This morning I updated the source code for the Silverlight Pages module that I am building as part of the DotNetNuke Hackathon.  Based on some feedback from Michael Washington, I did a little refactoring to separate out my XAML display markup into a separate view.  This makes the code just a little bit cleaner and allows me to develop the view in Blend (of course that is a whole new thing to learn which will have to wait for later).  For now I will continue to hack away in XAML, learning a bit more each day and shaking off some of the cobwebs from what I had learned 2 years ago.

There are a number of cases in programming where you are often forced to store data in one format but need to convert that data to a different format for display.  One of the situations where this seems to come up quite often is in the storage hierarchical data structures.  SQL Server has traditionally had very poor support for dealing with hierarchical data.  SQL 2005 and 2008 have made some effort to try and simplify solving this problem, unfortunately, there is still a lot of data that is stored in a format that is not readily able to take advantage of these new SQL Features.

When working with legacy data, or legacy business tiers which expose the data as flat collections with ID and ParentID fields, you will likely need a simple way to convert these records into some form of nested collection.  This is a problem where people often resort to brute force methods for doing this conversion.  Unfortunately, the brute force approach is often slow and very specific to a specific set of data.