1. Why do you need to set InsertCommand and InsertParameters in code - would it be much simpler to set them in ASPX instead?

The way you're doing it makes the whole SQLDataSource sort of useless - you can do the same with direct ADO.NET code (as shown in the

http://www.aspsnippets.com/post/2009/05/27/Get-ID-of-the-newly-inserted-record-in-SQL-Server-using-ADONet.aspx )