I am getting ready to travel to China for the third time.  The first was in March 2004, the second was March 2008 each of those trips was for 1 week and 2 weeks respectively.  This trip is for a month.  The city I will be living in is Xiamen, Fujian, China.  Xiamen on Google Maps   Xiamen is a small city by China standards only 2 million people.  To give you an idea that is the entire population of Utah crammed on an island with a 4 mile radius.

I will be living in a one bed room apartment on the 26th floor on a major street.  Cars honking all night long.  There is a clothes washer but no dryer.  The fridge is a mini-fridge, you know the kind that are only good for a couple six-packs.

Keep an eye on this blog I will be posting to it as much as possible during my trip.

I finally did it.  18 years after graduating from High School I finally finished my bachelors degree.  The last year has been the toughest of all.  My son was born, I went to China for 2 weeks, I worked full time, and took a full load 12+ credit hours.  This resulted in 4 hours of sleep a night, no TV, no Guitar Hero (and 3 came out :( ), no weekends, basically no FUN.

So, I need your help. 

What in the world do you do for FUN?  Keep it PG rated otherwise you'll never see it!

So I was driving to work when I notice a car with some strange apparatus mounted to the roof.  I was headed north on I-15 between Farmington and Layton.  So I catch up with this car... 

So for the last few days I have been scouring through lines and lines of code trying to figure out why the ASP Repeater control <asp:repeater ...> control was not working. 

I checked everything from the record set to the data binding to make sure I had covered all the bases.  Everything checked out but when I loaded the page the data was not displayed.

So in an attempt to troubleshoot the situation I created a new C# web form in VS 2005.  Keeping it simple I added just the one repeater control and data bound it to a single table.  Nothing fancy.  Loaded this page and it worked.

Over the next two days I methodically altered the non-functional page to be almost exactly like the functional page.  I was still having problems.  I even linked in the Master Page, CSS, and other supporting doc's to the functional page to see if it was something in one of them that was causing the problem.  I even altered the Page tag to point at the same CodeFile and still no Luck.

So then I paid a little more attention to this line... 

<%@ Page MasterPageFile="~/StandardLayout.master" Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="Default" %>

It is at the top of every page, and I generally don't have reason to mess with it

Then I noticed that in the functional page the AutoEventWireup="true" and this attribute was missing from the non-functional page.

I added this attribute to the non-functional page and reloaded.  IT WORKS!!

So, what is AutoEventWireup and what does it do...

There is an excellent post at

http://odetocode.com/Blogs/scott/archive/2006/02/16/2914.aspx

Scott Allen gives you all the information you need as well as ways to deal with the different behaviors.

Basically my issue boiled down to the fact that the Page_Load event was not firing and so the data binding never occurred.

For performance reasons and not to break other pages I have set the AutoEventWireup to false and used Scott's work around.

Thank you Scott!!!

 You must watch the video from Johnny Lee in which he demonstrates the effects that are possible with the Wii remote and using it for head tracking.  It can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

 Now that you have seen what is possible with his demonstration, imagine for a moment a first person shooter where you can look around the corner by moving your head, or a motorcycle / snowmobile / or ATV racing game where you have to lean as you corner while traveling through a 3-D world, or skiing / snowboarding down your favorite run in Snowbird, Alta, Park City or Lake Tahoe.  Wii tennis where the ball flies at you in 3-D.  Network 2 Wii’s together and have a very real boxing match.

 I second Johnny’s challenge to all Wii developers, I want to see some cool games.

Johnny Lee’s official website: http://johnnylee.net
Wiimote Project website: http://www.wiimoteproject.com