I have been building a webpart that needs client side validation. I kept getting the error: “Unable to find control id txtNotes referenced by the ‘ControlToValidate’ property” Now most of the posts say just use the command to get the ‘real’ ID at runtime this.rfvNotes.ControlToValidate = this.txtNotes.ClientID; But this did not work, in the end the form I found worked was: protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { base.OnInit(e); this.txtNotes.ID = “txtNotes”; this.rfvNotes.ControlToValidate = this.txtNotes.ID; this.rfvNotes.Enabled = true; this.rfvNotes.Text = “* Required”; } ...

Update 29 Mar 2010 - See this post for some updated usage notes I have been looking at Fitnesse.NET for a while; if you have not come across this testing tool I cannot recommend Gojko Adzic book highly enough; an excellent real world introduction to Fitnesse.NET. For me, the problem with Fitnesse is that it’s WIKI architecture does not lend itself to working within our Team Foundation Server based development model. However, as I am not really looking for a tool to allow Business Analysts to edit a central repository of tests the WIKI was not that important; so I have been looking at a way to store the Fitnesse tests inside a Visual Studio solution, so they are managed like a unit test. ...

I see that the registration (and hence session voting) has opened for the free community conference SQLBits III, I can’t make it as it is the same day as Alt.Net. However, I really do recommend this event if you ever work with data (some of you do that don’t you?)

The July edition of the Team System power tools have just been released. To pick out just one of a great set of tools - have a look at the Alert Editor, a really easy way to wire up external events handler to do things when TFS events occur.

Thanks to everyone one who attended my session at the Leeds SQL User group on Visual Studio Database Edition and to UPCO for hosting the event. The slide stack is available on the Black Marble web site

The Alt.net summer conference is now full after about 24 hours and that is with a larger capacity venue than the last one. Told it would be fast

Registration has opened for the Alt.UK Summer conference. If the first UK Alt.net conference event is anything to go by it will fill up fast, so don’t hang around if you are interested

I was trying to publish a .NET 3.5 WCF service to a network share e.g. \\myserversharefolder\_to\_holdservice and got the error “The specified file could not be encrypted” for all the files. I changed to a publish to the local disk it published fine, so what caused that? As part of some security impact modelling I have been doing development with my local source directories encrypted using standard Vista security (FYI does not seem to cause any significant performance impact) ...

This months meeting of the XPClub is on Wednesday. It is a general group chat about refactoring, branching and merging. This is a free event, usually with a few free beers, at the usual time & location, 7pm at the Victoria Hotel in Leeds, so hope to see you there

I have posted in the past about my efforts to write a user facing bug tracking interface for TFS to integrate with our SharePoint based customer portal. I have had some mixed success, but the end point is that I am just not happy with what I have written. Historically we have used our own home grown call tracking system (started as an Access DB, went via VB6 to ASP then ASP.NET, now is web service based) which our clients know (and love?). This give a far richer audit trail for the actions performed on a support call than is possible with a work item in TFS. In the end this simple fact is what has forced me to conclude that TFS work items are not the thing to expose to end user/help desk staff for bug tracking. ...