If there is one thing that I have learned throughout my career, it is that I need to do what I do because I love it. I need to do what I do for me. There can be no other reason: not because someone else wants me to do it, nor because of recognition from another person or organization, nor for the money or the stature. Wherever direction I take in my career, it must be because of my passion for the craft and my drive to improve. Awards, money, and fame are all welcome side-effects that let me know that others like what I do and think I do it well—this recognition is still rewarding, and even more so, is an essential component to self-improvement—but that is all for naught if I don't like what I am doing or I don't think I am doing it well. Awards, money, and fame should purely serve as feedback, and not as motivation.

The first three parts of this series discuss the events that make up the ASP.NET Page Life Cycle, the order that these events execute on the page and on the controls, and that necessary evil called Data Binding, through which you add dynamic content to your new ASP.NET page. Raising those events happens automatically, without any developer oversight, but tapping in to those events—making them work for you—requires wiring special methods called Event Handlers to those events. This wiring can happen automatically by the system if you follow a few simple steps, or it can happen manually, with developers connecting each appropriate event to its handler. Both sides have their advantages as well as their drawbacks, but learning the nuances of event wiring can only strengthen your ASP.NET repertoire.

Aligned with another jam session at Ann Arbor's Come Jam With Us is another installment of Learn to Code, this time providing an introduction to WatiN, or Web Application Testing in .NET. The jam session was held at the offices of SRT Solutions in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at 5:30p, Tuesday April 6th. Though thunderstorms were in the forecast, the predicted high was 72°F (22°C), so we weren't bothered by the same 8" of fluffy white snow that caused cancellations and delays during my session on ASP.NET MVC 2. But for those that couldn't make the WatiN jam session, might I recommend the exercise below.

In ASP.NET MVC, the default signature for a Details action includes an Int32 method argument. The system works fine when the expected data is entered, and the happy path is followed, but put in an invalid value or no value at all, and an exception explodes all over the user.

The previous installments of this series cover the core events of the ASP.NET Page class, of the ASP.NET Controls, and how the page and controls work together to co-exist in the same sandbox. We've gotten to the point where we know how these controls will interact with the page so that we can make our page more than just a sea of crazy peach gradient backgrounds, but that still isn't enough. Static content is so 1999, and that party broke up long ago. The next step in a quality, modern web site is creating dynamic content, and rendering it to the page. To do this, we need Data Binding.

On Tuesday, February 9th, I was scheduled lead a jam session for Come Jam With Us, the software developer study group in Ann Arbor. The session was to be on ASP.NET MVC 2, aimed to give attendees enough of an introduction to the product to empower developers to be able to start coding their own ASP.NET MVC 2 projects. Unfortunately, Mother Nature did not cooperate that day, half of the state of Michigan seemingly shut down under 8" of snow, and the session was cancelled and rescheduled for February 23rd. The goal of these Learn to Code exercises is to give you an introduction to building applications with ASP.NET MVC 2. In the near future, I also hope to provide a screen cast of these same exercises.

The first installment of this series goes back to the beginning and describes each of the events within ASP.NET Page Life Cycle. Understanding the basic fundamentals of the ASP.NET Page Life Cycle, including the order and scope of influence for each of the Page Life Cycle events, will help ensure that you are executing your custom code at the right time, and in the right order, rather than stepping on yourself by conflicting with core ASP.NET framework functionality. But this is only part of the story, since there is more to the ASP.NET Page Life Cycle than just the page, itself.

When a request occurs for an ASP.NET page, the response is processed through a series of events before being sent to the client browser. These events, known as the ASP.NET Page Life Cycle, are a complicated headache when used improperly, manifesting as odd exceptions, incorrect data, performance issues, and general confusion. It seems simple when reading yet-another-book-on-ASP.NET, but never when applied in the real world. What is covered in a few short pages in many ASP.NET books (and sometimes even just a few short paragraphs), is much more complicated outside of a "Hello, World!" application and inside of the complex demands of the enterprise applications that developers create and maintain in their day-to-day work life. As close to the core as the life cycle is to any ASP.NET web application, the complications and catches behind this system never seems to get wide coverage on study guides or other documentation. But, they should.