I’ve been using Developer Express components with VS.NET 2005 (beta 1) for a while, but nearly always in forms that I had previously created with VS.NET 2003. Now, suddenly some problems showed up when these old forms were edited, specifically with XtraGrids and XtraEditors on them. These problems were quite severe, as the VS designer would simply refrain from persisting all properties that are stored in “inner objects” of the main component.

This concept is used all over the DX libraries, for …

In XPO, an ORM product by Developer Express, it’s possible to use a custom “value converter” to persist information when the standard mapping techniques are not sufficient. This provides a flexible approach that can be used in many different scenarios.

Nullable types

Although the Developer Express knowledge base provides an article that shows how to persist a bitmap, I had never actually used that approach. With .NET 2.0, I was thinking about persisting nullable types and I found that XPO …