Mobile madness

Well after a lot of indecision I finally have a new mobile phone. I am a big fan of Sony Ericsson phones. At one time I had a t68i which I like a lot. Then when I took out a contract I got a Nokia 7610 (I think - their numbering system is even more confusing to me than the SE one) which at the time was supposed to be the best smartphone around. Although it had some very nice features - on the whole I hated it and got rid of it as soon as I could. My Mum still has it and likes it a lot! I then went back to SE with the K750 which I think is still a very good phone.

When it came to choosing time SE were about to bring out a whole slew of new phones. The P990 which I quite fancied, but as I have a Tungsten T3 there doesn't seem a lot of point, though the wireless networking could be nice at times. Then there is the W850 which I also quite fancied. I think it looks very smart and is a little unusual for me, though I don't often find myself listening to music on my phone. Sometimes the radio but if I want to listen to music it tends to be stuff I have on my PSP. Then there was the LG KG920 stunning in its ugliness but a good sounding spec. These are still like gold dust here at the moment.

I finally settled on the SE K800i which I wasn't sure was too much of a step up from my existing phone. I couldn't have been more wrong. It looks a lot bigger then my existing one but isn't really. The screen is quite a bit longer, a good few mm. and seems a lot clearer. The fact it uses a "real" flash is quite incredible, though I will sometimes miss the ability to turn the light on which was sometimes useful. Video calling is completely useless to me and frankly I can't see that ever changing. It has a nice little web browser built in and an RSS reader which is a cool feature - for me at least. It's also a little more polished than the 750, the plastic feels slightly "rubberised" which makes it nice to hold. Some of the buttons are a tiny bit smaller and the layout is slightly different which I think I will get used to quickly but is a tiny bit frustrating. I am also quite dissapointed that it didn't include one of the new Memory Stick micro's as these seem to be difficult to get hold of at the moment. All the usual suppliers are suggesting a delay ranging from a few days to a few weeks. Having said that it has taken almost everything from my k750 anyway.

On the whole after a couple of days I am delighted with this phone

The sun never sets

Just as a bit of fun, this is a map of all the countries I have been to so far. That's a suprising amount of red

You can create your own visited countries map

InternetFrog.com: Network Tools, Internet Speed Test and Website Tools

Internet Frog is one of those useful little sites that you don't need very often and can't find when you do. It has things like a broadband speed checker, WHOIS, an email blacklist checker and much more

Datagrids ruined my life!

I've been trying to setup an ASP.NET datagrid with dropdowns for data editing and as you will see from this link it took much longer than perhaps it should have done. The main problem being pre-selecting values. There seems to be a lot of conflicting advice and opinions on the best way to do this sort of thing. What I intend to do here is give a fairly generic solution that worked for me in this particular case.

• Setup your datagrid as normal. The columns you want drop downs for need to be made to template columns. The ones you don't want to be editable should be marked read only.


• Add an edit column as per normal


• In the template columns, put in your desired objects and layout and assign properties as per normal. This is what will appear in that column when the user hits edit and can contain pretty much any html or asp that you like.


• In my page behind code I added a new subroutine to bind data to whatever you want in your template(s) that you setup above. Essentially this code is the same as that you would use for binding data to the datagrid itself. (Presumably this can also be done by dragging and dropping the appropriate dataadapters etc. when you are editing the template but I prefer to do it in code.) The difference is that you need to be able to reference the objects that you have put into the template. This code needs to be called from the ItemDataBound event handler (where incidentally you can apply conditional formatting to cells but that is for another time). One of the parameters passed to this event handler is
  e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.DataGridItemEventArgs You can use this to find the controls you have put into your template. In my case I had a drop down in the template and so the declaration
  Dim MyDropDown As DropDownList = CType(e.Item.FindControl("MyTemplateDropDown"), DropDownList) generates a reference to the dropdown control which can now just be treated as a normal drop down object.
• To pre-select an existing value is now easy as it largely uses the code from the Microsoft site -
  If e.Item.ItemType = ListItemType.EditItem Then
  BindDGRow(e) ' This is the call that binds the datarow as described above
  Dim drv As DataRowView = CType(e.Item.DataItem, DataRowView)
  Dim currentValueInDataGrid As String = CType(drv("MyColumnNameInUnderlyingData"), String)
  MyDropDown.SelectedIndex = MyDropDown.Items.IndexOf(MyDropDown.Items.FindByValue(currentValueInDataGrid))

Easy!