It's been a busy few months since my last post.  Ben's building his vocabulary and knows a bunch of words.  He's also working on his "animal sounds".  He knows that a cow says "moo" and a bunch of others.  If you ask him what a pig says, he makes a sort of coughing sound.  I figured out he is saying the end of the word "oinK".  Ben was a little late to the game for walking. But he really got the hang of it and was very proud to be walking around.  But then he had a bit of an accident and broke his leg!  It sounds pretty crazy but the doctor says it is really quite common.  The specific break is actually called a "toddler's fracture"  To be clear, we aren't talking about one of those nasty "dangling limb" breaks.  Just a crack.  It still sucks for a 15 month old kid.  So poor Benny has a cast on his leg and that put an end to walking for a while. 

It's actually quite interesting to see Ben respond to this situation.  When the accident happened he was really unhappy and scared.  I don't think he was in a terrible amount of pain if he kept still.  But he was really scared, he knew something was not right in a serious way.  It took a while in the hospital and he did not like it when they splinted and wrapped his leg (the cast would get put on the next day at the Orthopedist's office).  However, as soon as his leg was immobilized he was out of pain and started turning back to normal, even playing a bit.  I expected him to play with the splint or try and take it off.  But he just ignored it.  I think somehow he actually understood that it was helping him.  Even when the cast got put on, he never pulled at it or anything.  He just accepted the situation - "now I have a cast on my leg, what's next?" He was back to crawling full time but didn't seem to care about the broken leg at all.  He eventually started to stand on it (leaning  on furniture) and now even takes as many as 8-10 steps on it!  He's not really supposed to but it isn't so easy to keep him off it.  The worst part of the whole thing is 6 weeks with no baths (not real ones, anyway), sand, swimming, dirt etc.  Anyway, in 2 weeks the cast is coming off.  My expectation is he'll quickly adjust back, start walking and that will be the end of that story.

We've also joined the Philadelphia Zoo.  This is a great idea for any family and we are really liking it, with 2 trips in so far this summer.  Benny loves it and points and yells at the animals.  We've also seen a lot of family lately including a visit to the park with Grandma and Longstreet Farm with his cousins. 

The last new thing is that we've been taking Ben for bike rides (he hangs out in a trailer), it's fun for the whole family.  Wow, so much to talk about, I really need to post these things more often!  Here's a bunch of photos:

• Craft Time for Ben, Mommy and cousin Fiona!

• With Grandma on Passover.  A classic "how big is Benny?" photo!

• Me and Ben at the Philadelphia Zoo.  Also... Making a mess eating ice cream, helping out in the garden, and Ben with his car (the best selling car in America!) and a picnic with Mommy and Grandma.

• Here's a shot of Ben with his cast.

• Benny's catching a free ride with Uncle Dennis, and posing with cousins Kaycie, Allie, Sami and Jake at Longstreet Farm.  Also Benny is his bike trailer - and looking cool too!

When using strongly typed views, don't name the controller action arguments with the same name as another form value!

I've been working with ASP.NET MVC for a couple of months now.  It is really pretty awesome.  It's worked so well, I haven't had much to blog about!  The other day I ran into an issue so I'm sharing the solution.   MVC will "automagically" bind the parameters of a controller action based on the values in the form.  And if your View is strongly typed and your controller action has a parameter of that same type, it will bind it too.  But in my case, the parameter was null.  MVC wasn't loading it. And there was no exception to help me out.

Here's a simple demo, I'm not showing every line of code...

Typical for an MVC application, I have a view that is strongly typed:

          <%@
          Page
          Title
          =""
          Language
          ="C#"
          MasterPageFile
          ="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master"
          

          Inherits
          ="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<OrganizationRole>"
          %> 
        

The View has a simple form which includes two text boxes:

          <
          p
          > 
          <
          label
          for
          ="OrganizationName">OrganizationName:</label> <%= Html.TextBox("OrganizationName") %> <%= Html.ValidationMessage("OrganizationName", "*") %> </p>
<p> <labelfor="Role">Role:</label> <%= Html.TextBox("Role") %> <%= Html.ValidationMessage("Role", "*") %> </p> 

A button on the form posts back to the controller, calling the Create Action.  Here is Action Code:

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)] publicActionResult Create(OrganizationRole role)
{ // Do Something Here... return View();
} 

In the screenshot below, you can see that when I debug the app, the role parameter has not been loaded.

The fix was simple but it took a while to figure it out!  All I had to do was re-name the parameter from "role" to "organizationRole":

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
publicActionResult Create(OrganizationRole organizationRole)
{
    // Do Something Here...
    return View();
}

You see, I was being lazy and abbreviated the argument's name.  That is ok, you can name the parameter almost anything you want.  But I gave the parameter the same name as one of the other form variables!  Notice above that my form has a text box named "Role"!  MVC tried to load the values of my parameters - it takes each of the posted values from the form ("OrganizationName" and "Role") and tries to match them up with arguments with the same names (it is not case sensitive) if they exist.  It also tries to load the entire form value (strongly typed as the class OrganizationRole) to the argument of type OrganizationRole, if one exists.  But an argument of type OrganizationRole with the name "Role" screws the who thing up!  The only problem is that it doesn't throw any exceptions.  Anyway, I changed the name and presto, it works.

It's hard to keep up with posting these photos of Ben.  Time flies.  Lots more news since my last blog post.  First of all, Ben had his 1st birthday!  His grandma made him an awesome cake (and cupcakes) and they were a big hit. 

Ben is really trying to gain some weight (he's a on the small side).  The Dr. put him on a "butter" diet, telling us to put butter on everything he eats.  Somehow he got the message.  All of a sudden he started eating everything in sight.  He gained 1 lb in 6 weeks.  Then he stopped eating again and got really finicky and cranky.  After a few days Rebecca took him to the Dr. to find out that he had an ear infection!  After a day or 2 of antibiotics, he was back to eating again.  He's a pretty funny eater.  One day he'll be eating Brussels sprout (yes, spelled with an "s" at the end, I looked it up), broccoli, meatloaf, spaghetti and meat sauce, salmon, and more.  It's like he loves all different flavor foods.  And the next day, he's bored of it all and won't eat anything!

Right around the time of the ear infection Benny developed another ailment, much to our dismay.  He's become a bit of a "momma's boy"!  All he wants is for his mommy to hold him.  It's pretty funny too because if it's just me and him hanging out, it's all good. He laughs and plays and is perfectly content.  But when Rebecca comes in the room, he starts to get cranky and he just wants her.  I'm sure this is pretty typical behavior for a kid his age.  For me, it's a little insulting - "what, I'm not good enough for you?".  But for Rebecca it is just plain annoying because she can't get anything done when he is around.  This too shall pass.

We've had a few other big achievements lately.  Ben started taking some steps on his own.  Still just 2 or 3 at a time, but people say once it starts, he'll be walking soon enough.  He also has increased his vast vocabulary to 3 words.  In addition to "momma" and "dadda", he now says "dog".  Well, more like "daw daw" but we are impressed.  It's funny too because we don't have a dog.  But he gets excited when he sees them on TV or out walking around, or at friends' houses.

OK, as usual, here are some recent photos...

No, that first one isn't Ben, but a classic just the same.  Big Steve eating Chicken Holiday!  Below are pictures of ben playing, at the park with Grandma, and showing off his new "Vail" shirt (he wants to go skiing there next year!).  Also, three classic "messy face" pictures.  The first is Ben eating his 1st Birthday Cake (his first sugar fix ever).  I think he liked it because you can see him eating his friend Ricky's cake too (with the red icing).  Think he enjoyed it?  And there's another with him covered in Oreo cookie!  Don't worry, he eats a lot of veggies and fruit too!

If you are looking to learn about Silverlight development, here is your chance.  Our local Microsoft Developer Evangelists are running a free full day event this Saturday featuring a good variety of information. 

To learn more or register, click here.

If you are a beginner or haven't gotten started yet, this is a great opportunity.  I'm not a beginner and my weekends are pretty busy these days.  So initially, I was going to skip this event.  But from my conversation with Dani Diaz last night, it sounds like there will be a decent range of information here, so I think I will attend too. 

I don't know the full agenda but some of the speakers include Dani, Lindsay Rutter, Bill Wolff and Pete Brown.  That's a good line up but to be perfectly honest, Pete Brown is the big draw for me.  I've been reading his blog since I started doing Silverlight development, this guy really knows his stuff.  One thing I've learned over time is that if a good speaker if giving a talk, even on a topic that I think I know fairly well, it is worth attending.  You never know what kind of tidbit you may pick up from them!

Hope to see you there.

One thing I really hate about doing Silverlight development is trying to search for good information on the Internet.  When I look for a solution to a problem I am having, I always run into a lot of "noise" in the form of outdated posts that aren't relevant anymore.  There are a ton of questions, answers, and sample solutions on the web from developers working with the Silverlight 2 Beta release.  I know this was all helpful information to share at the time, but a lot of it is useless now.  The problem is, sometimes you have to read the post a bit in order to figure out that the developer was on the Beta.  I've gotten to the point where the first thing I do is look at the date on the post before I read on.  What makes this even more complicated, is sometimes the information in these posts is still relevant and very helpful! 

Oh well, at least we are lucky to be developers in an age where so much information is shared among members of the community.  Can you imaging having to read manuals for all your information ;) ?  I don't mean to discourage anyone from posting.  Don't take me too seriously, I'm just ranting.