March 2006 - Posts

• I have a new blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/dannychen

  The ASP.NET weblogs are still using .Text which, frankly, is a bit annoying to work with and just plain 'old'.  Pete LePage showed me the MSDN blogs which use the (much newer) Community Server 2.0 codebase so I'm going to switch to it.  They look much cooler anyway.  Hopefully my blog will still be syndicated on ASP.NET so the readers can keep up to date with my happenings. In other news, you'll notice on the new blog that I'm now a "Visual Web Developer" tester as well.  Actually, the truth is that after ASP.NET 2.0 shipped, I found it to be a prime opportunity to shift jobs and join the test team that is responsible for the GUI.  While both teams are quite integrated, they are certainly distinct and have their own test methodologies.  This is going to be a great experience and I really like my new team.  However, I can't seem to just let go of controls so I expect you'll continue to see posts from me about custom controls and navigation tricks as well as a strong forum presence.  Here is the new address: http://blogs.msdn.com/dannychen Posted Mar 07 2006, 04:22 PM by dannychen with 5 comment(s)

• IE7 Beta and VWD Style Builder.

  There's a bug in the IE7 beta which seems to break the style builder.  Of course we'll work on getting it fixed but in the meantime, if you happen to have IE7 installed, there's a workaround you can apply. Create a new DWORD reg-key named "devenv.exe" with the value "0" at the following location: "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_CSS_DATA_RESPECTS_XSS_ZONE_SETTING_KB912120" Read more about it here:  http://blogs.msdn.com/petel   Posted Mar 06 2006, 08:45 AM by dannychen with no comments

• Top results for the loading control challenge.

  Thank you everyone for sharing your code with me.  There were quite a few excellent submissions and I learned a few things.  Here are the top entries I received so far for the challenge.  I'll add to this list if any more come in that I feel are worth mention. crms -at- sima.com is an Elite ASP.NET hacker and submitted this solution:      http://weblogs.asp.net/dannychen/articles/439435.aspx Raj Kaimal is an Elite ASP.NET hacker and submitted this solution:      http://weblogs.asp.net/dannychen/articles/439436.aspx      Raj also gets extra credit for coming up with a sample page using async tasks to demo his control. Both of these are very fine solutions, but not quite perfect.  Most critically, both run into an issue that I don't know if it can even be worked around.  Intermittently, ASP.NET throws an error: Session state has created a session id, but cannot save it because the response was already flushed by the application. I talked with some dev's about this and they seem to think it's pretty cut-and-dry.  Using Response.Flush pretty much causes this and can't really be worked around.  And this can't really be done without Response.Flush. Secondly, both are hardcoded to display a fixed message.  It would be really nice if they were Templated instead to give the users flexibility in the display.  This is a trivial amount of work, however... None-the-less, I learned that this was indeed possible and in-fact, not that hard to do.  Hopefully someone else will be able to benefit from these examples.    Posted Mar 02 2006, 10:00 AM by dannychen with 5 comment(s)