Datagrids made easy

People seem to struggle with .NET datagrids. Personally I like them as I think they are pretty powerful, however they don't quite work for me as I want so I have created a web user control that I use instead.

This control has a datagrid on it which is exposed as a property, it also has four buttons for navigation (first, previous, last and next buttons) as I prefer to list the page numbers in the datagrid headings.

The code for these buttons is very simple as follows -
Private Sub butFirst_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles butFirst.Click
Me.dgData.CurrentPageIndex = 0
BindData()
End Sub

Private Sub butPrev_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles butPrev.Click
Me.dgData.CurrentPageIndex = Math.Max(1, Me.dgData.CurrentPageIndex - 1)
BindData()
End Sub

Private Sub butNext_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles butNext.Click
Me.dgData.CurrentPageIndex = Math.Min(Me.dgData.CurrentPageIndex + 1, Me.dgData.PageCount)
BindData()
End Sub

Private Sub butLast_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles butLast.Click
Me.dgData.CurrentPageIndex = Me.dgData.PageCount
BindData()
End Sub

If you remember that the first page is number 0 then this should all make sense.

I also realised that the data that my grids are to show tends to be that from the main database I babysit. I already have a class which calls this in a couple of lines and returns a dataset. This means that all I need to do to my datagrid control is to give it a StoredProcedureDataSource type property and then I will be able to create an Intranet full of datafrids

Monitoring Server Disc Space

One of the more mundane things that I (and many server admins) have to do is to monitor free disc space on servers. There are a number of expensive tools to do this but I wanted a way to look at the information for all my servers at the same time with the possibility of a small pie chart or some such so that I can glance at it and know whether something needs to be done.

My solution to this was to create an RSS feed so that any major (by my definition) changes to free space would be flagged. I have a little routine that checks all my servers and puts the data into a table in an admin database which I can then query easily. The routine to create the feed was adapted from here and converted to VB. The code is simple and effective and it works.

My feed also links to a page which can show more of the history and any other information I want.