February 2003 - Posts
"Our" very own Duncan Mackenzie writes about his new article on MSDN discussing background copying using the Background Intelligent Transfer Service. I, like many I'm sure, have been faced with such conundrums in the past and it looks like a palatable solution indeed. Until now I had heard very little of BITS.
Excellent article!
Yoz Grahame writes about his experiences thus far with Microsoft's Three Degrees. I too downloaded Three Degrees and even got as far as adding the necessary firewall rules until I realized that I'd have to upgrade the firmware
on my router for IPv6. This stunted my otherwise enthusiastic endeavor and I
continued on more ostensibly productive activities....... like reading
blogs.
ScottGu writes about
Dogfooding and Showstoppers. Interesting vernacular and a more interesting read. Most developers are very familiar with the idea of a showstopper, but the idea of dogfooding was certainly new to me.
Microsoft
announced the release of
TaskVision, the first smart client sample app, on one of
DevelopMentor's Discussion Lists,
DOTNET-CLR. I've yet to use it but it looks as though it might actually be useful.
Comments on its code quality are already being made in the
Windows Technical: Off-Topic list.
Yesterday we had Brian Moore from Microsoft present
at our user group, the Tulsa .NET User Group. It was an excellent presentation and well attended. I
always enjoy talking with others who find facets of .NET as interesting as I
do.
If you don't yet belong to a .NET User Group, join one. If a group doesn't yet exist in your area, start one.
Ben Richardson made a comment regarding my post on Reporting with XML/XSLT and the lack of ability to control page breaks when printing. Since this was an issue I had initially faced as well, I felt I would post my findings.
There are a few CSS2 attributes implemented in Internet Explorer >= 4 that one can use to control page breaking behavior for print: page-break-before, and page-break-after. The CSS2 also defines page-break-inside; however, to my knowledge, no browser yet implements it.
In a few of my Windows Forms applications that require reporting facilities I employ a typical XML/XSLT method. I emit XML from my application and then use various XSLT stylesheets to translate said XML into HTML for each required report. This works well when client deployment is decentralized with no central repository to persist data. To display the report I usually interop with shdocvw.dll and put an instance of the control in a form. This gives the client the perception, albeit superficial one, of an integral reporting facility.
There have been times when I needed to display a more verbose report during preview but a more terse report on print. To facilitate this I would employ what Martin Fowler calls a Two Step View web presentation pattern in his book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by applying multiple XSLT stylesheets: one for preview, and one for print. Brad Wilson speaks of using CSS for printing which I could more succinctly employ for my Two Step View pattern as opposed to having to deal with multiple XSLT stylesheet translations.
Cool!
More Posts