November 2003 - Posts
I just completed the incredibly painless process of porting my web site from ASP.NET v1.1 and Wilson.MasterPages to ASP.NET v1.2 and it's integrated MasterPages.
All I can say is WOW.
I trimmed my 7 page site down from 57 files in 2 directories to an astounding 9 files (none of these figures are counting images of course). While most of the deprecated files were CodeBehind pages and .resx files, I'm still impressed. No more fooling around with UserControls at all when trying to seperate code from UI!!
While I'm on the topic I must also say that I really like inline code. I guess it's because of all of my classic ASP experience, but I find it easier to have everything right there in front of me.
Anyway, major kudos to the whole ASP.NET team!
Grr. Robert pointed out to me that there is no GoLive license for v1.2 yet, so until I get any clarification on this I went ahead and switched back to the 1.1 version of my site. I am interested to hear any clarification of this though, so I would appreciate any comments from anyone with more knowledge of this. I certianly don't want to upset anyone...
A picture says more than words...
Now if only it would reflect against the current database and list all available tables...
Also, my more attainable wish: The ability to select a block of text in the workbench and comment/uncomment it via a menu or toolbar like VS.NET...
I must admit that I was a bit hasty in my dismissal of the PDC Framework bits on my Windows 2003 Server box. I finally reinstalled everything after having repaved the box 2 weeks ago and everything is now running splendedly. In fact, my site (yeah, all 5 pages of it) seems a bit snappier after the first hit than it did with 1.1, but surely this is just my imagination.
Now I would like to ask the community of PDC'ers to recommend some of your favorite examples, labs, or basically anything at all that I can read/learn from about ASP.NET Whidbey. Since I don't actually have VS.NET Whidbey (working from the Yukon beta bits) I will be going about this the hard way (oh IntelliSense, I miss you already).
When I went to the Windows Messenger site tonight to download Windows Messenger 5 (MSN Messenger is a bit to fluffy for me, and Trillian stopped working... more on this in a sec) I found that the download link there is for WM4.7. Now why would I want to download an old version that doesn't even work anymore?!
So after a bit of digging around I found the real link to get WM5, and I now see that my friends actually ARE online.
Could it be that Microsoft finally locked out all of the third-party clients who haven't taken the red pill?
Well we're back from regionals... We actually did better than I feared we might, but the Virgina Tech. teams pretty much showed us how it's supposed to be done. I want to congratulate all of the teams involved and thank UVa for hosting this years competition.
On the homefront, I have finally forced myself to redesign my personal web site. My two previous designs (read: MasterPage templates) were just barebones HTML with CSS for decoration. This time I decided to spend a few hours working on the presentation side, and (for now) I am quite happy with the results.
On a side note: In the process of changing my template (and playing with my Single-User Vault source control provider) I managed to break debugging on my web server. I want to thank Roy for his great ASP.NET debugging FAQ, which had me back up and running in all of 2 minutes.
It seems that I am not the only one who had a less-than-desirable experiance with the Longhorn bits. I was running this on my main machine, a P4 3.0Ghz 800Mhz FSB with a gig of ram, 512 of which I had given to VPC. It was horribly slow.
Whats worse, I had installed the 1.2 framework on my main machine, only to find that it took somewhere between 5-30 seconds for IIS to serve up any .NET content at all. This was only compounded if accessed remotely.
So now here I sit, typing from a freshly repaved machine... That will teach me to play with the bleeding edge. I can't wait until I get my other motherboard back so I can set up a testing server without frustraiting myself to death.
I've been playing with JCreator as I'm preparing for this weekend. This will be my first programming competition, so I'm not really sure what to expect. I've studied all of the previous problems, some of which are pretty tough, and I'm glad the rest of my team are great coders.).
Too bad C# isn't an option, but hey, Java is close enough, right
If anyone has any advice or experience with programming competitions, I would love to hear it.
Well I finally installed the PDC framework bits on my machine, and my web site is now running .NET 1.2. Everything went very smoothly. The code “just worked” without any changes at all. I'm now looking forward to playing with the real MasterPages and replacing the setup I use now, which is a modified version of Paul's MasterPages.
One thing that I noticed though: The ASP.NET 1.2 Web Service Extension was prohibited by default on my installation. Has anyone else noticed this? I'm running Server '03 Enterprise if that matters.
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