Two years ago I installed vs.net and the .net framework and needed an experimental problem to solve. ALong came my sister who I had just written a FrontPage website for her brand new business Katie’s Bumpers. She was getting new clients faster than anything! (She is an amazing salesperson) I was being lazy and merely maintaining her list of stores where her products were being sole manually in html. With her quickly growing client list, she was starting to be quite a pest (I’m kidding – we tease her because the real point here is that she has done a phenomenal job in growing this business so quickly) asking me to update update update the website. I knew it was time to give her the reigns of maintaining the store list herself!

So I embarked on my first trials with asp.net –  a web page that access a Jet database where she could keep track of the store names and some sundry info on the stores. Then there is a procedure that creates an xml file from that data and persists that xml file on my asp.net webserver. On her frontpage site, there is a page that goes across domains to grab that xml file and does an xml transform (this is now asp, not anything with .NET) and renders a page with a store list.

Her data entry page is just a regular ol’ data grid with the edit/delete and update buttons. Pain in the butt, I think, but it did the trick.

Cut to two years later. Jill is now closing in on 600 locations around the world that are selling her products. Her data entry page is drudgery and I have promised her for months and months I’ll find some time to work on it.

So today I finally did. The real killer was the viewstate which had been a great utility back when she had 30 stores. So I removed the viewstate on her datagrid, added a form for editing individual records and stuck the datatable for the datagrid in a session object.

It was almost a little embarrassing – but I don’t think I need to be too ashamed that I created these problems in my very first ever experiment with asp.net.

Anyway, that’s really all it took – she is very happy …says the site is “rocket fast” now.

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