“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.” - Albert Einstein


Down Memory Lane - How this idea sparked


Four months back I started this blog and my open-source project - IdeaSparx CoolControls. I am a fan of ASP.NET 2.0 GridView. In my opinion it is simple yet flexible, plain yet lightweight, unsophisticated yet powerful. GridView control is well designed that it is easy to customize and extend. Not only that, it is also possible to extend GridView so that it can nearly match any popular and commercially available third-party controls out there. The only thing, of course, is that it requires a lot of work. But the huge amount of "sweat" i put into this is all worth it. I have this monumental dream which I planned out in my head that someday, somewhere, somehow (haha, now i am being a bit melodramatic..)  the ASP.NET community will have an open-source alternative over the commercially available grid controls. Therefore, I named this dream project - IdeaSparx CoolControls.

All About IdeaSparx CoolControls

One of its controls is CoolGridView which extends ASP.NET 2.0 GridView. At the end of 2009, CoolGridView was able to render GridView with fixed header, footer or pager and scrollable content. Now think about these features - resizable columns, rearrange columns, present hierarchical data, selective area reloading through AJAX, feature-rich Visual Studio designer support, sorting using multiple columns, data grouping, data binding tools for complex data structures, enhanced data editing and delivery of data-pages through streaming. I think these features are very much possible! Don't you think its cool? (hence, the name CoolGridView, by the way :)  my next installment - having a CoolGridView with resizable columns is already on the way.

Thinking Ahead : To Infinity and beyond..

This year I have decided to jump a little higher and put a little more "sweat" into the project. And surely I will be blogging more about it. But I cannot run the next mile alone.. I need your help. Your inputs are very valuable (not to mention, it boosts my confidence from zero to maybe, 10). Whenever I log on and see a few comments which meant somebody out there finds this dream of mine workable, doable.. possible, I literally dash to my work desk and start pounding on my keyboard and try to do my best to keep you all in the loop of things.

I am glad to tell everyone that because of the recent string of feedback I received in the past couple of months, we were able to make CoolGridView more stable . We were able to make sure that the features worked perfectly on different browsers - Internet Explorer 8/7/6, Firefox 3.5/3.0, Safari and Chrome. This was made possible because you have all used the control and provided feedback. It's Teamwork, i guess so I thank you. I am indeed very grateful.

I hope that you would all stand by me in making this distant dream of mine a reality. This year let's create a CoolGridView control that is easy to use and packed with lots of useful features.

"To infinity and beyond..."

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4 Responses to “Down Memory Lane - How this idea sparked”

  1. # Anonymous RaVel

    Glad to have you with us. The idea of creating and maintaining an open-source alternative over the commercially available grid controls is very brave. I hope you're going to achieve it. Good luck!

    Just to remember, a notice from my last comment, the control will be mostly useless in financial/accounting web apps without a feature of keeping scroll position after having postback or callback.
    I'm looking forward to see this in your control one day.  

  2. # Blogger John Eric Sobrepena

    Hi RaVel, thank you for your encouragement. Rest assured that your suggestion (maintain scroll position after postback or callback) will most likely be available in the next release together with the feature of users being able to resize columns.  

  3. # Blogger John Eric Sobrepena

    Hi RaVel, You can check out the latest release. It now includes your suggestion to maintain scroll position after a postback or callback.

    CoolGridView New Release : Resizable Column Widths and Keeping Scroll Position  

  4. # Anonymous Anonymous

    Hi John,

    I was wondering if this project was still going on. This is an awesome tool!!

    G  

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John Eric Sobrepena

John Eric Sobrepena
Hi, I am an I.T. professional who loves technology. I am right now into Android development. I am also a subject matter expert on C#, ASP.NET, WPF and Silverlight. Photography is one of my many hobbies.
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