For those of you who use Visio to due your database modeling, you might have run across the slight problem of not being able to get rid of the auto-generated foreign-keys in your tables (assuming you might have deleted and recreated a relation to the same table.)  If you try to generate a database from your model, you’ll find that the foreign keys that you thought you deleted still exist somewhere in ‘limbo’ and as a result, the error checking in Visio goes crazy.

So, how do you get rid of these ‘phantom foreign keys/relationships’?  Well, I found no solutions from Microsoft’s web site, but I did find some work-arounds from a few blog posts.  Here are two methods that seem to work:

Copy Data Structure into a New File

1. Create a new database model diagram
2. Select all of the items in your existing diagram and click Ctrl+C (Copy)
3. Paste the entire diagram into your new diagram.  The “phantom” foreign keys will not be copied.

View (and Delete) Related Tables

1. Right-click on the table with the problem
2. Select "Show related tables" and you should get the "phantom relationship" back
3. Select the relationship and delete it

I recently had to writing a proposal for a web site design RFP which I had never done before.  The company I work for doesn’t typically respond to RFPs and we typically do development work, but this time we made an exception.

It was quite the learning experience to write the proposal and quite difficult because there were so many unknowns, despite the details of the RFP.  In addition, since the company I work for really isn’t a design firm, we weren’t sure what the ‘other guys’ would propose.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get the work, but I’m still curious as to how other companies price web site design jobs.  The design company Blue Flavor has published the blog entry Pricing a Project which is a little inside-look at how they price projects and is very insightful.

Note to self: Bookmark this link! MSDN: 101 Samples for Visual Studio 2005

It seems like such a simple thing.  You have a form.  You have one submit button.  Yet when you hit your Enter key, the form submits, the page posts back, and… well, nothing.  For some reason Internet Explorer doesn’t seem to understand that the Enter key should post the form.

Thanks to some handy-work by the ASP.NET 2.0 developers, there is a solution for this.  In your <form> tag, you now have a property called defaultbutton that can be used to make sure that the button you want to be ‘clicked’ when hitting the enter key actually is.

<form id="form1"  runat="server" defaultbutton="btnSearch">

But wait, there is more!  A new defaultbutton property also makes it super easy to make sure that the cursor auto-magically starts on the field of your choosing so you don’t have to write your own onload JavaScript event handler:

<form id="form1"  runat="server" defaultbutton="btnSearch" defaultfocus="txtSearch">

The more I learn about ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio .NET 2005, the more I’m impressed.  It’s the little details like these that get me all excited!