Building a status calendar - ASP.NET
<p>I need to build a status dashboard that reads Events (ID, Desc, Time) out of a database, and puts a marker on a day that drills down to detail, if there is an event - and just a checkmark if there is no event. Just like <a href="http://www.google.com/appsstatus" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/appsstatus</a>.</p>

<p>I am a Jr. developer witha PHP background, I am using C# &amp; ASP.NET. I chose to use the UpdatePanel/ScriptManager components for the grid even though there is some bandwidth costs.</p>

<p>My question is about the best way to build this table. In PHP, I would use a string and just keep adding HTML to it via nested iteration, like:</p>

<pre><code>foreach($row in $rows){
MyHtml .= "&lt;td&gt;" . $variableFromDB[i] . "&lt;/td&gt;";
i++
}
return MyHtml; //Output built HTML
</code></pre>

<p>In this case I need to query an array to see if an event exists for that day, if so, generate a link containing URL parameter (field1=value1&amp;field2) so that I can display the corresponding detail information.</p>

<p>Since I'm using .NET, I'm wondering if there is a more elegant way to do this without querying for each cell to check for an event, and an easier way to build a table. I see .NET classes like "HtmlTableCell" &amp; "HtmlTableRow", but I haven't seen any compelling examples that require a query in each cell.</p>

<p>Any guidance from you senior .NET folks would be great...</p>
