Andy Butland

Paging sets of database records in a web application efficiently has long been a relatively tricky undertaking. Whilst web form controls such as the GridView offer control based paging very easily, they will still hit the database for all the records before processing the paging within the web application, and hence unnecessary amounts of data are passed between database and web server. Database based techniques - only retrieving the particular rows you require in each request - are therefore generally to be preferred. But some of those provide their own headaches - for example as well as retrieving the particular set of rows for a page, you will often want to know what the full count of records to be able to display a message along the lines of: 200 records found. Page 1 of 20 . SQL Server Paging Prior to the 2005 version, I would do this using SQL Server with two queries - one to get the page of data and another, using the same WHERE clause, to get the count. With SQL Serve

Possibly going slightly around the houses, but I'm sure similar to other developers who have started using ASP.Net MVC, I've recently started setting up and taking a look into Ruby On Rails . Only had an quick look so far, and had a read through the rails guides to get started - but already can see why it's proved such a popular environment for web development, how it's influenced the development of ASP.Net MVC, and how it's come to promote the MVC pattern more widely in web development circles. Also probably oddly for a RoR developer, but similar to others from a Microsoft background, I'm running Vista. There are some useful posts out there for setting up RoR on Vista , but as I found a few issues that weren't covered figured it worth noting here. MySQL Setup Whilst setting up Rails I also installed MySQL to use as the database. The link provided above provides all the details for installing this. Note though that when it comes to configuring the inst