Rory Primrose

Now this could be interesting to play with.

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Soma said it. It must be true. This is great news. I am very excited about this release. I wonder if the subscription downloads for this will produce a DOS attack though.

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Having worked with Whidbey for six months now, I have come across some things that I think are great about the IDE and some things that I wish were not there. The things that I don't like about the Whidbey IDE tend to be the things that are different from previous versions and I just don't understand the design decisions involved.

Firstly, the good. One of the things that I think is really cool is if you have an intellisense dropdown list pop up for a method parameter that you are calling, you don't have to type the entire namespace of the item you want. For example, I have been working with web custom controls quite a lot recently. Rendering tags and attributes using AddAttribute and RenderBeginTag makes use of System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriterAttribute and System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriterTag definitions. When intellisense drops down the list of options, you can type just "div" instead of "system.web.UI.htmltextwritertag.div" and it will select the correct item.

Next, the bad. One of the things that I really don't like about the new IDE is that when you are in a code view, the right dropdown list at the top of the document now only contain methods that you have in the document rather than including all the methods that you could override in a base class, but it does contain all events for an object selected in the left dropdown list even if they are not handled. Very inconsistent. The left dropdown list doesn't contain interfaces anymore either.

The ugly. I am not sure why there is this change in behavior, but when you check something into source control, each checkbox in the treeview of pending items becomes checked again. This grates against my style of work. When I have to modify multiple files, I don't check them in with the same comment across the files unless, in the very unlikely case, I have made the same changes across all those files. This means that when I check files in, I uncheck all the files, check the one I want to check in and write a comment for the changes made to that file. When I check it in, the pending checkins window is rebuilt and all the checkboxes are checked again. This means that I have to then uncheck everything again. A small inconvenience, but an annoying one. For me, this comes down to not honouring how the user wants things done. I think this is poor form. If a user sets something up a certain way, then remember the settings and don't force them into your opinion of life, the universe and how to best use an application.

These are the three things that I have come across a lot in the last couple of weeks. I have also been using snippets a lot too. There is a lot of cool stuff in the new IDE and I can't wait for it to go to full release.

What are the IDE features that you like or dislike?

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Just came across this post about the next release of Community Server. There is some very exciting changes in the next release.

I have been very happy with CS since I changed over to it. I had previously built several versions of my own site, which is great fun and I got exactly what I wanted out of it, but I just didn't have time to keep up with its development. It has been good using someone else's code for once. Makes me keen for new versions.

While we are on the excitement topic, there is so much to be looking forward to in the tech world. Whidbey and Yukon are being released in a couple of weeks, xbox 360 a few weeks after that. Vista and all the goodies that go with that should also be a lot of fun to work and play with.

Good times ahead to be a techie (still can't bring myself to call myself a geek and nerd is definitely out).

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Last week, I posted about how nested control designers in ASP.Net were not rendering. I have progressed a lot in the last week regarding getting good support for controls in the designer. No doubt some articles will follow.

With regard to nested designers getting called, this will only happen when the control related to the designer is hosted in an editable region.

The page for example is the classic editable region. You can drag and drop controls onto the page. You can select the control and change its properties through the property grid. Controls themselves may also have editable regions if their designer has been developed to support them.

There is an easy set of steps to demonstrate this.

1. Open a webform in the designer
2. Drag on a Label control and clear its Text property. The designer for the Label control will render [ID Property] for the control so that the control remains visible in the designer while there isn't a Text property value.
3. Drag a Panel control onto the designer.
4. Drag the Label control into the Panel control. This is the first indication that the Panel control has an editable region. You can drag and drop controls into it and you can select, modify and delete those child controls. Notice that the Label is still being rendered with [ID Property] if its Text property is empty.
5. Drag a Placeholder control onto the designer.
6. Drag the Label control into the Placeholder control. You will notice that you can't drop the Label control onto the Placeholder control. The designer for the Placeholder control doesn't render an editable region.
7. Go into the Source view.
8. Manually move the declaration for the Label control from inside the Panel to inside the Placeholder control.
9. Go into the Design view. You will notice that now that the Label control is no longer rendered. Its designer is not working anymore.
10. Go into the Source view and add a Text property value to the Label control.
11. Go into the Design view again. You will now notice that the Label control is rendering again.

The other interesting thing to notice is that if a control isn't clickable (ie not in an editable region), then it is also not available through the dropdown list in the property grid. The only way to modify the properties of the control is manually in the Source view.

Another thing to note about editable regions is that the only controls that are selectable and can be modified or deleted are the immediate children that are placed into the editable region. If the control hierarchy went Panel -> Placeholder -> Label, then the Placeholder would be selectable in the editable region of the Panel, but the Label would not be. To achieve that, the Placeholder's designer would also need to support an editable region.

Tags: ASP.Net

We have been picking up the pace at our Taekwondo club recently. It has been really good getting into a more solid workout.

I have been amazed at the amount of fluid I have to drink. This week, I have been going through almost 2 litres of Gatorade in each one hour session. I think I would be going through the full 2 litres if we had another drink break added. I need to get into the habit of drinking more water during the day to help with the hydration before a training session.

On the exercise side of things, I noticed I dropped a couple of kilos recently. After training last night, I dropped another 2.5 kilos. I could understand that if I was losing lots of water through sweat, but if I am replacing it with 2 litres of fluid then how does that work? Any fitness trainers out there know how this works?

My ankle has also healed and strengthened enough for me to not strap it anymore. I had to take about three weeks off training and then about two months of strapping it with tape for training. Amazing that it takes so long for ankles to heal.

Tags: Taekwondo

I put up a post a while back about my issues with publishing embedded resources from an assembly with ASP.Net 2.0. Ramon wanted a sample, so here it is.

There are a couple of things to note about getting this to work:

1. The resource must be marked as Build Action = Embedded Resource
2. Line 18 in ResTest\ResTestLib\My Project\AssemblyInfo.vb must include the full namespace of the assembly, not just the filename of the embedded resource
3. As above, Line 21 in ResTest\ResTestLib\ResTestControl.vb must also include the full namespace of the assemlby, not just the filename of the embedded resource

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I have been designing and building a nested set of web controls over the last couple of weeks. By nested, I mean that there is a parent control that contains a set of child controls of a specific type.

I like to have default behaviours of my web controls in the designer when they are empty. For example, the parent control would add 3 child controls if it was empty and the child control would display something if it was empty, like how the label displays "[ID]" when the text property is empty.

One thing that surprised me was that the designers for the child control don't get called when rendering the parent control in the designer. This means that the behaviour of the parent's designer must also do the designer work of the child control.

I am sure this is not right. One of the reasons I think I am missing something here is that if I take the panel control (which has a designer), and I put my own control in it that has a designer, my controls designer gets called. Why would it be different with two of my own nested controls?

I hope I am missing something because the nested controls should be calling their own designers to help with design-time rendering rather than relying on parent controls which would typically be completely unrelated (the panel isn't going to understand how to handle an empty label control).

I will have to check my code again.

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I think that just the title alone was enough to convince you to read this post. You are (or at least Geoff is) wondering if I am the biggest loser. I'll leave you to decide that for yourself, but that is not what I want to rant about.

After watching tonight's episode of 24, I did a little channel surfing and came across the end of 'The biggest loser' - yet another reality/competition show. These people need to lose as much weight as they can to stay in the game and win.

I just saw this lady get kicked from the show. What struck me was the interview with her at the end. Before we got to see how she went after the show, she was giving her goodbye to the competition chat to the camera. What she (roughly) said was that she wanted to lose weight so that she could be a good mum and have a great relationship etc etc. This made me a bit sad. People are wonderful, beautiful and unique, regardless of their size or shape. I think she related fitness with happiness. Surely unfit people can be happy, have good relationships and be great parents.

I think that self confidence, love and acceptance are more related to fitness than happiness and good relationships. I am not saying however that lack of self confidence, love and acceptance wouldn't have an impact on happiness and relationships though.

Perhaps fitness is tied to happiness and good relationships more than I think. I wish people could accept themselves for who they are rather than thinking that they will only have a better life if they were fit. I would prefer that people were happy with themselves and fitness was satisfaction on top rather than being the key to life. Maybe this is an idealistic view of the world.

What do you think?

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