Here are a couple of small routines that let you quickly collect ASP.NET form variables into an object or a data row with a single line of code. This routine comes in handy in many situations where full databinding may not be involved or more commonly in AJAX scenarios where no form databinding can be applied on Page level callbacks.

LINQ to SQL is all about returning object from database queries, but sometimes it's actually useful to use good old DataReaders or DataTables - especially in ASP.NET applications that use DataBinding. Entities are objects and databinding requires Reflection which is very slow, compared to a DataReader. Luckily LINQ to SQL provides the abillity to retrieve a Sql Command object that can be used to return an alternate result set.

So I was walking through the trade show here at the Connections conference today and ran by the MSDN booth and there it was: The December issue of MSDN Magazine, and in it my first article for the magazine. Woo hoo. It’s in the December issue and it’s about building the two-way databinding control...