Oct 2008 Views: 1,427 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Brian Mains writes a quick book Review about the Code Leader.
  • ASP.NET AJAX Development Approach Part 5

    Published: 23 Oct 2008 Views: 3,605 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Brain Mains talks about rendering the UI of a control with ASP.NET AJAX.
  • ASP.NET AJAX Development Approach Part 4

    Published: 27 Aug 2008 Views: 3,248 Avg Rating: 4/5 Votes: 1 Comments: 2

    Brian Mains overviews the server portion of the ASP.NET AJAX framework.
  • ASP.NET AJAX Development Approach Part 3

    Published: 30 Jul 2008 Views: 9,770 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Brian Mains overviews the client portion of the ASP.NET AJAX framework.
  • ASP.NET AJAX Development Approach Part 2

    Published: 25 Jul 2008 Views: 9,460 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Brian Mains overviews the client portion of the ASP.NET AJAX framework.
  • ASP.NET AJAX Development Approach Part 1

    Published: 23 Jul 2008 Views: 14,178 Avg Rating: 3/5 Votes: 3 Comments: 5

    Brian Mains overviews the client portion of the ASP.NET AJAX framework.
  • Three Tier Architecture with ASP.NET

    Published: 11 Jul 2008 Views: 42,772 Avg Rating: 2/5 Votes: 3 Comments: 3

    Brian Main talks about the GridView control in the context of 3-tier ASP.NET applications.
  • Book Review: Professional Visual Studio Extensibility

    Published: 11 Jun 2008 Views: 2,905 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Review of the book: Professional Visual Studio Extensibility.
  • 3-Tier Architecture Examples

    Published: 06 Jun 2008 Views: 53,633 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 2

    Brian Mains provides some examples of 3-Tier architecture.
  • Introduction to 3-Tier Architecture

    Published: 28 Apr 2008 Views: 63,896 Avg Rating: 5/5 Votes: 2 Comments: 4

    Brian Mains explains the benefits of a 3-tier architecture.
  • WPF Data Binding, With LINQ

    Published: 14 Mar 2008 Views: 48,029 Avg Rating: 5/5 Votes: 1 Comments: 2

    Brian Mains explains how to perform data binding in WPF with LINQ.
  • WPF Flow Documents and Images

    Published: 28 Feb 2008 Views: 22,721 Avg Rating: 3/5 Votes: 1 Comments: 0

    Brian mains shows how to use the flow documents and images.
  • LINQ to SQL and Visual Studio 2008

    Published: 06 Feb 2008 Views: 46,572 Avg Rating: 3/5 Votes: 1 Comments: 1

    Brian Mains discusses LINQ to SQL capabilities in the Visual Studio 2008 designer.
  • The Power and Pain of Abstraction

    Published: 09 Jan 2008 Views: 2,713 Avg Rating: 2/5 Votes: 2 Comments: 0

    Brian Mains talks about abstractions.
  • Styles, Resources, and Control Templates in WPF

    Published: 05 Nov 2007 Views: 56,990 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    This article will show how to use Styles, Resources, and Control Templates in WPF.
  • More WPF Animations

    Published: 27 Jun 2007 Views: 28,579 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) has many ways to manipulate objects. Some of these ways involve transforming an object, or using animation to animate the various values of an object. These can all work together to provide a very interactive interface. This article will show you how.
  • Using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) Control Flow in SQL Server 2005

    Published: 01 Jun 2007 Views: 58,844 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) in SQL Server 2005 has been redone, and is clearly superior over SQL Server 2000. With all of the new capabilities and features in SSIS, it is possible to create very complex transformation packages. This article will show you how to take advantage of the control flow features.
  • Introduction to WPF Animations

    Published: 29 May 2007 Views: 55,375 Avg Rating: 4/5 Votes: 4 Comments: 0

    WPF is a new framework that has many advanced capabilities. Animations are one of those capabilities, where an object can be animated via rotating, stretching, scaling, moving it across the screen, changing its color, etc. This article will show some of the basic animations.
  • Using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) Data Flow in SQL Server 2005

    Published: 18 May 2007 Views: 38,477 Avg Rating: 5/5 Votes: 1 Comments: 0

    SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) in SQL Server 2005 has been redone, and is clearly superior over SQL Server 2000. With all of the new capabilities and features in SSIS, it is possible to create very complex data transformation packages. This article will show you how.
  • Health Monitoring

    Published: 14 May 2007 Views: 5,441 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Health monitoring is a new feature of the .NET 2.0 framework that allows you to monitor what is going on in your system. Events raised within an ASP.NET application are logged to a provider, such as the event log, ASP.NET database, tracing, email, or any custom provider you create. Health monitoring provides an excellent way to capture what is happening in your system.
  • Polymorphism and Encapsulation

    Published: 27 Apr 2007 Views: 131,291 Avg Rating: 3/5 Votes: 8 Comments: 6

    Polymorphism and encapsulation are two big words in OO development, and are also a fundamental concept of software development. This article will demystify these concepts by showing you some real world examples.
  • Introduction to the PopupControl Extender

    Published: 08 Dec 2006 Views: 43,408 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    The PopupControl extender is a way to render a server control popup to the user, so that the user can perform some action (say click on a textbox), the user selects a value in a control that dynamically appears, and that value is posted back to the originating server control.
  • Introduction to the ATLAS FilteredTextBox Extender

    Published: 17 Nov 2006 Views: 7,072 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    The new AJAX.NET Extensions and the AJAX Control Toolkit provide powerful additions to the ASP.NET developer. By providing client-side capabilities all controlled within these "extenders," you have the means to provide more powerful input into how the application interacts, giving your application a richer UI. In this article, we'll be looking at the FilteredTextBox extender to see how this works.
  • NUnit Testing Tools

    Published: 13 Nov 2006 Views: 25,906 Avg Rating: 2/5 Votes: 1 Comments: 1

    NUnit testing tools provide a means to test your object model, and is especially useful in ensuring that your application and its logic works correctly. This is a type of tool that is used with Test-Driven Development, and other methodologies like Agile.
  • Web Objects in Components

    Published: 08 Nov 2006 Views: 3,119 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Whether you know it or not, it is possible to access certain ASP.NET classes in Windows components, such as HttpContext that provides you with access to many of the needed objects in the ASP.NET runtime. This article is going to explain how it can work.
  • Custom Provider Configuration Sections

    Published: 25 Oct 2006 Views: 8,828 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 1

    Each provider you see in the framework has a custom configuration section associated with it, where you can specify the providers that are utilized for it. These providers specify the type of database to connect to, the object that will do the work, etc. We will take a look at one, and how it is instantiated and use in a provider.
  • Custom Configuration Collections

    Published: 13 Oct 2006 Views: 20,419 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Custom configuration sections support the use of collections. These collections are similar to the add, remove, and clear sections that you see defined for connectionStrings, appSettings, or other sections.
  • Configuration Section Validators

    Published: 09 Oct 2006 Views: 4,398 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    .NET 2.0 has a new means to create custom configuration sections. It also provides a means to validate the content within it, using a custom validator inheriting from ConfigurationValidatorBase. In addition, the validator links to the property in the configuration section through an attribute, which you will see in this article.
  • Introduction to ASP.NET Development, Part 2 - Server Controls

    Published: 29 Sep 2006 Views: 1,321 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    Server controls are essentially classes that render specific HTML/JavaScript to the browser. A server control maps to one or many more HTML elements, but provide additional capabilities as well. They also have advanced server-side capabilities, such as responding to postbacks, performing javascript callbacks, databinding assignments, and other advanced capabilities.
  • Introduction to ASP.NET Development, Part 1 - The Page

    Published: 25 Sep 2006 Views: 2,310 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    This tutorial will introduce you to creating ASP.NET pages, what the difference is between inline and code-behind models, and what the page lifecycle is all about.
  • 2.0 Custom Configuration Sections

    Published: 20 Sep 2006 Views: 9,066 Avg Rating: 0/5 Votes: 0 Comments: 0

    .NET 2.0 produced a new way to create custom configuration sections, one that is even easier than before. It involves a custom class that inherits from the ASP.NET ConfigurationSection class, defining usable properties that map to the properties for the configuration element.

Article Comments by bmains (5)

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