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Irregular expressions regularly
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Comments

Shawn A. Van Ness said:

One good use for RegexOptions.RightToLeft is converting a flat index into a text file into human-manageable line/column numbers.

Let's say you're parsing a text file -- with Regexes, of course, so you're representing the whole file as a single string in memory.

Now, let's say you find a problem. Where is it? The user is not going to be very happy if you tell him it's at character offset 54872. He's going to want to see a line number (at least) and hopefully a column number.

Now, there are many ways to skin this cat... certainly some are more performant than others. But for a quick and dirty solution, you can't get much simpler than using an RTL regex!

Here you go... if you use this in your book, can I get a shout-out in the liner notes? :)
-S


Regex lineStartRTL = new Regex( @"^",
RegexOptions.Multiline|RegexOptions.RightToLeft);

private int IndexToLineNumber( int index)
{
if ( index >= this.source.Length)
index = this.source.Length-1;

// Line numbers are conventionally one-based, so
// return the count of line-starts to our "left"
return this.lineStartRTL.Matches(
this.source, index).Count;
}

private int IndexToColumnNumber( int index)
{
if ( index >= this.source.Length)
index = this.source.Length-1;

// Column numbers are conventionally zero-based, so
// return the diff between us and the first char on
// the line
int begin = this.lineStartRTL.Match(
this.source, index).Index;
return index-begin;
}
# February 9, 2003 12:08 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks Shawn, love your work! :-)
# February 9, 2003 12:27 PM

coacoacoa said:

About the way to remove a comma in a "string list" is to put commas in front of the string.
Instead of building a string list like this :
myStr = ""
myStr = myStr & strItem1 & ","
myStr = myStr & strItem2 & ","
...
Let's use :
myStr = ""
myStr = myStr & "," & strItem1
myStr = myStr & "," & strItem2
...
Then you can remove the first comma like this :
myStr = Mid(myStr, 2)
# February 11, 2003 8:47 AM

Darren Neimke said:

How much more performant is that? You'd still have to wrap the result in a test to see that the length of the "myStr" variable was > 0; and how big would the string get before you did some sort of optimization on the string building process itself anyway? Hmmmmm? :P
# February 11, 2003 1:07 PM

Ben Richardson said:

How good was Symonds 143!!
# February 12, 2003 6:16 AM

Darren Neimke said:

It was great. I'll bet that he got sledged a bit ;) and probably did some "trash-talkin'" of his own after that knock.
# February 12, 2003 6:19 AM

Deepak Sharma said:

Now it get's interesting. .Net mixed with Cricket. Yeah, I like it. Symonds century was great. More so because you guys defeated Pakistan. I am an Indian. You know what I mean...:) So, Sledging is known to me. That is what every Fast bowler and wicketkeeper does...Right? :)
# February 12, 2003 6:52 AM

Darren Neimke said:

It's not so much the mixing of Cricket and .NET as the recognition that we are a diverse community :-)
# February 12, 2003 7:03 AM

Greg said:

I will have to do some sledging on the tennis courts this weekend! I also call this 'playing mind games' with your opponent. Like in tennis, if your opponent is serving really good, on the next change over you make a comment "Wow, you are serving really good today..have you changed something in your serve?" Then, they can't serve anymore because they are now thinking about it!

# February 12, 2003 2:27 PM

TrackBack said:

Grumpicus Maximus (...we're all mad here.) Thursday, February 20, 2003
# February 20, 2003 4:56 PM

Jorge said:

Aim for the grouchy cyclist? :-)
# February 26, 2003 3:47 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Oy! Now that's just plain nasty. So tell me, were you the guy in the Blue Nissan?
# February 26, 2003 3:55 AM

TrackBack said:

Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio WebDog, Shadow
# March 2, 2003 4:44 PM

TrackBack said:

XML Web Services are kewl..... : Alex Lowe's .NET Blog
# March 2, 2003 4:44 PM

TrackBack said:

Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio WebDog, Shadow
# March 3, 2003 4:02 PM

TrackBack said:

Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio WebDog, Shadow
# March 3, 2003 4:07 PM

Duncan Mackenzie said:

Actually, if you take a look at my custom control article at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnwinforms/html/custcntrlsamp4.asp that is exactly what I create, an Image List View. :)
# March 5, 2003 7:26 AM

TrackBack said:

Reader as a performer : ShowUsYour-Blog!
# March 6, 2003 3:25 AM

TrackBack said:

MORE VS.NET 2003 Info : ShowUsYour-Blog!
# March 6, 2003 3:25 AM

jimh@qis.net said:

As usual, you are far beyond us mere ASP mortals.

Try as I might, I have not grok'd .Net. I made a concerted effort today to download the MSDN 'Intro to .Net' and watched about half of it. I figure I have about 10-20 more hours worth of MSDN stuff to watch before I "get" it.

I know I have to get past this wall, but it is tough.
# March 7, 2003 3:26 AM

Thomas Johansen said:

I hope I see this app in my inbox soon =)
# March 9, 2003 1:27 PM

Jeff Giesbrecht said:

I love the idea Darren!!

Have you read anything from David Allen? His website is http://davidco.com. In his book "Getting Things Done" he talks a lot about a similar fashion of listing tasks, etc.

He puts forward that there shouldn't be a to-do list as that adds pressure to get none important things done that day. Rather there should be one list of items that are going to be done in the future some time, but that is looked at regularly so as to keep up with them.

Your DevBuddy is a great concept that holds great value for making sure one is on top of things that need to get done. An addition I would like to submit is if one can drag an email or web-page to the app and have the email add a task and the URL of the web-page be added to the list of articles that would be very beneficial.
# March 9, 2003 10:03 PM

Duncan Mackenzie said:

Allow me to drag the complete snippet into an email/web post/whatever
Allow me to drag the snippet in from VS.NET
Show the code with color coding, and paste it in with color coding if the target supports it
allow me to describe the snippet (a description field)
Menu Option/Right Click/Shortcut in VS.NET to create new snippet
Save the whole thing as an XML file (serialization makes this easy) and let me send it to other users of the tool...
Support using (multiple) shared snippet sets, so you could put an XML file onto a share and several people could use it and add to it
Perhaps use a database, but support offline through serialized XML?
# March 10, 2003 11:41 PM

Darren Neimke said:

> Allow me to drag the snippet in from VS.NET

So, with *your* dream tool you just drag it onto the tab and it prompts you for metadata such as category, language, description?

> support offline through serialized XML?

Nod, the serialization bit a sort of understand, and that would be a must to implement in some manner or form.

> Allow me to drag the complete snippet into ...
> Allow me to drag the snippet in from ...

Yep, I'd definitely support drag and drop events. Maybe elaborate on how you drag "out" of the tool. What invokes that action?

Because you mentioned it several times, could you please also drill in further on how *your* dream tool interacts with VS.NET?
# March 10, 2003 11:58 PM

Duncan Mackenzie said:

>Because you mentioned it several times, could you please
>also drill in further on how *your* dream tool interacts
>with VS.NET?

It could be a VS Add-In AND a standalone app... I just want a way to add snippets easily from VS.NET... dragging is certainly fine :)

>So, with *your* dream tool you just drag it onto the tab
>and it prompts you for metadata such as category,
>language, description?

Yep, that would be perfect!
# March 11, 2003 12:34 AM

Jason Tucker said:

Mine would be totally integrated in the VS.Net IDE. If not the ability to copy to the clipboard ala Office XP's clipboard manager. The ability to export the snippets into a readable form for aggregation into something else i.e. a portal. The ability to classify the snippet by language, website found, etc. etc. basically lots and lots of metadata. Have you seen Code Swap for VS.Net?
http://wwww.vscodeswap.com/

I'll probably have more items when I think more.

# March 11, 2003 12:41 AM

Royo said:

Take a look ate Source+ 200 from AxTools.Com
It's a code manager for VB 6.0 , but i wish it were for .NET as well. It has very very nice functionality.
# March 11, 2003 7:50 AM

TrackBack said:

Put your orders in... : ShowUsYour-Blog!
# March 11, 2003 5:06 PM

TrackBack said:

Code line counting.. : Jason Tucker's Blog
# March 11, 2003 7:25 PM

Jeff Giesbrecht said:

Darren have you seen this snippet manager?

http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/Details.aspx?SampleGuid=353670f2-4e73-467c-94b5-2faaefb5741d
# March 12, 2003 10:59 PM

Shawn A. Van Ness said:

Interested parties should also check out Chris Sells' RegexDesigner .NET tool... it's literally spoiled me: I can't write or read regexes without it, any more.

http://www.sellsbrothers.com/tools/#regexd

-S
# March 13, 2003 12:11 AM

Darren Neimke said:

< grin / > Thanks Shawn :-) I'll happily concede that my tool isn't really in the same league as Chris's or Eric Gunnerson's workbench.

It's quick-n-simple though, and, it's become one of my most used tools (although I do still use the others if I need a heavyweight).

I'd say mine is to theirs as WebMatrix is to VS.NET!
# March 13, 2003 12:14 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Great stuff!! Thanks Jeff, that's a great tool, probably only 2 or 3 features short of what I had in mind ;)
# March 13, 2003 12:17 AM

Phil Weber said:

Thanks for the link, Darren! You might also enjoy Chris Sells' three-part series on "Serialization Basics." The series starts here (free registration required).
# March 13, 2003 1:36 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Yeh, thanks Phil... I saw those the other day. You actually reminded me to add them to my "To read" list ;-)
# March 13, 2003 1:40 AM

TrackBack said:

Useful Methods in C# : ScottW's ASP.NET WebLog
# March 17, 2003 11:38 PM

Phil Scott said:

When I took the 70-310 exam, the hardest part were doing remoting. There were A LOT of question involved with coding, deploying and debugging remoting. Just a warning.

All in all, a good exam. But so much remoting, which to me is one of the minor players in .NET, kinda threw me.
# March 21, 2003 2:35 AM

TrackBack said:

Memobook and DevBuddy : Wes' Puzzling Blog
# March 21, 2003 5:57 PM

Paul Gielens said:

Advanced .NET Remoting will clarify a thing or two.
# March 22, 2003 12:18 PM

Ingo Rammer said:

Paul: Thanks!

Darren: By the way, chapter 3 of my book is available for download at http://www.apress.com/book/supplementDownload.html?bID=47&sID=442

I guess this chapter alone can help you to clarify some of the issues.

Happy Remoting,
-Ingo
# March 22, 2003 5:11 PM

TrackBack said:

Remoting is *still* Whacky! : ShowUsYour-Blog!
# March 23, 2003 5:45 AM

Stephane Rodriguez said:


The Interop link points to a free ebook which, at first glance, looks full of promise. Unfortunately, once you start reding it, for instance the COM interop chapter, you'll see that the author is merely providing an overview, not real world cases of actual marshalling issues (anyone can check that .NET programming boards are full of marshalling issues and concerns).
# March 26, 2003 1:29 PM

TrackBack said:

TaskVision and an ever-increasing learning curve! : ShowUsYour-Blog!
# March 27, 2003 6:35 AM

TrackBack said:

WebService Results : Jesse Ezell Blog
# March 27, 2003 6:35 AM

TrackBack said:

Clarence Westberg's Radio Weblog
# March 31, 2003 2:21 AM

Moshe Eshel said:

Hi,
Great idea and solves most of the problems for ranges that users encounter, also it is very intuitive (I'm gonna use this the next time I have to implement a date search).

However, many users (especcially business users) would appriciate the addition (maybe in advanced mode) of actually inputing in dates and even hours for a more complete solution (that can support more advanced date search).

One question though, why the hardcoded limit on the beforedate and afterdate? do you plan on not using the system after 2099 does Y2K ring a bell???

All the best,
Moshe
# April 2, 2003 11:18 AM

Chris Frazier said:

I don't think I'll be alive to worry about dates after 2099, but Moshe raises a good point. I suppose if you wanted to go this route, make sure it's documented in there.

Is this an asp.net/web solution or winforms? I'm implementing a DHTML pseudo-popup calendar to select dates in my current project...makes it real easy to use and eliminates those pesky pop-ups! I modified it from an example on javascript.com.

Good Job,
-Chris
# April 2, 2003 7:31 PM

TrackBack said:

Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio WebDog, Shadow
# April 2, 2003 7:54 PM

Bill Wilkinson said:

Why not actually build part of the query and stuff it into the <OPTION>s?

<SELECT Name="dateSearch">
<OPTION Value="theDate=$"> Exact date
<OPTION Value="theDate<$"> Before date
<OPTION Value="theDate>$"> After date
<OPTION Value="DateDiff(d,$,#)>=-7 AND DateDiff(d,$,#)<=7"> Within a week
...
</SELECT>

And then, in the server code, after validating the users textual date, you just REPLACE the $ with a properly formatted version of his date for the DB you are using. Likewise, you replace any # with a proper form of today's date.

And now you don't have the enddate problem the other noticed.

Of course, you could use the same kind of logic on the server to avoid putting in an enddaate when it isn't needed (or begindate when it isn't needed) but why bother with logic when it isn't needed?
# April 3, 2003 3:44 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks Bill... that's great!
# April 3, 2003 4:12 AM

Bill Wilkinson said:

One more minor "trick": Most DBs treat a date-alone as 0:00:00 on that date. So instead of needing to do

WHERE dateField >= '2003-3-11 0:00:01' AND dateField <= '2003-4-11 23:59:59'

you can more simply code

WHERE dateField >= '2003-3-11' AND dateField < '2003-4-12'

Notice the operators: >= but just <

And notice that I bumped the date for the end date to the *next* day. Because *any* time on the prior date will be *less than* that value.

# April 3, 2003 7:44 PM

TrackBack said:

Re: the blogging style thing : Bloated Blog of .NET Blunders
# April 5, 2003 8:55 PM

TrackBack said:

A little 'bit' more on Int32 vs Integer : Code/Tea/Etc...
# April 5, 2003 8:55 PM

TrackBack said:

A Canonical Hierarchy : ShowUsYour-Blog!
# April 7, 2003 6:53 PM

Chris Frazier said:

The only thing that immediately comes to mind is CausesValidation. Although, it seems like that is the *opposite* of what you would like to do...the default is true, but perhaps you could set it to false at the Page level, then set the only one you want to be true.
# April 8, 2003 1:53 AM

Chris Frazier said:

Have you gotten this resolved yet, Darren? How about adding another validator to do the work for you? CustomValidator maybe?:)
# April 10, 2003 7:48 AM

TrackBack said:

What's the fuss about VS .NET 2003? : Edgar S??nchez's .NET Blog
# April 10, 2003 7:44 PM

David Stone said:

Ooooh. I like regexSnippets. Very nice. :)

I use regexes all the time...so it's really nice to see tools like this come out. I also use Eric Gunnerson's RegexWorkbench and Chris Sells' RegexDesigner. There's another on CodeProject that I found useful called Expresso.

What's funny is that these tools all pretty much do the same thing...but each has it's own litle feature that makes me use it when I need that one feature. Yours is now the "favorites" feature which I predict will come in handy. Thanks! :)
# April 12, 2003 11:31 PM

Mads Nissen said:

I've seen jesus on this one. From now on I won't touch a webservice as long as I am sure that I'll only talk to other .NET applications. And. If you design your app nicely (as I'm always struggeling to do) implementing .NET remoting alongside WS is absolutely no problem.<br><br>The other nice thing about remoting is that I get the feel of writing real server apps, like I've done on J2EE. Feels more solid. Feels more component, service and message oriented.
# April 17, 2003 12:01 PM

TrackBack said:

Debugging Web Services over HTTPS : mads studentblog
# April 18, 2003 7:19 AM

TrackBack said:

[Reference] Handy reference for command line compiling : CSharpener's Blog
# April 18, 2003 11:45 PM

TrackBack said:

[Reference] Handy reference for command line compiling : ShowUsYour-Blog!
# April 18, 2003 11:45 PM

TrackBack said:

Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio WebDog, Shadow
# April 18, 2003 11:45 PM

Hendrix said:

Darren,

I just ran the Anagram.html but if I enter let's say 'AL' it should work but it says it's not one.

Thanks for your help.
# May 1, 2003 4:08 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Well, it doesn't work because "AL" isn't an anagram of "ALXBIETOS". If you'd entered "IBXALTSEO" it would have worked.

What are your the rules for what you are trying to achieve?



# May 1, 2003 4:18 AM

Chris Frazier said:

Sweet! Now, all I have to do is find out how (and when) to leverage Regex!:P
# May 2, 2003 1:10 AM

TrackBack said:

ShowUsYour-Blog!
# May 4, 2003 3:16 AM

TrackBack said:

ShowUsYour<Blog>
# May 4, 2003 3:16 AM

G. Andrew Duthie said:

Darren,

Pet peeve here, but even if you don't like the feature...it's good to point out that this can also be disabled at the page level, rather than disabling it for the entire application. In fact, for most people, this is the smarter way to do it, since it enables you to allow HTML input on a specific page, while protecting you from inadvertent script vulnerabilities where you may not be filtering or encoding the input.

# May 4, 2003 7:02 PM

Darren Neimke said:

I plead temporary insanity ;-)
# May 4, 2003 9:44 PM

Frans Bouma said:

Congratz, Darren! :)
# May 5, 2003 11:21 PM

Thomas Johansen said:

Congrats mate! Awesome stuff by the way ;)
# May 5, 2003 11:44 PM

G. Andrew Duthie said:

Not you, too, Darren...another RSS feed made infinitely less useful through the use of the description field. Don't do it, I beg you. There's too little time, and too many blogs, to add extra clicks to your readers' efforts.

Come back from the dark side... :-)
# May 5, 2003 11:55 PM

Serdar Kilic said:

By A$ I'm assuming it is AUD$ ? If so, hey cool another aussie :)
# May 6, 2003 3:12 PM

Maurice Hicks said:

As a Kiwi now living in the US, I faced the same tipping confusion when I first arrived here.
Here are the rules of thumb I use:
1. Tip the bloke who drives the cab or shuttle from the airport. Roughly 10% of the fare for cabbies and $1 per bag for shuttle drivers.
2. If you have a bellboy take bags to your room $1 per bag is reasonable.
3. Americans love to eat out. Get used to tipping 15-20% of the bill anytime you're at a place where a server brings something to your table. Don't feel obligated to use the tip jar at places like Subway though.
4. Tip the guy or girl that cuts your hair (for some reason this just never occured to me).
Off the top of my head I can't think of anything else that isn't discretionary.

My pet peeve is the bloke that stands in the loo at some bars/clubs, turns on the faucet, hands you a paper towel and expects a tip for it.
# May 6, 2003 5:33 PM

Phil Weber said:

Darren: In addition to Maurice's list, I like to leave a couple of dollars each day for the chamber maid when I stay in a hotel, but I think I'm probably in the minority.

I also usually toss my change into the tip jar when I buy something at a coffee place (e.g., Starbucks).
# May 6, 2003 5:55 PM

Phil Weber said:

Also, there's a list of who is on which money here: http://www.moneyfactory.com/document.cfm/18/118
# May 6, 2003 5:58 PM

bill said:

ulysses s. grant is on the $50 bill
# May 6, 2003 6:01 PM

Roy Osherove said:

Cool!
I've always wanted to visit there myself, alas, I am in Israel... :(
They'd have to hire me first to get me here
# May 12, 2003 4:39 PM

Paul Wilson said:

You're going to just love what they have to show you about ASP.NET -- I know I did.
# May 12, 2003 6:33 PM

randy said:

Based on what I know, I agree. I think that there are some interesting possibilities, but I doubt that they'll be widely used. Most people will do what they're doing, and on occasion here or there take advantage of the CLR functionality to make their lives easier. However, the XML story could be much bigger than the CLR hosting in Yukon. I think its hard to tell at this point.
# May 14, 2003 4:35 PM

TrackBack said:

.Avery Blog
# May 15, 2003 8:04 AM

HumanCompiler said:

Great entry!

Last time I was out at the campus I just didn't want to leave! :P

And you're definitely right about Bill...and all of us with that same passion for learning...it continues every single day!
# May 16, 2003 3:37 AM

TrackBack said:

Code/Tea/Etc...
# May 16, 2003 6:12 PM

TrackBack said:

ShowUsYour-Blog!
# May 16, 2003 6:12 PM

James Shaw said:

Yes, it was another great week at MS. Hope you make it back to Oz ok Darren. Drop by for a few when you're in Atlanta next. ;-)
# May 17, 2003 1:22 PM

Rob Chartier said:

Have a safe trip, and make sure you drop me a line if you make it up to Vancouver.

ps. Dont forget the tip!
# May 22, 2003 10:18 AM

George Young said:

Good to meet you during your visit here, Darren. Be sure to drop a line when your in Redmond again.
# May 23, 2003 1:59 AM

Tariq said:

I think Expresso is much better, although RegexSnippets has a better interface. Maybe your'll should merge
# May 28, 2003 11:57 AM

Tariq said:

Interesting point.
For the last 6 months i've found a great affinity to myie2. its a great browser, oh, but its the IE back end. so theres a brand new interface for IE (myie2) that allowes me to much much more.
# June 1, 2003 4:34 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Tariq, thanks for the post. That's exactly what I'm on about; by all means, use the IE engine to build a better product but, why anyone would go through all the pain to RE-build it is beyond me!
# June 1, 2003 6:00 PM

ZeroSleep said:

Will firebird support Behaviors or something similar to IE Behaviors?
# June 1, 2003 6:39 PM

Cadmium said:

Hmmm... let me think. Maybe the MILLIONS of people using a NON-Microsoft OS would have something to say here? Choice is good. If there were no other browsers linux users would never be able get to the internet and OSX's primary browser would still be crippled and buggy.

Beside the broken features that have lasted years (proper http compression? longstanding css bugs?), there are a distinct lack of popular features missing from IE. In case you didn't notice a lot of people like tabbed browsing (so popular it's built-in by every other major browser besides IE: Opera, Mozilla/Firebird, Safari). Gestures in IE? Nope. Skins? Nope. Maybe not your thing, but you could always use the mozilla IE skin if your concerned about UI. Built in javascript control? Built in download manager? JavaScript debugging that isn't a complete joke?

I'm tired of getting only the features microsoft thinks I should have. Give me the features I want, give me the features everyone else has. There has been very few tangible improvements to the IE browsing experience since IE4. Browsing in IE today feels like browsing in IE in 1998.

Yes, IE won the browser wars, and it's a shame because we're missing out.
# June 1, 2003 8:35 PM

JosephCooney said:

Hey - all I meant was that you have to do a LOT of typing to get anything done with the htmltextwriter. CodeDOM looks just as bad, but cool because you can output multiple languages...I'll have to get out of the witty .sig business and leave it to guys like you who know what they're doing :-).
# June 2, 2003 4:09 AM

Duncan Mackenzie said:

Thanks for the advice and the plug... I'll try to get out more :)
# June 8, 2003 11:48 AM

JosephCooney said:

C'mon Darren - we _know_ you're under NDA, but you can't make statements about how much "better" things are going to get for VB.NET developers without giving us a few more juicy details. :-)
Seriously, if VB.NET got edit & continue I think it would be a compelling reason to switch. Generics are cool (C# 2.0), but edit and continue would probably be a clincher for me. I lead a sort of double life with my .NET programming, writing about the same amount of VB.NET and C#. There are pros and cons to both languages, both in the area of language features and in the area of tool support, and I really don't prefer one language over another. I agree with you that VB has never been this good - inheritance, multi-threading. At the same time I don't see any reason why a competent VB.NET developer shouldn't be able to read and understand C# pretty easily. Same framework, just a different "skin" on top of the MSIL.
# June 9, 2003 4:55 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

Glad I could help out, Darren. I am going to be soon tackling a few magazine articles here, and your comments have inspired me to share my experiences in a blog of my own. :-)

Thanks!
# June 9, 2003 5:46 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

Mozilla 1.x rocks. I am currently using Mozilla 1.4 RC1, and can't get enough of it. The popup blocker is the cincher for me, IE is so freaking annoying, you can't visit ESPN.com or MSNBC.com without having an annoying ad popping up and disrupting your flow.

Never was a huge fan of Opera, didn't seem to do as well as rendering Web sites as Mozilla/IE, but it's always been the fastest browser I've used, especially on "alternative" operating systems.
# June 9, 2003 5:49 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

Doug and Donny Mack are a fun duo. I remember going out to Bourbon Street with them and a handful of others when we were in New Orleans for the ASP.NET Connections conference back in 2001. Quite a blast.
# June 9, 2003 5:52 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

I always think of "tokenizing" as the recognition of tokens. So, the string: "This is a nice blog," is tokenized by your brain, by chunking out the various words from the mess of characters. "This" "is" "a" "nice" "blog". Perhaps I am confusing this term with lexing? I dunno, it's been a while since my last compilers class! :-)

Now that I think about it, isn't what I just described lexing, and tokenizing is saying something like, "Ok, 'This is' is a verb participle and 'nice' is an adjective and 'blog' is a noun." (Apologies for any incorrect grammar terms.) Heh, good thing I'm graduating grad school NOW before any tests on this material! :-)
# June 11, 2003 5:15 AM

Tim Walters said:

Interesting stuff Dazza,

One thing I thought I should add... since you're tokenizing your text with valid XML, your string becomes a XML Fragment. Now if you had multiple markup tags in there you could do something like the following...

Pseudo code:
- If output mode = formatted
- - set node list to all "formatted" elements
- Else
- - set node list to all "raw" elements
- For each node in the list
- - output the innerText
- - output a linebreak

It's more work for the current solution, but if you had more wrap modes it is easily scalable. In fact if you ended up with 30 different wrap modes, you could use the enumerator's toString method to name your markup nodes, and then use the same toString method in your selectNodes() method, no extra coding required except extending the Enum.

You could also use XSLT of course, but given your dislike for it you'll be wanting to wait until a WYSIWYG editor before you try that right? :)

Tim.
# June 11, 2003 6:04 AM

Frans Bouma said:

I will never take that pledge. Speed isn't everything. In today's software, robustness, ease of use (by developers), simplicity and other things are as important as performance and most of the time more important. When speed is important, looking at tiny instructions will NEVER help you. Optimize the algorithm, not the instructions. Read my blog for an excellent example :)

Using the profiler supplied I found a memleak in the IsDBNull function in the SqlDataReader. Haven't heard from MS yet. :)
# June 12, 2003 12:24 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Yes, thanks Frans, I did see your fine piece last week:

http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/archive/06082003.aspx

Thanks for the comment too :-)
# June 12, 2003 12:34 PM

Jim Arnold said:

Er...Byte.Parse()?

A simple example (in C#, without error-checking):

using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Globalization;

class Test
{
static void Main()
{
string hexString = "#88A8B2";
Color color = ConvertHexStringToColor(hexString);
Console.WriteLine(color);
}

static Color ConvertHexStringToColor(string hexString)
{
Int32 colorValue = Int32.Parse(hexString.Substring(1), NumberStyles.AllowHexSpecifier);

return Color.FromArgb(colorValue);
}
}

Jim
# June 12, 2003 5:34 PM

Jim Arnold said:


Oops, Int32.Parse of course, not Byte...

Remember that the Alpha channel of a color constructed from this will default to 0.

Also, the reason there isn't a built-in method to do this is probably because '#' isn't the standard way to denote prefix numbers ('0x' is more common).

Jim
# June 12, 2003 5:37 PM

Jim Bolla said:

thanks to a fellow sitepoint forums member:
(http://www.sitepointforums.com/showthread.php?postid=806773)

System.Drawing.ColorTranslator.FromHtml("#999900")



# June 12, 2003 5:51 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks guys.
# June 13, 2003 3:25 AM

d said:

Or even Microsoft.VisualBasic.Hex("123")
# June 14, 2003 3:36 PM

Steven Smith said:

Cool, congrats!
# June 17, 2003 9:05 AM

Alex Hoffman said:

Good to see another aussie blogger :)
# June 18, 2003 7:25 PM

Darren Neimke said:

"I can be contacted through several mediums, although it is a rare event when I multitask and use two simultaneously. As to whether I am actually able to communicate, well that is certainly debatable. On some levels maybe, on others clearly not."
# June 19, 2003 12:48 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Son, a woman is a lot like a... a refrigerator! They're about six feet tall, 300 pounds. They make ice, and... um... [spots his can of Duff] Oh, wait a minute. Actually, a woman is more like a beer. They smell good, they look good, you'd step over your own mother just to get one! [downs the beer] But you can't stop at one. You wanna drink another woman! - Homer J Simpson
# June 19, 2003 12:49 PM

Darren Neimke said:

When I just accidentally dialed an 800 number without preceding it by a 1, I got a message from the phone company saying, "You must dial a 1 before an 800 number."

If they can do that, why can't they just "If/Then" and put the dang 1 in???
# June 19, 2003 12:52 PM

Frans Bouma said:

Frysk: "Wês in sinnestriel. In oar hat dêr forlet fan."

In English: "Be as a sunbeam, other people will appreciate it."
# June 19, 2003 1:14 PM

Frans Bouma said:

But, my all time favorites are located at www.despair.com. Their posters are so incredibly brilliant :) Check: http://www.despair.com/indem.html for their complete collection.
# June 19, 2003 1:31 PM

Frans Bouma said:

Some of the despair classics:
"It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others" :D

"For every winner there are dozens of losers. Odds are you are one of them." :) :) Great birthday-gift material to give to your PHB's ;P
# June 19, 2003 1:46 PM

Paul said:

"When you find yourself in a hole, the best thing you can do is stop digging." -- Warren Buffet
# June 19, 2003 7:41 PM

Paul said:

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." - Albert Einstein
# June 19, 2003 7:41 PM

Jan Tielens said:

Trying is the first step towards failure.
# June 19, 2003 8:51 PM

Neil said:

Deprived of the freedom to wander, man often becomes frustrated, bored, dulled; a moron, a machine, an automaton. -- Tristan Jones
# June 19, 2003 8:57 PM

JosephCooney said:

Nice C#/VB.NET joke (static/shared). Would you care to mention any of the "gems" you've uncovered in the starter kits Darren? Maybe a link to your ppt presentation from your .NET users group talk? I've looked at a couple of demo applications (Petstore, IBuySpy) and found them a bit sub-standard (or should that be void). I've been meaning to check out Taskvision (for windows forms goodies). What are some of the goodies you've found?
# June 24, 2003 1:15 PM

julie said:

Hmmm- sounds like I need to talk some more about the starter kits at our Vermont .NET user group meetings where Dave comes monthly.
# June 24, 2003 5:51 PM

Dave Burke said:

Darren, dude. I am honored to be the " [d.o.t.d.] Dave" referenced in your phenom post on the starter kits. http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/! Keep up the great blogging.
# June 24, 2003 11:14 PM

Dave Burke said:

Uhhh, I think I've encountered a glitch in my thinking process. I obviously didn't intend to post this comment here, but rather in response to your "mining for jewels" post at http://weblogs.asp.net/dneimke/posts/9253.aspx...where it looks like that pesky Julie Lerman beat me to comment!
# June 24, 2003 11:20 PM

Dave Burke said:

As I accidentally commented on another of your posts, I am proud to be the Dave to whom you ranted. Keep up the great blogging, Darren! btw, I DID add subscribe to the gotdotnet/rss feed thanks to your post.
# June 24, 2003 11:22 PM

TrackBack said:

ShowUsYour<Blog>
# June 25, 2003 2:25 AM

TrackBack said:

Kent Sharkey's blog
# June 25, 2003 2:25 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

I now have a Weblog of my own: ScottOnWriting.NET

Thanks! :-)
# July 8, 2003 8:50 AM

JosephCooney said:

Nice (short) presentation. I think I need to actually LOOK at the starter kits first and then maybe re-read to get more benefit. The slide background is pretty nice.
# July 14, 2003 6:11 AM

SBC said:

Thanks for the pointer. Will check it out.
# July 14, 2003 6:41 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

Oh, just wait until my series of articles appears on the ASP.NET site at MSDN. **Then** you'll truly love the site! :-)
# July 15, 2003 8:34 AM

HumanCompiler said:

Don't let it get to you. People like that won't make it in the long run. It takes more than being able to copy, paste & fix some code to make it in this industry...especially right now! ;)
# July 17, 2003 7:08 AM

Jesse Ezell said:

Ever consider using GUIDs for ids instead? Then, you could generate/use them client side and wouldn't have to updating relations, etc. Identity fields are such a pain when you are working with disconnected recordsets.
# July 22, 2003 5:27 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Jesse... thanks for the advice! I hadn't considered it, in fact I haven't really decided on that *or* where the "Version" number will come from yet but your idea of using GUID's for the ID sounds pretty solid.
# July 22, 2003 5:54 AM

Jesse Ezell said:

No prob. As an alternative to version number, you might consider a TimeStamp column (just have SQL auto inject it like: "INSERT into Table (..., TimeStamp) Values (..., GetDate())"). Then, you don't have to worry about version increments, etc. Either way can work, but the TimeStamp is probably less of a hassle...plus, you get to know the last modified date, which might come in handy some time.
# July 22, 2003 6:08 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Well, my idea for the "Version" is that it is not "entity-specific". In other words, each user has a current version for the entire application. You can see why I want to do it that way if you peek at my diagrams and notice how the user sends the Version back to the server and that is the determining factor for deciding collisions on *all* tables.
# July 22, 2003 6:13 AM

Jesse Ezell said:

A global version could be a pain for dealing with concurrency. With a decent amount of users, it would gaurentee that your users would only be able to modify data while online. Usually, you want to make concurrency as granular as possible, because users aren't very good at dealing with concurrency violations (and they are frustrating as hell too).
# July 22, 2003 6:56 AM

Darren Neimke said:

You could still have ROWVERSION to ensure row integrity if you wanted, but the *main* idea behind having a global "Version" attribute is so that you can ensure that you return the minimum amount of data back to the client after the update -- remembering that the data returned includes the data that you passed in PLUS any data that had a Version stamp greater than the current client Version stamp.
# July 22, 2003 7:02 AM

Roy Osherove said:

I really like expresso:
http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/Expresso.asp
# July 22, 2003 11:12 AM

Eddie Garmon said:

you told the riddle incorrectly... i know that the third word starts with l, but i don't want to spoil it. you probably want to look at rephrasing it.
# July 23, 2003 10:57 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Doh! Thanks Eddie ;-)
# July 23, 2003 11:02 AM

Randy Ridge said:

language... but of course this is a dumb riddle and everyone knows the answer is nugry...

http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/N/nugry.html
# July 23, 2003 11:56 AM

Randy Ridge said:

doh i mis-posted on your blog... so i'll repeat.. language.. but everyone knows the answer is nugry -- http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/N/nugry.html
# July 23, 2003 11:57 AM

Alex Hoffman said:

Thanks for pointing that out - I missed the articles too. Hey your from Adelaide? I knew they had churches, but now they have computers too? :)
# July 24, 2003 12:02 PM

Darren Neimke said:

> I knew they had churches, but now
> they have computers too?

:P


# July 24, 2003 12:13 PM

Duncan Mackenzie said:

I wonder if having that post headlined on MSDN helped? :)
# July 24, 2003 11:46 PM

Darren Neimke said:


Oh *that*?

{ blush }

# July 25, 2003 4:29 AM

TrackBack said:

HumanCompiler - Erik Porter Blog
# July 27, 2003 6:49 AM

Chris Frazier said:

Nice, Darren, but what about testing RegexValidators - javascript Regex? I wrote a little page that does this (it goes thru one more step to load the regex).

I know at least one other person besides me has found it useful. It's real simple - check it out @ http://www.aspalliance.com/christopher/experiments/regexvalidator.aspx

# July 30, 2003 4:05 PM

TrackBack said:

# August 1, 2003 1:57 AM

AdvisorMan said:

I'm not aware of anyone that got an interesting job at Microsoft at age 45 without having one or two of these multi monster projects shipped or being some kind of celebrity. At that age you are either and architect or a manager which means you have responsibility for getting one of these monsters out. This in turn means you should have lots of experience in doing monster projects. Makes sense?
# August 4, 2003 9:24 AM

Darren Neimke said:

I should probably point out that, in my example, Microsoft can be substituted for *any* company.

The company itself is academic, feel free i\to replace it with whatever you expect to be doing when you are 45. The arugument is really to weigh up the pros and cons of different types of organisations.
# August 4, 2003 9:45 AM

Steve said:

This is something I've actually been considering a good bit lately. I fit my current employer into the small to mid-size range. The one problem I've had here is that I get to work on a lot of small to medium sized applications but they are all very similar. They don't pose any substantial challenges that really cause my brain to hurt. I've found that problems that make your "brain hurt" are the ones that really challenge you professionally to learn new things and take yourself to the next level. So, in summary I guess my opinion is that it doesn't matter if its big or small its the "brain hurt factor" that makes the most difference.
# August 4, 2003 10:31 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 4, 2003 11:11 AM

Anonymous said:


If you think you're good enough to work for Microsoft, then you probably have a strong sense of self-motivation, creativity, passion, and entrepreneurialism.

If that's the case, why not work for yourself and do something truly original?

Granted, working for Microsoft you'll have access to incredible resources and work with some of the most talented people in the world but, at the end of the day, you're still working for the "man".

Why not work for yourself instead and build your own empire?
# August 4, 2003 11:22 AM

Stephane Rodriguez said:


Tried 2200 people. Tried 30.

30 is the definite answer when it comes to fast moves, fast software development, simpler requirements, and best of all, less meetings and less processes.

Can't even see the point now of working in big fat companies, except if I wanted to make a career and have planned that I would stay there ten years or so.
This never happened to me so far. The innovation is in small companies. The personal interest and motivation is with them too.

I wouldn't stay long in a company that tells me to do many things without the freedom of doing them. Microsoft has admitted a lot of corporate greed so far. There are also books about it.
# August 4, 2003 1:59 PM

Jerry Dennany said:

ha! too funny.
The referenced article does focus on metacognition, though, and the fact that one has difficulty determining their own abilities. The likelyhood that you are surrounded by hordes of dumb people that also view you as intelligent is unlikely, though possible ;-)
# August 5, 2003 3:44 AM

Tom Richards said:

I dunno if I'm smart or dumb - sometimes dumb sometimes smart?. Right now, I think I'm smartest when I recognize I'm dumb or feel dumb. I haven't a clue whether I'm surrounded by smart or dumb people, I'm dumb enough to think I'm smarter or is it the other way around? Like I said - I dunno ...
# August 5, 2003 9:33 AM

JosephCooney said:

In response to AdvisorMan's comments, A friend of my <a href='http://www.dcooney.com/'>brother</a> who is just hitting 40, is not famous (not like Darren is) and does not have any monster projects shipped (I think he has written a Z80 emulator :-) ) just got a job in Redmond. AFAIK he is working on the XML application frameworks team. I like A nonymous' suggestion of "work for yourself". I just wish I could follow his advice.
# August 5, 2003 10:31 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 6, 2003 12:03 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 6, 2003 12:03 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 6, 2003 12:23 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

Speaking as a self-employed person (an independent trainer, writer, and consultant), the absolutely best part about it is working the hours I want. I can start working at noon, take a day off whenever, etc. Also, being able to call my own shots is great. Being able to work on stuff that interests me is worth more than you could believe. Plus, I think the flexible schedule will really pay off once I start a family.

Some of the downers, in my personal opinion are:

-- The insane cost of health insurance. Right now I still have health insurance through the university, but having finished my Masters degree in June, it's set to end in a month. Before going back to school, I was paying like $75 a month for JUST emergency care, and I had to pay the first $5,000 in any emergency at that. :-) My head hurts just trying to fathom what comprehensive health care for an entire family would cost.

-- Sometimes my job is mundane. I mean, I am jazzed about ASP.NET and writing, but sometimes it feels like that's all I do.

-- I have to pay the "employment" tax - this is something your employer picks up for you, but, since I am my own employer, this translates into me having to pay rediculous amounts of tax each year. Also, I am fairly frugal and do all right for myself, so this is a bad combination - they say the more you profit the more the government takes, so it makes sense to profit less, investing those profits into other tax-sheltered vehicles... but... oh well, I'm no entrepenuer.
# August 6, 2003 12:27 AM

Damian said:

Biggest downer I have found is the stress of getting money out of clients who think that it might be a fun idea to put you at the bottom of their list of people to pay. As an independent, you have very little leverage when dealing with an accounting department who turns 30 days into 45. Or the small business owner who says "Mate, I'm owed 30 grand right now, as soon as I get paid I'll sort you out."

I've also found I don't want to let myself take any "time off whenever I want" because I'm always stressing about finding more work. This is from a perspective of someone in the relatively early stages of independance though, things may change over time.
# August 6, 2003 1:05 AM

Colt said:

Thanks for your sharing Darren!
I moderate the messages in AspAdvice and I did NOT subscribe to the Regex list, but I think I will "sign-up today" :)
# August 6, 2003 1:14 AM

AdvisorMan said:

I'm sure there is an explanaition for this but it might be a long and complicated one. Think about it, why would a team at Microsoft hire a 40 year old guy without any special qualifications when the same team can get a motivated 25 year old Stanford graduate? The first question I would ask in such a case is: "Why are you hiring me and not that 25 year old kid?". Usually you find the exlanation a year into the job.
# August 6, 2003 1:57 AM

Duncan said:

Agreed - plus as a rule of thumb you will need to spend half an hour a day doing business administration stuff. (Filling out tax forms, dealing with the revenue, accountants, auditors etc...I suppose this would vary a great deal by jurisdiction)
# August 6, 2003 4:28 AM

Anonymous said:


LMAO! You must be the 40 year old programmer (who has the wisdom of experience to come up with an answer like that!)
# August 6, 2003 11:42 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 6, 2003 11:48 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

I hope that's not the future, as it costs $5.95/month to read blogs! :-)
# August 7, 2003 10:52 PM

Darren Neimke said:


Scott,
Then somebody such as yourself should clearly hope that it *is*!

I must admit that, originally I started to read a couple and then wished that I could read more - without paying - then, the sudden realization hit me... this is Oprah for the web :-(

# August 7, 2003 11:48 PM

sdg said:

rs
# August 8, 2003 6:07 PM

Douglas Reilly said:

The worst part of the "job" of being self employed for me is scaring up work when the need arises. I have some pretty reliable clients, but every now and again, there is a shift in what they need (or can afford) and so I have to either pick up an additional client or convince an existing client that they have more work for me. I have been *very* fortunate over the last couple of years, in spite of the general downturn.

I am fortunate that I have developed a cusion for the cash flow problems that clients can impose upon you, and I have one good client that pays within a week or so to balance the other major client that takes 60-90 days.
# August 9, 2003 11:26 PM

TrackBack said:

# August 10, 2003 8:37 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 11, 2003 6:58 PM

Kent Sharkey said:

They have in fact upped my dosage. ;)

Look for many more coming soon -- Scott Mitchell writes faster than I can tech edit. And there's always that article I've been writing for the last 5 months...

Now if I can just get them to up my Scotch dosage...
# August 11, 2003 7:42 PM

Jesse Ezell said:

Mike is definately a cool guy. A group of us went out for food and beer a few times during the ISV tour down in Austin. Mike came along a few times and we had some really great conversations about SOA, etc. They are doing some really neat stuff with EraBlogs (ultra-SOA stuff, completely message based).
# August 11, 2003 8:02 PM

Jesse Ezell said:

For those who don't know, Mike's Blog is over here:

http://thebicameralmind.com/
# August 11, 2003 8:04 PM

Darren Neimke said:


Thanks Jesse!
# August 11, 2003 8:09 PM

Rachel Reese said:

hehe, "TryHarder". I like that one.

I always imagine the compiler getting ticked off with me for using AndAlso, since English-wise they mean the same thing, but AndAlso is a longer to write (and thus compile) version.
# August 12, 2003 7:23 PM

Joe Grossberg said:

Yeah, I thought "Death March" was short on answers, especially if you don't have authority.

It's predicated on the assumption that management is on your side, vs. a death march deadline imposed from outside the company, and that your execs are willing to do "whatever it takes" to get stuff done.

The book is of little use if it's your boss who's wielding that whip.
# August 13, 2003 12:33 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

Re: OrElse/AndAlso, for those who remember the .NET Framework Beta1 (or was it even in Beta2), intially VB.NET's Or and And operators were short-circuiting, but the old VB guard complained citing lack of backward compatability and difficulty in porting.

Darren said: "The | operator of C/C++/C#/Java/JavaScript is the same as the VB.NET OR operator. And the || operator is the same as VB.NET's OrElse operator"

I don't think this is true. The | operator is for a bit-wise OR in those languages - that is, it takes two *integers* and returns a bit-wise integer OR value. || is a logical or, and is short-circuiting in languages like C#/C/C++/etc. (Namely, it takes in two *booleans* and returns a boolean value.)
# August 13, 2003 3:08 PM

Brian Desmond said:

I believe there is a bug in your code. The value of i is never reset once it exceeds ten. Therefore, for each piece of food you consume after your tenth item, you will burp. ;)

--Brian
# August 14, 2003 12:58 AM

Darren Neimke said:


Brian, this feature is by design ;-)
# August 14, 2003 1:06 AM

Darren Neimke said:

There is a potential bug though that didn't show itself until I turned on Option Strict. You should do some type checking when the call to Me.CurrentLocation.GetContents() is made because it returns a collection of type 'object'. Imagine if I was drunk when I made the Goto(Fridge) call and somehow stumbled into the car parking lot. Imagine trying to consume a parking lot full of cars!

I understand that this will be remedied when Generics comes along!
# August 14, 2003 1:10 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 14, 2003 5:31 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 14, 2003 4:16 PM

TrackBack said:

New keywords explained.
# August 18, 2003 2:57 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

Neat stuff, I was unaware of this method and property. I played with them a bit and decided to write an article on this, thanks! :-)

If you are interested, you can get a "sneak peek" - it will go live on Wednesday this week, see:
http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/082003-1.aspx
# August 18, 2003 3:49 PM

Steve Hiner said:

I think they ARE the same...

AND & OR are bitwise in VB
ANDALSO & ORELSE are boolean in VB
# August 18, 2003 4:45 PM

Thomas Johansen said:

Thanks for helping me out with this mate. You can hereafter call yourself 'The King of Regex' ;)
# August 27, 2003 8:48 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 27, 2003 9:28 AM

Jonathan Cogley said:

Nice stuff. I didn't know you could name groups and then reference them in your match by name. Thanks for the tip!

BTW - your tester class really wants to be a NUnit Test case - it is so similar you would be amazed. If you haven't already, take a look at NUnit on SourceForge, it will change the way you write code forever.
# August 28, 2003 12:28 AM

Scott Galloway said:

Well you don't ralyy *NEED* to HtmlEncode all user input, you just need to make sure they don't do anything naughty... What I've done for a recent application is perform an XSLT transform on the incoming user content - this stips out all malicious and unwanted HTML content but leaves tags I do allow - some formatting ones... I do this by converting the incoming data to XML using the excellent SGML parser then applying the transform before saving to DB. This has been competely foolproof so far - the fall back if the conversion fails is of course to HtmlEncode...
# August 28, 2003 10:48 AM

Kurt said:

When you set the Text property of a TextBox (multiline or not) on a WebForm, the text is automatically HTML Encoded. That's why running it through Server.HtmlEncode yourself yields goofy results, it's encoding the already encoded text.
# August 28, 2003 1:13 PM

Martin Vobr said:

Hi,
the callendar looks pretty cool. Good job!

I've tried it in IE6 and Mozzila 1.3 and it works great.

But when trying Opera 6 it does not work at all :-(. Is any chance to fix the issue?

I'll be happy to use it in my projects, but lack of Opera support is for me showstopper for any projects outside intranet environment...

If you need assistence with testing please contact me at martin.vobr@rebex.net
# August 28, 2003 7:24 PM

Scott Galloway said:

That's pretty cool, thanks...
# September 5, 2003 9:12 AM

OmegaSupreme said:

Cool, good tip.
# September 7, 2003 7:46 PM

Chris Martin said:

How 'bout %WIN%\system32\vbscript.dll?
# September 9, 2003 5:28 AM

Darren Neimke said:


Yeh, I did import that reference but still couldn't work out how to access those functions :( I could "intellisense" them but not access them!

# September 9, 2003 8:00 AM

Paul Wilson said:

Just say NO to code without proper resource cleanup:

public string ReadFromFile(string filename)
{
string retval = "";
FileStream fs = null;
StreamReader sr = null;
try {
fs = File.OpenRead(filename);
sr = new StreamReader(fs);
retVal = sr.ReadToEnd();
}
finally {
if (sr != null) { sr.Close(); }
if (fs != null) { fs.Close(); }
}
return retVal ;
}
# September 11, 2003 8:59 PM

TrackBack said:

# September 12, 2003 6:18 PM

Thomas Johansen said:

Why not simply something like this?:

using (FileStream fs = File.OpenRead(filename))
{
StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(fs);
retVal = sr.ReadToEnd();
}
return retVal;
# September 12, 2003 11:47 PM

Koh said:

Hi, good day.

I've tested the demo. It's work fine, but can t be able to limit the selectedable date range ?? Example, current date = 18/09/2003 ... only allow to select up to (Max 1 month from now) 31/10/2003.

Can it be display the format like .... Thursday, September 18, 2003 ???

It would be nice if you are able to guilde me on how to change the coding. Thanks! Your co-operation will be greatly appreciated. You cna reach me at hbkoh@intimal.edu.my
# September 18, 2003 12:33 AM

TrackBack said:

# September 21, 2003 4:50 PM

SBC said:

a good one. thanks for posting it.
# September 21, 2003 7:46 PM

TrackBack said:

# September 22, 2003 1:07 AM

TrackBack said:

# September 22, 2003 4:02 PM

TrackBack said:

# September 22, 2003 4:35 PM

TrackBack said:

# September 22, 2003 4:35 PM

TrackBack said:

# September 23, 2003 4:42 AM

OmegaSupreme said:

Thanks for the info, very useful :D
# September 23, 2003 7:21 AM

Christian Nordbakk said:

Great post Darren! Especially the two last 'Interesting Links'. Thanks!
# September 26, 2003 5:07 AM

TrackBack said:

# September 26, 2003 10:11 AM

Dave Bettin said:

Just to clear up one item: The conference doesn't need me I need the conference. Also, I know a great piano tuner here in town :-)
# September 26, 2003 9:24 PM

TrackBack said:

# September 27, 2003 8:10 AM

Simon Fell said:

You don't need any of this, it all gets done for you, IsInRole will check against the users group membership.
# September 28, 2003 7:22 PM

Darren Neimke said:


Yeh, that's true some - but not all - of the time unfortunately. I was testing my app. on a WinXP machine that was not a domain controller and, although I can query the group membership ( as per GetUserRoles() ) the test against IIdentity.IsInRole was always failing.

So, a little bit of brute force fixed the problem ;-)
# September 28, 2003 8:48 PM

TrackBack said:

# October 1, 2003 7:12 PM

Scott Galloway said:

Can I add a 3. Document them properly! Much of the code in these apps isn't well conmmented / documented, explaining some of the basic concepts / patterns used would REALLY help. What documentation has been produced is pretty basic and generally covers the 'how to use the app' type of documentation.
What would be really helpful would be some examples of extending the basic apps and some discussion of concepts like your article provides (excellent article incidentally, well, except for the use of DataBinder.Eval but I have an almost obsessive aversion to it's use...).
Anyway, I'm really not trying to be negative, they are excellent, just a bit of a lost opportunity in my opinion.
# October 1, 2003 7:51 PM

Darren Neimke said:


Scott, I agree 100% about the DataBinder.Eval stuff and tossed-up whether or not to use it in the article. In the end I used it because I thought that it would be a little more explicit for any NEWBIES reading it. You're right though, I should use the more direct syntax so I'll alter it this weekend when I add the screen shots.

Thanks for the feedback! :-)

# October 1, 2003 8:31 PM

Me said:

There are always exactly 4 valid components. So no property needed.
# October 7, 2003 1:27 PM

Andrew said:

I've also noticed this behavior,you can
use MyIE as alternative ;-)
# October 8, 2003 5:16 AM

Siegfried Weber said:

I've seen such behavior too, but only if I have a galore of IE windows open.
# October 8, 2003 5:26 PM

Damon said:

I was wondering if you had a small example of using this control you could post for download?

THanks
# October 9, 2003 9:57 PM

Darren Neimke said:

There's quite a bit of sample code in the .chm file that comes with the Assembly have you seen that?
# October 9, 2003 10:39 PM

Damon said:

Sorry I should have looked deeper before asking. I see it know. Thanks for the quick response.
# October 9, 2003 10:56 PM

Darren Neimke said:


No probs.... let me know if you get stuck :-)
# October 9, 2003 10:57 PM

Damon said:

I am stuck. Here is what I am trying to do. I have an ASP.NET app and I have a process that takes forever(I am processing a txt file). I need to launch that txt file process on a seperate thread and then use your timer control to check to see if it is complete by checking a session variable. Once complete then move to a another page. Any suggestions? Thanks
# October 10, 2003 10:26 PM

JosephCooney said:

Yeah, all those easily-readable regex's are SUCH a big problem. Like PERL, the REALLY need to be obfuscated ;-).
# October 13, 2003 9:01 PM

JosephCooney said:

Personalization is cool. Wouldn't it be great if there were some cool webcontrols that would easily let you do stuff like WebParts in your ASP.NET applications. I wonder who could make something like that? ;)
# October 16, 2003 1:06 AM

anon said:

Great stuff
how about a version for C# ?
# October 16, 2003 5:34 PM

Darren Neimke said:


That has been left as an excercise for the reader :-)

# October 16, 2003 8:21 PM

test said:

<SCRIPT>self.location 'www.microsoft.com'</SCRIPT>
# October 17, 2003 9:46 AM

test said:

<SCRIPT language="Javascript">
self.location='www.microsoft.com';
alert("here");
</SCRIPT>
# October 17, 2003 9:47 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

Actually, the RssFeed control does not yet support templates. I initially built it so it did have template support ONLY, and then I found I was always wanting it to look a certain way, so I just scraped the templates.

Adding templates is a proposed feature in the RssFeed GotDotNet WOrkspace, but I'm not yet certain it needs to be added... http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/RssFeed

# October 26, 2003 6:41 PM

the0ther said:

"titbits"?

the t and the d aren't adjacent on the keyboard, either.
# October 29, 2003 2:28 PM

Andy Smith said:

Calling the javascript method directly is a bad plan. I make no guarentees that the _undocumented_ script which opens the dialog window will remain exactly as it is. If there are customization features that I am missing, it would be better if we tried to get them implemented for everybody.
# November 3, 2003 11:45 AM

Frans Bouma said:

VB.NET developers will now not made familiar with the term Refactoring which is a general term used by Java developers, C++ developers, researchers, architects and soon, C# developers. VB.NET developers will never hear of the term and will not learn about the term. They will thus not be able to participate in discussions about this and will be looked upon as second grade developers.

Sorry, but EXPLICITLY avoiding a menu item with the general term is EXPLICITLY making VB.NET developers look less skilled while they probably ain't.
# November 5, 2003 6:08 AM

Darren Neimke said:

> VB.NET developers will now not made familiar with the term Refactoring

Well, they already are but that's an aside. I've used this feature, it's not really that great. IMHO it should really be relegated to more speculative ventures - such as WebMatrix - until it has been further evaluated.

Frans, on another (completely unrelated) topic, are you a C# developer? If you are can you please tell me how often the average C#'er would use the C# Class wizard when designing classes and their respective members? Is that a useful IDE tool?
# November 5, 2003 6:15 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Well, it's speculation of course if the average VB.NET developer is familiar with the 'refactoring' term, however he/she will be when there is a menu item in front of his/her nose :)

Refactoring is not something I'd use often agreed, as I'm more of a design first, implement later kinda guy and not a 'design on the fly' kind of developer, however refactoring can help.

I'm a C# developer and I never use the class wizard. :) I also don't know any C# developer who uses the wizard to, say, add properties. Most of them have macros for that. The class wizard is pretty bogus to me, because it f.e. doesn't do a lot you would expect from such a wizard, like creating a derived class from a given other class, implementing interfaces using the wizard etc.
# November 5, 2003 7:12 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Right, thanks. Well, I'd estimate that the 'Refactoring' stuff will get used nearly as much as the C# Class wizard does :)
# November 5, 2003 1:29 PM

Jules said:

Neat. My method of doing this was far more convoluted, lol.
# November 10, 2003 6:04 AM

Darrell said:

I am generally against using cursors. Cursors take away the wonderful set-based abilities of SQL Server and force it to look at things row-by-row. Probably not a big deal in this case, but there is almost always a set-based solution. Like this one from Alceu Almeida which includes error handling and transaction capabilities(http://searchdatabase.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid13_gci551691,00.html?FromTaxonomy=%2Fpr%2F286331):

SELECT * from sysobjects where uid = user_id('UseNAme')
declare @Return int
exec @Return = sp_configure 'allow updates', '1'
SELECT @Return as 'Returned Code'
GO
reconfigure WITH OVERRIDE
GO
DECLARE @Rows int, @Error int
BEGIN TRANSACTION
update sysobjects set uid = user_id('dbo') where uid = user_id('UseNAme')
SELECT @Error = @@Error, @Rows = @@RowCount
SELECT @Rows as '#Rows'
IF @Rows > 0
BEGIN
SELECT @Rows AS '#Rows'
COMMIT TRANSACTION
END
else
BEGIN
SELECT @Error AS 'Error #'
ROLLBACK TRANSACTION
END

exec sp_configure 'allow updates', '0'
reconfigure WITH OVERRIDE
go
# November 10, 2003 9:14 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks for that Darrell... it's always nice to know the pure set-based way of doing it; alas my sql skills are not quite what they used to be.
# November 10, 2003 2:08 PM

JosephCooney said:

I never get tired of seeing the word 'crikey' in a weblog ;-). I agree re: "proof of concept" vs. something to use in production. Sometimes the difference is more like an order of magnitude, not 50%.
# November 13, 2003 6:42 AM

John said:

I think you've a css problem or something...I'm viewing (most of) your page in IE 6.0.2800 and the content for the frame is too far to the left and is under the left hand side links pane
# November 13, 2003 12:32 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Fixed, thanks!
# November 13, 2003 3:03 PM

Roy Osherove said:

Congrats!!
# November 15, 2003 6:16 PM

Jim Martin said:

Nice Job! That is really awesome!!
# November 15, 2003 6:52 PM

Darrell said:

Sweet!
# November 17, 2003 9:21 AM

Sam Gentile said:

> I read the new "Beyond (COM) Add Reference: Has Anyone Seen the Bridge?" article yesterday and, was quite impressed by the detailed groundwork that was laid-out to explain the differences between COM and CLR and, how Interop provides a bridge for seamlessly calling in and out of both environments. As the author states in that article the real meat is still to come so, if you are reading this and you haven't already read that article scoot over now and give it a look - you won't be disappointed.
>>

Why thank you! As the author I am glad you liked it and it was helpful to you. Feel free to leave suggestions at the link with my name on additional suggestions.

> For example, the guy who rated Sam's article a 1 out of 9 - it would be insightful (and add perspective) to see *why* he thought that it smelled *that* bad.
>>
Me too! I can't tell what the beef of that one person was and how I could best adddress his/her needs.

Thanks!
# November 18, 2003 3:59 PM

Duncan Mackenzie said:

Honestly, having the comments visible wouldn't help all that much.... most people don't leave a comment, just a rating.

As someone with a bunch of MSDN articles, I wish everyone left a comment... but I think that if we forced people to type something in we would either drastically reduce the # of people who were willing to rate our articles or get a lot of useless comments like "qwertysdfdsafsd" (we already get a few of those, likely from people who think that their rating will be rejected without some text entered into the comment box)
# November 19, 2003 4:14 AM

Bambuk said:

Nice :)
# November 19, 2003 8:04 AM

Jeffro said:

"We also touched on the fact that Stored Procedures can help us to modularize our programming by storing chunks of database logic in the database rather than in our programs."

This for me is the number one reason to use sprocs-- and it's a point that gets left out in these arguments over dynamic vs CRUD sprocs.

With sprocs... business logic can be altered on the server without any recompilation and redeployment-- as long as the parameters are left alone, of course.

But as to the CRUD... why do you have to have 3 people writing these things and breaking code and causing terror and confusion? If you write a code generator... you can output your CRUD script and a class library for calling them every time your structures change. Hand the class to your developers... and VS.Net shows them where the application is broken with a stack of Tasks when they switch it out.

Any additional logic can be added to the CRUDs-- and I think this is easier to maintain than triggers.

The bottom line: the more logic that's moved to the server, the more centalized and streamlined the maintenance becomes. And the sp's are available to anyone that can talk to the database.

Anyways, thanks for the balanced and insightful article.
# November 19, 2003 8:20 AM

Scott McCulloch said:

Sounds good, why can't they host it at a real place like sydney :)

Just joking, have fun...
# November 19, 2003 8:24 AM

Chris Frazier said:

Hellz yeah, Darren!
# November 19, 2003 3:51 PM

Darren Neimke said:


Oy! :-)
# November 19, 2003 6:03 PM

senkwe chanda said:

Hi Darren, I guess I should really direct this to ScottW, but, in order to have a blog listed at regexblogs, doesn't that imply that you need to have a .Text (and therefore .Net) powered blog? If so, I doubt that you'll get many (if any) Java, Ruby or Perl afficionados maintaining blogs there. I really hope I'm wrong about that because I've just started work on my own regex tool and would love to have a blog hosted there at some point :-)
# November 20, 2003 3:30 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

Woot! That article is up! Hehe. Darren, I have already written part 2, which talks about Hashtables, so your questions will be answered!

Ok, here's a sneak peak. The hashtable does not store the data in any sort of tree structure. Rather, it stores the data in an array. Hashing is the process of mapping the key to an array index. This value is computed by a formula that involves the hashcode of the object being added to the hash (which is accessible via the GetHashCode() method). (I discuss the precise equation in my Part 2 article...)

Anywho, when you enumerate through the hashtable it enumerates from the first item in the underlying array on down - NOT in the order of insertion. The ordering in that underlying array is based on the equation aforementioned, which in part involves the GetHashCode() value of the object being stored.

If this makes no sense, don't worry. I discuss hashtables in detail in Part 2. Essentially, hashtables provide a means for constant-time access (like an array), but better than an array because it offers constant time searching too!
# November 21, 2003 12:11 AM

Bruce Johnson said:

I'm not 100% certain of this (statistics is about 20 years in my past), but I believe that you don't need to randomize the player array to have this (quite slick) algorithm work. Assuming that the distribution of random numbers is uniform across the entire range, the order of the players in the array is inconsequential. Using your example, Bill will have a 1 in 16 chance of being selected regardless of where Bill is in the player array.
# November 26, 2003 9:21 AM

Ron Krauter said:


Darren,

Do you mind posting some code of the solution. I am having a hard time understanding the solution.

Thanking you for your time,

-ron
# November 26, 2003 6:51 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Ron... take a peek at this:

http://weblogs.asp.net/dneimke/posts/39993.aspx
# November 26, 2003 7:44 PM

Todd Moon said:

OK, now set up an app that runs PickARandomGuy a few thousand times and records the guy picked each time. Then post some statistics. Basically just a chart which shows what percent of time each Guy was picked and their score. I'm curious how the their score relates to that percentage. Maybe run the test with at least twice the number of Guys so they have a smoother distribution of scores.
# November 27, 2003 12:11 AM

Ron Krauter said:


Thank you Sir for taking the time to write the Code!

I ran a test picking a "Guy" 10000000 times and here is the result:

Player Weight Weighted Probability Occurance (10000000 iterations)
====== ====== =========== =========
Jim 20 05.87 06.34
Bob 10 02.93 03.02
Wayne 40 11.73 11.91
Foo 5 01.47 01.48
Darren 90 26.39 26.35
Barry 22 06.45 06.57
Randy 45 13.20 13.36
John 11 03.23 03.11
Doe 98 28.74 27.86

So, this is perfect. The only problem I see is this section:

If randScore <= 0 Then
LabelRandomGuy.Text = "New guy is : " & g.ToString
Exit Sub
End If

What if you have a lot of "Guys", then we might end up with a lot of loops just to get randScore to 0.

Thanks again,

-ron
# November 27, 2003 12:15 AM

Ron Krauter said:

Sorry about the formating..second try
<code>
Player Weight Weighted Probability Occurance (10000000 iterations)
====== ====== =========== =========
Jim 20 05.87 06.34
Bob 10 02.93 03.02
Wayne 40 11.73 11.91
Foo 5 01.47 01.48
Darren 90 26.39 26.35
Barry 22 06.45 06.57
Randy 45 13.20 13.36
John 11 03.23 03.11
Doe 98 28.74 27.86
</code>
# November 27, 2003 12:16 AM

Darren Neimke said:


Thanks for saving me the time Ron ;-)
# November 27, 2003 12:20 AM

Ron Krauter said:

Todd,

I just saw your post after posting my findings! Although I wish my posting was better formatted.

-ron
# November 27, 2003 12:36 AM

Scott said:

Try binding a DataSet containing 1000+ records to a DataGrid and see if you want to:
a) Use custom paging so that you only have to retrieve data pages instead of the whole shebang.
b) Use a DataReader instead of a DataSet.

I constructed an ASP.NET app using a DataGrid and a DataSet. It worked well when I only have 30-50 rows in the DataSet. When I got to 940 it added about 30 seconds to my page load time.
# December 6, 2003 12:49 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

Check out Dino Esposito's latest MSDN article:

Tips for Successful Data Access
http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/datareader.asp

He talks about DataReaders vs. DataSets a bit...
# December 6, 2003 1:18 AM

Phil Weber said:

Hi, Darren: I use DataReaders almost exclusively in ASP.NET development. They're the .NET equivalent of the venerable "firehose" cursor.
# December 6, 2003 2:23 AM

Frans Bouma said:

When you have to fill objects with data, datareaders are very fast and easy to use. When you're using datasets, they're of course not necessary.
# December 6, 2003 4:25 AM

Scott Galloway said:

Same here, for ASP.NET, I use SqlDataReaders for the vast majority of data access...only times where I would use DataSets (or DataTables without DataSets) are where I need to cache the data or serialize / access it via a Web Service.
SqlDataReaders are really handy but you have to remember that they're connected the whole time you're using them so they're really only suitable for instances where you pull out data, do very little with it and dump it (filling custom objects or just binding on to controls are the most typical for me).
# December 6, 2003 7:44 AM

Scott Galloway said:

Oh, also use DataSets for DataRelations...the most useful and seemingly underused thing about them...
# December 6, 2003 8:59 AM

Paul Wilson said:

I use datareaders for most web development, and I prefer custom objects instead of datasets, so I use datareaders to fill them also. Just make sure you wrap access in try/finally blocks to close datareaders, and use the closeconnection behavior so the underlying connection is then closed too. One last note, paging should be done in the database: http://weblogs.asp.net/pwilson/posts/31456.aspx.
# December 6, 2003 10:01 AM

Douglas Reilly said:

I use DataReaders all the time, and generally find them to be lots easier than DataSets. They are lightweight (relatively speaking) and unless I need to bind multiple controls to a single result set (which I could actually overcome if I really wanted to) or things I need to do in a CheckBoxList, I always use DataReaders. If you use a pattern that ensure disposal, all is well.
# December 6, 2003 11:57 AM

Scott Galloway said:

Also, quite a few people who actually commit suicide don't actually mean to (the old cry for help thing) - people don't realise just how many things can be fatal. In teenage girls, Iron Tablets (taken for anaemia) are a pretty common cause of death - they look harmless but in large doses they're fatal. Also, hanging - very easy to accidentally kill yourself, as beyond a certain pressure you pass out, causing strangulation. Don't worry, I used to study this stuff - not a morbid fascination :-)
# December 10, 2003 7:23 AM

Dennis v/d Stelt said:

@Scott: You say the "don't worry" thing because we might think you are morbid, but don't think about the fact we might find it even more morbid that you did study at this?! :)
# December 10, 2003 7:34 AM

Scott Galloway said:

Hey, I was studying Clinical Psychology...didn't have a choice...very interesting subject though!
# December 10, 2003 8:00 AM

Fabrice said:

I hope that ScottW comes up with not only a solution to aggregate feeds, but also with a way to filter posts out from feeds. For example, it could be as simple as checkboxes posters could use to flag their posts "I talk about the PDC", "I talk about a Microsoft product", "I talk about my company"... You know, some kind of metadata which could be used to filter RSS feeds.
We wouldn't subscribe to Rss.aspx, but to Rss.aspx?ThemeOut=12&ThemeOut=15...
# December 10, 2003 8:48 AM

Mark said:

When people do not understand what life is really about, hopelessness sets in. I know.

There is only one who can change all that:
http://www.gospelcom.net/guidance/gospel/gospel.shtml">http://www.gospelcom.net/guidance/gospel/gospel.shtml
http://www.billygraham.com/believe/

A testimony:
http://www.billygraham.com/article.asp?i=392&s=62

Additional:

http://www.gospelcom.net/guidance/
http://www.gospelcom.net/guidance/grief.shtml
http://www.gospelcom.net/guidance/rejection.shtml

Specifically Suicide:
http://www.billygraham.com/search.asp?search=suicide&x=0&y=0
http://www.billygraham.com/qna/qna.asp?i=3169

I hope this helps.
# December 10, 2003 8:48 AM

Scott Watermasysk said:

The main page will be cleaned up shortly (in addition to some new user features for filtering content).

-Scott
# December 10, 2003 8:55 AM

Fabrice said:

Thanks Scott. Now we should stop asking and let you work and see what you did ;-)
# December 10, 2003 9:05 AM

SBC said:

Hope you watch the classic movie 'It's A Wonderful Like' this season.. :-)
# December 10, 2003 8:24 PM

SBC said:

errata - 'It's A Wonderful Life'
# December 10, 2003 8:42 PM

Steven Smith said:

You can also subscribe to individuals' blogs instead of the BIG FEED OF DEATH. Sure, you may miss stuff, but odds are if it's really important, somebody will tell you about it...

Steve
# December 10, 2003 8:58 PM

Tim said:


Hi,

You have a cool blog.Lot's of info.
# December 13, 2003 6:29 AM

Paschal said:

Hi Darren, why don't you try Code Library ? See my blog for more details. Great tool for code repositery, and it's free ;-)
# December 15, 2003 5:12 PM

Darren Neimke said:


Thanks Paschal... just downloading now :-)
# December 15, 2003 5:23 PM

Paschal said:

Darren yes Code Library is not perfect but give the developer some credit. It's a cool app indeed and If I look at the number of people who had a look or download his tool through my post, it should be not so bad at all ;-)
I think we should all the time be not too critic when people use some off their time to develop some nice freeware like this one (IMHO!).
However, don't misunderstand me, I don't say we can't be critic, but I prefer to be tough with some commercial tools provided by some companies good enough only to rip you off!
# December 16, 2003 5:31 AM

Paschal said:

I think by the way that DevBuddy is a good idea. Why not pushing it a bit furthermore. I can help (just a little bit ;-)) if you want
# December 16, 2003 5:33 AM

Darren Neimke said:


Thanks Paschal, and thanks for the initial link. I really didn't mean to come across as a 'hard critic' of the product - I actually quite like it. As I said, the UI is very nice and there's a whole bunch of features in there that I really like.

Again, as I said, I'll persist with the application tomorrow and see if I can get the hang of it :-)

P.S. Regarding DevBuddy - yes, I really must get off of my "butt" and do something about that; I'll give you a ping sometime to discuss it with you :-)

Cheers,
- Darren

# December 16, 2003 5:40 AM

Udi Dahan - The Software Simplist said:

Although I come from a different point of view - the consulting side of project management - I'd be very interested in hearing your views on my experiences.

My blog is at: http://udidahan.weblogs.us

More generally, I strongly stuggest you take a look at Joel on Software, specifically his article on scheduling:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.html

Hope that helps
# December 16, 2003 6:44 AM

Darrell said:

Johanna Rothman - Managing Product Development -http://www.jrothman.com/weblog/blogger.html

Esther Derby - Software Mgmt Process Improvement - http://www.estherderby.com/weblog/blogger.html

Dave Anderson - Agile Management - http://www.agilemanagement.net/

If you have some $$$, the Cutter Consortium has an Agile Software Development Project Mgmt advisory service - http://www.cutter.com/project/advisory.html

And of course, some shameless self-promotion! My blog has a category called Agile Software Development - http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/darrell.norton/
# December 16, 2003 8:39 AM

Chris Darnell said:

These articles come at an interesting time for me, when I am researching Code Libraries for my company. While Code Library is free, it is still lacking in many regards for me. I am currently comparing CodeBox with Code Library. Here is a brief critique:

1) Code Library's security is only at the UI level, not at the database level.
2) Code Library doesn't provide any tracking. CodeBox not only records what user created a particular snippet element, but it also records when the snippet element was created AND when it was last changed.
3) For a team environment, Code Library does not tailor itself for each user. CodeBox, which is the other product I am analyzing right now, allows each user to have their own Bookmarks.
4) Both only offer VS.NET integration as a button to open each applications user interface, neither offer any other type of VS.NET plug-in
5) Code Library creates new Tables in the database for each new project. This makes it impossible to set code snippet dependencies between different projects. CodeBox creates relational table rows with the same table, allowing dependencies to be set across the entire library.

----------
Why do I like CodeBox better (so far ;-) )?
1) DOCUMENTATION IS IN ENGLISH ;-)
2) Offers a separate tab for each snippet element that is for examples of using the snippet
3) Each snippent element can be "typed", indicating that the code is a class, structure, method, etc...
4) Ability to record who created a snippet element
5) Price isn't unreasonable
6) Database structure is much simpler. (I especially like the ability to set dependencies across the entire library).
7) I really like the "Export HTML" feature, which exports not only the selected snippet element, but follows to its Dependencies, as well.

----------
Code Library currently has several bugs that simply make it impossible for me to us:
- Code Library doesn't retain the "code language" setting when you create a code snippet element. I always us VB.NET, but it always sets the code language to C# when I return to an element. (Granted, that only affects the code syntax highlighting, but it should still maintain that value)
- Code Library provides the ability to search through files, but it doesn't. (Frankly, I'm not sure that it could, anyway. CodeBox doesn't offer that option.

I'm not affiliated, in any way, with any of these products. This is just based on my analysis of each over the past week or so.

Hope this helps!!!
# December 16, 2003 11:56 AM

Chris Darnell said:

Suppose I should add that I can appreciate the work that the Code Library developer(s) have put into the product. It just "isn't there" enough for it to be of any use to me. :-)
# December 16, 2003 12:15 PM

Shannon J Hager said:

I agree, CodeLibrary just isn't there yet. Or maybe it is and I just can't figure it out via the Chinese documentation.
# December 16, 2003 1:17 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks guys... some great feedback - especially from Chris :-)
# December 16, 2003 4:33 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks everyone, all I can say is: "subscribed, subscribed, subscribed" :-)
# December 16, 2003 4:54 PM

Paschal said:

Hey come on guys, Code Libray is not perfect, yes sure, but it's done in a professional look and for free. I believe that code Library developer don't earn his life from this huge development.
I use this tool every day and it suit my wishes. Darren Devbuddy is surely promising, but for the moment I like a good free open source tool to play with.
And for the documentation, come on, the tool is not so difficult to use.
I didn't found any secret function requiring to have a master in chinese to understand it ;-)
My only advice: support the guys who devote their spare time to make things moving... in the right direction !
# December 17, 2003 3:29 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Paschal, agreed!

I wrote in my blog today - http://weblogs.asp.net/dneimke/posts/44004.aspx - about how I've changed my mind about the tool - I really didn't realize just how cool it is.

When I've used it a bit more I hope to write a review on Scott Mitchell's .NET Toolbox site.
# December 17, 2003 4:52 AM

Joel said:

Have you looked at CodeSmart from AxTools? Does much of what you are talking about.
# December 17, 2003 1:35 PM

Shannon J Hager said:

Paschal, CodeLib is open source?
# December 19, 2003 7:34 PM

Iain said:

I favour integrating the "Test it" phase with the "Code it" phase, although I always have more tests to write after. If you can test as you write, you spend even less time debugging because you don't write everything and then come back to the routine(s) when not working, they're still in your head because you wrote the test first, and now you're writing the code and testing simultaneously (more or less).

Very effective, I find.
# December 21, 2003 6:15 PM

Paschal said:

Huhh magic mushrooms for your breakfast today ;-)))
# December 23, 2003 7:02 AM

Troy Goode said:

Whuh?
# December 23, 2003 8:42 AM

TrackBack said:

Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio WebDog, Shadow
# December 26, 2003 3:48 AM

TrackBack said:

# January 4, 2004 1:07 PM

mohammad said:

good
# January 6, 2004 6:42 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks Mohammed... fyi, this control is now available on GotDotNet:

http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/Details.aspx?SampleGuid=69a7c7bb-939a-4777-aceb-2d9ebbe35b85
# January 6, 2004 7:25 PM

12 said:

<br>
# January 8, 2004 3:41 AM

Scott Galloway said:

Been my aim for the year for say...the past 10 years :-)
# January 8, 2004 6:17 AM

joe said:

Darren, how would Napoleon categorize you? I thought about it, and I think I'm a little bit of each one of those types! I guess it depends on what time of day it is!
# January 15, 2004 9:31 AM

OmegaSupreme said:

Great post, of interest to me because we're currently moving into new offices and thinking about various ways to motivate staff.

I think smart-lazy is good for a programmer because in order to save time typing I guess they would think about ways to optimise their code.
# January 15, 2004 9:41 AM

Udi Dahan - The Software Simplist said:

It's great to see that technical types can appreciate the difficulties in managing people like themselves.

Actually, this field is VERY developed and has roots in psychology and sociology. There are various personality/aptitude tests that categorize people in various ways. Meyers-Briggs(?) is one that has surfaced several times in the blogosphere, but there are many others.

If you really intend to get into this, I suggest that you set aside time each day to read about it for the next 3 months or so. After that, you'll be much better armed to choose which direction you choose to take it.

In fact, in the business world, these topics are of such importance that they are some of the first topics taught as a part of the MBA program.
# January 15, 2004 12:41 PM

Darren Neimke said:


Hi Joe,

> Darren, how would Napoleon categorize you?

Well, I believe that I'm *either* currently somewhere in the "Smart-Lazy" quadrant or, it's my goal to be there. It's probably more significant if it's the latter of those because then, that would become one of my motivating factors.
# January 15, 2004 2:56 PM

Ryan said:

Code behind adjustment:

change protected virtual void RegisterClientScript() to
public virtual void RegisterClientScript()

and in your script just RegisterClientScript();

protected MarkItUp.WebControls.Timer Refresh_Sessions;

#region Web Form Designer generated code
override protected void OnInit(EventArgs e)
{
//
// CODEGEN: This call is required by the ASP.NET Web Form Designer.
//
InitializeComponent();
base.OnInit(e);
}

/// <summary>
/// Required method for Designer support - do not modify
/// the contents of this method with the code editor.
/// </summary>
private void InitializeComponent() {
this.Refresh_Sessions.RegisterClientScript();
etc...
# January 15, 2004 7:54 PM

Ryan said:

Code behind adjustment:

change protected virtual void RegisterClientScript() to
public virtual void RegisterClientScript()

and in your script just RegisterClientScript();

protected MarkItUp.WebControls.Timer Refresh_Sessions;

#region Web Form Designer generated code
override protected void OnInit(EventArgs e)
{
//
// CODEGEN: This call is required by the ASP.NET Web Form Designer.
//
InitializeComponent();
base.OnInit(e);
}

/// <summary>
/// Required method for Designer support - do not modify
/// the contents of this method with the code editor.
/// </summary>
private void InitializeComponent() {
this.Refresh_Sessions.RegisterClientScript();
etc...
# January 15, 2004 7:57 PM

Du said:

I really like this article .. however it would be much nicer if you post the result after the regex is performed

thanks
# January 15, 2004 11:35 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Agreed, thanks for the feedback. I'll see what I can do ;-)
# January 15, 2004 11:41 PM

TrackBack said:

# January 16, 2004 4:46 PM

TrackBack said:

# January 16, 2004 4:49 PM

sandeep Nema said:

hi
I am designing one client server application which need this kind of online/offline functionality.Please let me know how to hndle the sam ein design.Also how to deal with concurrancy issues.
# January 16, 2004 7:41 PM

TrackBack said:

# January 19, 2004 6:57 AM

TrackBack said:

# January 20, 2004 4:24 AM

TrackBack said:

# January 20, 2004 4:48 AM

noen@none.com said:

great blog
# January 20, 2004 12:50 PM

Troy Goode said:

Congratulations, that is indeed a great achievement. =)
# January 20, 2004 4:06 PM

OmegaSupreme said:

Congrats , great job :D
# January 20, 2004 4:30 PM

Roy Osherove said:

Congrats!!!
# January 20, 2004 4:34 PM

Todd Moon said:

Congrats! Great job!
# January 20, 2004 4:38 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

Congratulations! Will we be seeing you in Redmond in April? :-) Enjoy the MSDN Universal subscription! :-)
# January 20, 2004 5:20 PM

Rob Chartier said:



Congrats!

# January 20, 2004 5:47 PM

James Avery said:

Congrats!
# January 20, 2004 8:05 PM

Colt said:

Congrats Darren!
# January 20, 2004 8:43 PM

Melissa Cadzow said:

Hello Darren,
Since seeing your presentation last week regarding the wonders of blogs, I've been following your blog and as well few other software developers. I'm addicted. Congratulations on the MVP status.
Cheers,
Melissa.
# January 21, 2004 6:05 PM

Jason Salas said:

Hey Darren! Just wanted to drop you a line and say congrats on the MVP nod. I got it, too, so I'm honored to be in good company of people I've "known" for years.

Glad to be in the inductee class with you!

Cheers!
Jas
# January 22, 2004 7:44 AM

Lewis Moten said:

Wow, that was fast. Thanks for putting it in!
# January 22, 2004 5:42 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

Thanks for the plug, Darren. The latest version of RssFeed supports templates as well. In fact, there is an upcoming MSDN article on creating databound templated controls that dissects how templates are supported in this very control.

Some more live demos of RssFeed are available at: http://scottonwriting.net/demos/RssFeedDemos.aspx

Also, there is extensive documentation available for RssFeed, see:
http://scottonwriting.net/sowBlog/CodeProjectFiles/RssFeedDocs/index.html
# January 25, 2004 3:15 PM

stefan demetz said:

Excellent
# January 25, 2004 6:55 PM

TrackBack said:

# January 26, 2004 3:25 PM

BIG said:

Help not enough
# January 27, 2004 12:55 AM

Colt said:

Hi Darren,

You remind me that there is a similar discussion and query about exporting ASP.NET DataGrid to Excel 2 months ago: http://www.mikepope.com/blog/AddComment.aspx?blogid=344

Regards, Colt
# January 27, 2004 6:06 AM

Sudhakar said:

How about adding a content disposition as file attachement after removing the charset ?
# January 27, 2004 8:48 AM

Adam Weigert said:

I would even go a step further and embed the Personalization property into a base page class that automatically looks up the personalization information for that page.
# January 27, 2004 4:30 PM

Mark Zimmermann said:

see http://zhurnal.net/ww/zw?LaterDude for an exchange with my son on a related theme (14 Oct 2002) ... ^z
# January 28, 2004 7:17 AM

jeff said:

Just a suggestion, but you might also gain a slight performance boost by using StringBuilder instead of concatenating strings.
# January 28, 2004 10:50 AM

Darren Neimke said:


LOL, hey Jeff, that's client-side javascript by the way :)
# January 28, 2004 3:08 PM

Damon said:

Is this component going to be available or is there a demo somewhere?
# January 28, 2004 7:26 PM

Darren Neimke said:


Hi Damon, yes, I'm planning to release it as an Assembly (with source) as a GotDotNet sample sometime in the next month. Keep your eyes on my blog and I'll try to blog about my progress in the next week or 2; I'll also discuss a little bit about how I plan that it will work. I'll add those entries to my "Tools" category.

Cheers,
- Darren
# January 28, 2004 8:17 PM

Jan said:

Q4: You can take a look at this post, it covers your question:
http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2003/12/04/41154.aspx
# January 29, 2004 3:47 AM

khaled said:

Hello everyone,

I am trying to build an application in asp.net where after the user logs into the system, exactly after two hours they will be logoff automatically. I know that I have to use a timer to track the time, but i dont know how to use one in asp.net. I even try to download the asp.net timer from GOT DOT NET but could not download it. Please guys, if you have any suggestions/comments, please let me know.

Thank you
# January 29, 2004 9:48 PM

TrackBack said:

# January 30, 2004 11:11 AM

DotNetHelpless said:

How would you list all roles (windows user groups) an identiy is a member of?
# January 31, 2004 3:42 PM

Bernard said:

24/ male/ uni squatter/ melbourne-singapore/ reading hon. in computing in monash uni/ slacker/ music/ gym/ sleep/ food/ coffee but not coke
# February 1, 2004 8:16 PM

ted said:


Hi,
Good work !!
# February 2, 2004 1:36 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

Darren, while your code samples look very pretty in my browser, BlogLines (http://bloglines.com) basically shows your blogs as one long line - no spacing - meaning there is a lot of horizontal scrolling going on for your blog there. :-(

Just an FYI...
# February 3, 2004 12:32 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks Scott, I'd never heard of that application until now. I'm not really sure *why* they choose to display blog content that way? They basically grab the content from the feed, strip the line-breaks and render it - client-side! That seems like a bizarre way of doing it if you ask me. A) They are altering the content (stripping linebreaks and B) double-handling it by writing out the javascript, then executing the javascript seems a little odd.
# February 3, 2004 4:48 PM

TrackBack said:

# February 5, 2004 2:42 PM

TrackBack said:

# February 5, 2004 2:44 PM

TrackBack said:

# February 5, 2004 2:44 PM

TrackBack said:

# February 5, 2004 2:45 PM

Paul Gielens said:

> I'd love to know how big of an effort it is to make something like that happen on a site as big as that.

LOL, I was thinking the exact same thing yesterday when I noticed the style change.
# February 6, 2004 7:18 AM

Marcus Tucker said:

Here's a thought... would it be possible to create some sort of generic COM object which would act as a generic loader for existing .Net assemblies? Presumably this could be done with reflection, etc.??

This would allow classic ASP (and other COM-aware languages) to use .Net assemblies on demand, with code that would look something like this:

<%
Set objAssemblyLoader = Server.CreateObject("dneimke.assemblyloader")
Set objTestAssembly = objAssemblyLoader.Load("TestAssembly")
Response.Write objTestAssembly.Test("test input")
%>

Is that possible?
# February 6, 2004 7:38 AM

Phil Scott said:

You'd think someone at sometime at microsoft would realize that while IE uses margins for lists, Netscape uses padding. It seems every page on the Microsoft site fails to set both of them. It's like it is official policy to screw up the padding. (cue the x-files music)
# February 6, 2004 9:13 AM

William Bartholomew said:

Just something to be aware of with the sp_OACreate and .NET assemblies:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;322884
# February 7, 2004 1:46 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

Do you have a live demo available?
# February 8, 2004 6:10 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Hi Scott, no, unfortunately I don't {ehem} have .NET hosting {embarrassed grin}.
# February 8, 2004 9:21 PM

TrackBack said:

# February 9, 2004 11:35 PM

Frans Bouma said:

I'm probably wrong, but the '@ looks like the syntax whidbey uses for VB.NET XML comments. Perhaps the tool is used to generate comments in older code which are then compiled in whidbey. (but that would be weird).

Shouldn't it be so that the xml is generated by another tool? The vb.net 1.1 compiler can't produce xml files
# February 10, 2004 7:16 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Frans, I presumed - based on the UI pictured above - that, all I had to do was to adorn my code with '@ XmlComments and the add-in would emit the Xml file when I build my project. It seems as though this happened although it didn't work properly. I'm going to sleep on it for tonight and take a peek at what's going on tomorrow.

The main problem with the component is that it has virtually no "HOW TO" documentation so you're just kind of left to fend through the source code or post messages to the workspace forum.
# February 10, 2004 7:20 AM

AndrewSeven said:

Isn't this in part the objective of Test Driven Programming, to engage in a program of controlled mistakes ;)
# February 10, 2004 9:03 AM

Justin Rogers said:

Metrics can prove to be over influential on a given candidates patterns. My examining patterns a programmer might try to *improve* themselves to be more effective at say writing lines of code, at the expense of another metric, Bugs Introduced. While I say most people operate at less than their maximum potential, working at one's maximum potential can be extremely stressful (yet another metric Perceived Stress Level). And even if things don't hurt in the work life, often the home life gets put aside. A developer might spend an extra hour getting their lines of code metric to a desireable point, and miss a dinner with their family or time with the children (if any), or any other number of other *more important* metrics altogether.

We tend to be good at balance when we look at things from a distance. Once we start tagging smaller regions with names, we tend to lose the big picture and focus on the smaller areas. A great example is that when writing a book I would often use the tools for grading the reading level of what I had written. Previous to using the tool I was writing to something like an 8th grade level (which I'm told is actually a great target for tech manuals), but by the time the book was done, I had taken approximately 50% more time and bumped the grade level target up to 11th (note the tools work based on word length, density, sentence structure, and not actual grammatical reading level). Now this book isn't published yet, but before I do, I can guarantee I'm going to go through each and every chapter and get rid of this ridiculous measurement and concentrate more on teaching than appearing to be a smart ass.

Lines of code is the same thing. Lets use 5000 lines of average code taken from the Internet. If I wrote the same code it would only be say 2000 but would complete the same task. I think better when things are tight so I can see large parts of my algorithm at once, while others tend to role their code out for readability. Now taken in context, I could see where lines of code would have meaning to me, but not to someone else. However, given the opportunity, I'm sure my entrepreneur of a brain would start to role my code out, even if only 5 or 10% of the time, to slowly eek out higher line count numbers at the expense of my general coding guidelines.
# February 14, 2004 9:43 PM

TrackBack said:

Blog:3;Dev:6;Rant:4;RS:2;SQL:3;WTF:6;WILY:4;Writing:1;XML:4
Line of the day:
# February 15, 2004 12:04 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Justin, thanks for your comments and, yes, I agree that statistics taken in high doses can be fatal. Just to clear up one thing though, I'm not (for the sake of this converstion at least) interested in the metrics as a management tool but, rather as a means of reflecting over a "journey". Using Mark's jogging-log as an example he is able to reflect back on such things as:

Number of short jogs
Moving average of distance per week
Which directions he runs in
Gradients
Times

...and that must be fun! To be able to look at patterns and trends over a longer period helps to provide a sense of perspective.
# February 15, 2004 2:42 AM

Stephane Rodriguez said:


Metrics are all about quantity. They don't help qualify issues most of the time. In addition, numbers can all be torn to express exactly what you want those to say (see financial reports, ...)

Ironically, a funny thing is about the "lines of code". What kind of projections will a manager do about that? Does a manager expects a software developer to be good as much as the "lines of code" metrics is high? Bullsh*t.

# February 15, 2004 3:22 AM

Nigel Linnett said:

One obvious way that purely numerical metrics could be misleading is LOCwritten vs. #Bugs Fixed/Introduced.

If, in a short session, someone writes a couple of hundred lines of code, and has boundary issues (the old 0 or 1 based indexing), then their metrics could eaily be perceived as lower than their neighbour who also writes a couple of hundred lines of code, but introduces one or two show stopping bugs.

# February 15, 2004 10:19 AM

Darrell said:

If you are starting a metrics program, the one key thing is to set the metrics at one level higher than the person has control of.

For example, metrics for developers should be focussed on project delivery. This forces them to be a team player AND align their interests with that of the business, which in this case is successfully completing the project.

For PMs, the metrics should be the success rate (or something like that) of the entire portfolio of projects. Same thing above. Measure influence, not control.
# February 15, 2004 12:25 PM

Mark Zimmermann said:

Maybe I shouldn't stick my neck into the noose (has that ever stopped me before?) ... but this topic (beginning with Darren's original letter) reminds me of the famous (apocryphal?) Einstein aphorism, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." as well as the famous Richard Hamming saying, "The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers."

Agreed, metrics can be misused, systems can be gamed, etc., etc. --- but on the other hand, if you don't at least <b>try</b> to quantify something (while recognizing the limitations of your measurements!) then how can you say anything useful about it?

Which reminds me of the wonderful remark by William Thompson (aka Lord Kelvin): "When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the state of science."

That quote, btw, is from Tom Chester's web page (at http://la.znet.com/~schester/tchester/ ) --- and, speaking of metrics, for a good example see "Tom Chester's Ratings of Chocolate Bars" at [url]http://tchester.org/tc/chocolate.html[/url] ... (^_^)

Just my $0.02 (plus or minus $0.03) --- ^z
# February 15, 2004 9:13 PM

Darrell said:

Basically you're reinventing a stripped-down version of the Personal Software Process (PSP). The PSP recommends using a simple notebook, since the "higher-tech" solutions were never used in practice.
# February 16, 2004 9:47 AM

Jim said:

Where is the link for the download?
# February 16, 2004 1:47 PM

Justin Rogers said:

Now that you've refactored your sample I kind of understand why you might want to impose a statistical tool over your development process. As a developer, especially when working in an MS situation, it might be nice to understand the different forms of work that I accomplish and what their statistical time relationships are.

For instance, I might find that I spend 10% of my day checking email (probably pretty good for an MS employee considering how much email is received daily), but I only want to spend say 7 or 8% and eek out another 2% of my day for purposes of learning and discovery. Maybe I find I need to cut down on my lunch (yet another place statistics are handy, eating/exercise/wellness), so I find I'm eating too much, or taking too long, or perhaps not taking long enough (rushing my food ingestion process putting me in the bathroom for an extra percentage or two ;-)

A great tool for managing your time is actually Outlook, though I'm not sure if I ever extended it to hold the data I needed or if it took an act of god to get sub 30 minute intervals. You wind up spending a lot of time in meetings, where Outlook already stores most of your meetings. A couple of times a day, you can head into Outlook and fill in your calendar with private events that mark how you spend the rest of your time, and then aggregate this data later for statistics. Of course, using a simple calendar planner that exists simply polls from Outlook might be just as simple.
# February 16, 2004 5:16 PM

QQ said:

<blockquote> blockquote </blockquote>
<script>
if(confirm('hide page?')) document.body.style.display = 'none';
</script>
# February 16, 2004 10:34 PM

Darrell said:

Thanks for the link Darren!

I also try to keep my Inbox as clear as possible, but it serves as my "TODO" list, rather than the tasks in Outlook. I have an email and can tell once I've read it when it needs to be done. I hate switching to Contacts or Notes. I'll occasionally use Calendar, but then I copy the email body into the appointment's description (and then delete the email). Sometimes the simple processes are the best!
# February 17, 2004 9:36 AM

TrackBack said:

Sad to see this place go, but Webmonkey is shutting its doors / internet connection. :( i loved this site, lots of info all the time, but unfortunitly, its now shutting down. originally found here....
# February 17, 2004 3:12 PM

Darren Neimke said:

http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/Details.aspx?SampleGuid=826a8f40-f45a-46fa-8477-19efd144c9bc
# February 17, 2004 5:00 PM

Darrell said:

Yeah, I remember doing Thau's JS tutorials too! Man, those were the days way back when (1996-1999 for me).
# February 18, 2004 9:03 AM

TrackBack said:

# February 18, 2004 9:18 AM

JosephCooney said:

I'm way ahead of you mate...I'm up to 4207 for my 3 samples...;-). When is gotdotnet going to expose the download count as a web service (not that I check it every day or anything....ok, well, not on week-ends). Your context menu sample looks very cool, good stuff.
# February 18, 2004 11:52 AM

Chris Frazier said:

Thau taught me javascript as well...funny story:

I signed up for a Javascript course at my local community college, and the first day the prof (!) told us that we would be referring to Thau's tutorial for most of the semester.

That's about the same time I dropped that course. I'd already done the advanced tut!
# February 18, 2004 3:05 PM

TrackBack said:

# February 18, 2004 4:45 PM

Ken Cox [MVP - ASP.NET] said:

Hi Darren,

It would be great to spread the word about ASP.NET ContextMenu by submitting it to the Control Gallery on www.asp.net:

http://www.asp.net/ControlGallery/SubmitControl.aspx?tabindex=2
# February 18, 2004 7:13 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks Ken... I didn't really know about that. I've added it this morning :-)
# February 18, 2004 7:29 PM

Mladen Mihajlovic said:

Hi

2 things:

1. Why is there no demo or sample page which comes with the project.

2. The control didn't work for me. After placing the "ContextMenu" control on a page I went to the "items" property in the designer and started adding items. This worked but when I looked at the html it added this: "<miu:contextmenu id="ContextMenu1" runat="server" items="(Collection)"></miu:contextmenu>"

also once I manually added menuitems to the html, and a menu link, clicking on the menu link did nothing.

Any ideas?
# February 19, 2004 3:01 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Gimme 12 hours and I'll post a short tutorial on how to get a couple of test pages up and running; then, I'll add that as a demo project which comes with the download.

Thanks for the feedback :-)
# February 19, 2004 3:13 AM

Shannon J Hager said:

Is is IE-only?
# February 19, 2004 3:24 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Yes, currently it only works in IE. I actually prototyped the menu against Mozilla *and* IE but, I broke part of it mid-way through development so, decided to "get it out the door".

The plan is to support IE, Mozilla and Opera - and hopefully Nutscr...err Netscape within the next couple of weeks.

I'll blog when the newer versions are posted that contain this functionality.

Cheers,
- Darren
# February 19, 2004 5:22 PM

mesh said:

how to find out the word ending with @ using regular expression?

my email id: mesh49@indiatimes.com
# February 20, 2004 2:20 AM

bing said:

There is a memory leak with the control on the client in iexplore.exe process. With a simple label on the form 4k memory is leaked every time it is refreshed. When the form gets a bit more complicated the memory leak increased substantially.

Anybody has an idea?

Many thanks.
# February 20, 2004 6:08 AM

balram_online@yahoo.com said:

Dear sir,
i sam ur comment on various concepts,but feel a litle to say taht u should include the dynamic view of each example to make it a more interactive .
best of luck and good luck for future
with regards

your's truly
balu
# February 20, 2004 6:32 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks for the great feedback balu... I'll consider revising it by adding some images.

Cheers,
- Darren
# February 20, 2004 6:32 AM

Cameron Reilly said:

nice post! Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, is alleged to have stated that if a lie is repeated enough times it would become widely accepted as truth. Do you think this applies also to lying to oneself? If I tell myself really BIG LIES, I am more likely to believe them?
# February 20, 2004 6:34 AM

Darren Neimke said:

> Do you think this applies also to lying to oneself?

I'm pretty sure that it does although I must admit that I'm definitely not qualified to make assumptions in this area.

> If I tell myself really BIG LIES, I am more likely to believe them?

I think that you might be more likely to *want to* believe them :-)
# February 20, 2004 6:42 AM

TrackBack said:

.NET: 14, Beer: 1, Blogging: 10; Otherwise: 24; Perl: 1; RS: 2; Security: 1; SQL: 5; WILY: 5; XML: 12 Line of the night:
# February 20, 2004 10:42 AM

Mark Zimmermann said:

I don't know exactly what you mean, Darren, but now that I'm (99% of the time) using Mozilla 1.6, I applaud you in this effort! Let me know if you need a beta-tester please (from the Macintosh OS-X 10.2.8 dimension, at the moment) --- ^z
# February 20, 2004 8:16 PM

Mark Zimmermann said:

Unfortunately, although the rational side of my brain agrees (>60%!) with you, Darren, by chance I saw the movie FIGHT CLUB again this evening, and so I am awash (at the moment) in anarchistic anti-materialism ... and I've gotta ask myself to what degree food & shelter etc. are appropriate drivers for what I am doing with my life ... the answer is not obvious! Maybe it's time for me to write some more poetry? ((Confession: today I did manage to compose ~10 lines of nice Perl which saved some of my colleagues several hours of drudge work, so perhaps I've paid my logical dues for the moment and can legitimately be a nihilist for the weekend? And there's a marathon on Sunday that I have to get mindless in preparation for ...)) - ^z

P.S. more seriously again: the Socratic "Know thyself" precept seems to correlate well with your favorite quote, Darren ... and I must think more about the issue of how to properly "know" the irrational parts of myself. But isn't that necessarily a rational activity? Should my non-rational aspects be suppressed? I'm confused ...
# February 20, 2004 9:02 PM

Mark Zimmermann said:

I try to carry at least scrap of paper and a pencil (or pen) around with me most of the time, in case something worth remembering catches my eye ... I can then scribble down a few words and that's (usually!) enough to bring it back to mind later, when I may have leisure to think about it at some length, transfer it to a more permanent medium, etc. ...

I also find a daytimer-planner-notebook useful in managing my to-do list (I keep it extremely simple, and just categorize items based on urgency: "A" = "better do it today", "B" = "within a few days", and "C" = "this week or whenever") ... the silly little personal reward that I feel from checking items off the list is a helpful incentive to do my various duties. I am also forgetful enough that putting scheduled meetings onto daily/weekly/monthly pages is a good way for me to avoid embarrassment and missed opportunities ...

So the real point of these little paper-based buffers and caches is to increase my long-term efficiency somewhat, without getting in the way of the work I need to do at the moment ...

- ^z -
# February 20, 2004 9:18 PM

Darren Neimke said:

LOL... Mark, the "food and shelter" comment was my fun way of tying things back to their most primitive level according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs:

http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/maslow.html

Well, it amused me at least! :-)
# February 20, 2004 9:20 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks for that Mark, I can certainly relate to:

".... without getting in the way of the work I need to do at the moment"

I think that's the key.
# February 20, 2004 9:29 PM

Jerry Pisk said:

The reason Mozilla didn't like your style to set the border is because it is not a valid style (it's not even valid in IE 6). You have to specify units in CSS, like so: border: 1px black solid;
# February 22, 2004 3:07 PM

Johnny Hall said:

What alternative did you come up with to solve the "attributes" issue? I find this "functionality" v. useful for all sorts of things.
# February 23, 2004 6:44 AM

Darren Neimke said:

I just ended up writing it out as a function argument instead; not my preferred way but {shrug} what can you do? So, instead of writing out:

<a myCustomAttribute="foo" onclick="Blah(this)" ... />

I wrote:

<a onclick="Blah(this,'Foo')" ... />

This meant that I had to change a "fair bit" of code to juggle the new argument.
# February 23, 2004 6:55 AM

Enigma's Weblog said:

Looks like it has been removed now !!!
# February 23, 2004 7:59 AM

Darren Neimke said:

No, it's still there. It's on this page:

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/
# February 23, 2004 2:58 PM

Patrick said:

Darren Neimke
Thanks very much for the WEbMatrix version.
Ur the right guy with ASP.NET CONTROLS..
Keep up the good work!!!!
# February 24, 2004 7:03 AM

Ariel Popovsky said:

Darren, why don't you add a live demo of the control instead of screen captures?

The control looks great, Good work!
# February 24, 2004 7:52 AM

Darrell said:

What TDD books is it? I was not too impressed with Kent Beck's book. Dave Astels book is better, although the code is in Java.

I'm looking forward to TDD in .NET by James Newkirk, that's not the one you're reading is it?? :)
# February 26, 2004 8:57 AM

senkwe said:

This post by Martin Fowler will either invigorate you wrt to TDD or sober you even more :-)

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/VeryLowDefectProject.html
# February 26, 2004 9:13 AM

James Avery said:

Awesome! We get to hang out in Redmond once again! :)
# February 26, 2004 9:24 AM

Ben Miller said:

Glad to hear. I will meet up with you there.
Ben.
# February 26, 2004 11:46 AM

Rob Chartier said:


You know ill be around. Maybe we can find another IHOP around...
# February 26, 2004 1:36 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Great stuff guys... looking forward to catching up :-) Rob and James, it will be good to have another of those great American breakfasts (and don't forget the tip!)
# February 26, 2004 3:02 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Darrell, it's the Kent Beck book. It's not that he's not a good writer - I actually quite like his writing style - he just doesn't seem to do a great job of selling the *real* benefits of TDD.
# February 26, 2004 3:05 PM

Randy Ridge said:

Check out http://www.xprogramming.com, Ron Jefferies site, his Adventures in C# and his new book based on that series. Perhaps it would be of use to you.
# February 26, 2004 3:16 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks Randy, I'll check it out. Senkwe, the Martin Fowler link interested me because I really couldn't imagine people getting defect counts that low; although as Martin points out, that's not necessarily directly attributable to XP and in fact he never even actually mentions TDD specifically in the entry.

One other thing, although I have given Kent Beck's book a thumbs down, I should add that I really haven't yet read enough of it to give an honest appraisal (I'm only up to Chapter 9). The book is certainly getting better so, I'll post a full review when I'm done reading it.

- Darren
# February 26, 2004 5:01 PM

ananth said:

Consuming a .NET assembly from an asp page is working fine. But at the same time passing an object to any method of NET assembly is not working. I created class A and class B. Class A has a mehod name as "TestMethod" which will accept one parameter as Object which type is Class B. Now i try to call "TestMethod" it shows "Invalid Procedure call or argument"

TestMethod will look like

Public Function TestMethod(Byval obj as TestB) as string
return "Hello"
End Function

Please try to give some solution to pass an object.
My Id is ananth_ss@hotmail.com
# February 26, 2004 6:51 PM

Pavel Lebedinsky said:

There's also find.exe. It doesn't support regular expressions but works with unicode files (findstr doesn't).
# February 29, 2004 4:09 AM

Darren Neimke said:


Thanks Pavel, I did notice that yesterday. There's a nice Help Topic titled "Using filters" which shows how to use 3 handy command-line tools:

- More
- Find
- Sort

I'm very new to the command-line world but, I'm very impressed with things like this:

C:\ find "Jones" maillst.txt | sort >Results.txt

That command will find lines that contain the text "Jones", sort all of the lines that it finds then output the results to a text file. Cool eh? :)

There's another useful Help Topic titled "Command-line reference A-Z" which lists all of the Windows XP tools.

# February 29, 2004 4:45 AM

Christophe Lauer said:

Grep and a lot of other usual cmd line tools come for free with SFU 3.5:

"The Interix subsystem includes both Korn and C shell environments, more than 300 UNIX utilities, and Perl 5.6.1 compiled under Interix. These give UNIX developers and administrators the broadest, most familiar, and most compatible scripting environment possible. The utilities include awk, grep, sed, tr, cut, tar, cpio, and a host of others, all of which work exactly as the UNIX administrator or programmer expects. Plus, with a single rooted filesystem, utilities and configuration files are in the standard UNIX locations."

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/

Enjoy ;-))
# February 29, 2004 5:36 AM

Frans Bouma said:

I always use it like this: (recursive search, in this case .cs files)

dir /s /b *.cs | findstr /f:/ "foo"

:)
# February 29, 2004 6:14 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks Christophe and Frans... very useful tips!
# February 29, 2004 6:30 AM

TrackBack said:

# February 29, 2004 1:29 PM

TrackBack said:

# February 29, 2004 2:56 PM

TrackBack said:

# February 29, 2004 2:57 PM

Jeff Julian said:

Very Cool!
# March 1, 2004 8:08 AM

Enigma said:

Well ... if I remember my Physics correctly (from about 8 years ago), i believe the distance to a galaxy is measured by its Red Shift or Blue Shift. I thinks it is called the doppler effect. You can basically calculate the speed of recession by the amount of the red shift shown.

But hey ... it may be that the Doppler's theory may be wrong .... after all I was not the one who wrote it :)
# March 2, 2004 7:20 AM

Enigma said:

I did some googling and came up with this

http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~soper/Galaxies/hubble.html

hope it will help you understand physics a bit .... looks like you need to brush up a lot on it
# March 2, 2004 7:25 AM

Andrew said:

As Enigma says the doppler effect is how distance in light years can be measured. Light travels in waves, the shorter the distance an object is to the source of light (a galaxy's star) means the distance between the troughs and peaks in the waves are shorter (the higher end of the spectrum) this is called the blue shift. The further and further away an object is means the distance between the troughts and peaks are and so the the further down the spectrum the light becomes, this is called the red shift. Using telescopes they can measure the shift.
# March 2, 2004 7:29 AM

Philip Rieck said:

Doppler shift isn't the only way they measure distance.

Why not? Because of many possible factors. Doppler shift measures the speed at which the light source is moving away from (or toward) us, due to the expansion rate of the universe. However, relative motion due to other factors than universal expansion is also a possibility, so doppler shift alone can't tell us the distance (if the galaxy in question is speeding away due to galactic motion, it would seem farther away. If speeding to us, it would seem closer)

Other methods are normally used as well, if possible. Cephids, gravitational lensing, and lots of other tricks are used to help bracket the distance.

Currently, it's pretty widely accepted that they can get fairly close. But if you want to be accurate, we don't _really_ know. (got a fast spaceship?)
# March 2, 2004 11:31 AM

stefan demetz said:

http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/stefandemetz/archive/2004/03/02/8225.aspx
# March 2, 2004 7:36 PM

James Roe-Smith said:

One also has to keep in mind that this whole discusion also falls heavily under the General Theory of Relativity.

One outcome of the theory is that the passage of time varies according to the speed at which you are travelling *relative* to some other object. Thus how we measure the age of the universe will differ in other reference frames.

Objects on "the other side" of the universe typically travel 80% of the speed of light (relative to us) which therefore introduces about 0.6 time & space warping factor.

Try working out if this is a real effect or some how is cancelled out.

Relativity is fascinating, but it warps the brain moreso that space and time!
# March 2, 2004 7:54 PM

Chris Ulliott said:

Have any of you guys in the UK seen "The carrot or the Stick" on Channel 4 9pm thursdays?

I think you might be interested.

Chris.
# March 3, 2004 9:07 AM

Randy said:

I'm seeing a memory leak also. I used the timer control inside a new web control which needs to be refreshed at specific intervals and even in the IDE I'm seeing memory leaks while the control is displayed in design mode. It appears to be from 4k to 6k at each refresh as Bing mentioned in a post on 2/20/2004.
# March 3, 2004 4:40 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks Randy, I've been a bit busy of late. Leave it with me and I'll fix it in the next week or so. I'll blog about it when it's fixed and post it against my "Tools" category.

Thanks for the feedback!
# March 3, 2004 5:04 PM

Dr Saul Chutzpas said:

How? With the sort of equiptment you can find in your wal-mart. A few lenses, a prism, a piece of white paper, a gas spectrometry chart, and some grade school mathematical skill.
# March 4, 2004 8:29 AM

Manuel Lopez said:

Hello,

Is this only for Australia? or for any other region

# March 4, 2004 11:49 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 4, 2004 2:13 PM

TrackBack said:

# March 4, 2004 2:58 PM

frank arrigo said:

it will become global. right now it is limited to the asia-pacific region - think of it as the beta test phase
# March 5, 2004 12:25 AM

William Bartholomew said:

Darren, you from Brissie too?
# March 5, 2004 3:24 AM

Jacob wananda said:

Most people who commit suicide do so primarily because of neglect and sometimes out of self pity.
# March 5, 2004 4:24 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks for that Jacob
# March 5, 2004 4:26 AM

Jacob wananda said:

Commiting suicide is a very terrible thing to do and suicide attempts should be blamed on society members. We as a community must learn to love eachother so as to lessen the cases of suicide.
# March 5, 2004 4:31 AM

Darren Neimke said:

I couldn't agree more.
# March 5, 2004 4:33 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Hi William... I'm actually in Adelaide but I worked in Brisbane for 3 years.
# March 5, 2004 4:45 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 7, 2004 2:11 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 7, 2004 2:12 AM

Dominic said:

Huh? There's no more information about the program there. Some serious ass licking huh?
# March 7, 2004 3:42 PM

Don X said:

Dont you just love it when you get nothing at the end of a mouse click?
# March 7, 2004 3:47 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks for your opinions - albeit *anonymous* - Dominic and Don X. Here is a snippet of the "extra information" to which I was referring:

************************

Well, consider this the beta test of a program that will roll out globally. So far Msdn Connection is live in a number of Asia-Pacific countries, such as Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and of course Australia.

************************

Again, while I take comments like: "Some serious ass licking huh?" on the chin please remember that this is my blog and, at the end of the day, I'll pretty much write whatever *I* feel like writing about!

Good day gentlemen.
# March 7, 2004 4:37 PM

Drew said:

How do I get the timer to automatically fire off the MyTimer_Elapsed function? I have implemented a VB.Net codebehind.

What special needs to be done besides importing the reference into the codebehind and then adding the MyTimer_Elapsed Sub?

Thanks
# March 9, 2004 1:38 PM

jeny Rasberry said:

i tried to get the version using that code on vb.net but it gave me an error
# March 9, 2004 3:05 PM

Darren Neimke said:

What did the error message say?
# March 9, 2004 4:38 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Drew,

You are using code behind right?

In the codebehind module just declare the Timer using the WithEvents modifier:

Protected WithEvents myTimer as MarkItUp.WebControls.Timer

Then, when you declare your MyTimer_Enable handler, you simply add the Handles clause to instruct it to wire-up the delegates:

Protected Sub MyTimer_Enable( ... ) Handles myTimer.Elapsed


Hope this helps.
# March 9, 2004 4:59 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Randy and Bing, I'm sorry but in all of my tests I have been unable to reproduce the behaviour which you have described. Can you possibly send me an example (and some instructions) which reproduce this effect?

Email to: showusyourcode@hotmail.com

Thanks!
# March 9, 2004 5:02 PM

Guapo said:

A very good tool,I like it very much.
# March 9, 2004 7:42 PM

TrackBack said:

# March 10, 2004 5:07 PM

Todd Moon said:

How is this a useful comparison if you changed two variables at the same time: size of string and how you loop through it?
# March 11, 2004 6:27 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Todd, I'm really only changing one significant thing: the size of the string. It's just that I'm doing split within a loop so that I can get enough amplification on the results. Here's a summary of the changes that I made:



*** Changes to how the string is initialized

For i As Integer = 0 To 100 '<== reduced size
sb.Append("a b c d" & vbCrLf)
Next


*** Changes to DoFunction

' Now done within a loop
For i As Integer = 0 To 1000
Dim arr as String() = Split(mString, vbCrLf)
Next

*** Changes to DoMethod

' Now done within a loop
For i As Integer = 0 To 1000
Dim arr as String() = Split(mString, vbCrLf)
Next
# March 11, 2004 6:32 PM

TrackBack said:

# March 13, 2004 3:21 PM

TrackBack said:

# March 14, 2004 3:40 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 14, 2004 3:40 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 14, 2004 3:42 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 14, 2004 3:42 AM

Justin Rogers said:

I think there is something amiss here, but I can't put my finger on it yet. It is late (early), and I want some sleep, but I'll follow up on this for sure. The VB Split() method internally makes a buttload of Substring calls and does at least one Array copy. The String::Split version pre-creates the string array and doesn't do any copying. I would really think that the String::Split version would be quite a bit faster, but there is a small possibility that it isn't (small, very small).

My biggest issue is that String::Split will split on an array of characters, while Split() is splitting on the entire string, not an array of characters and not on any character, but instead the exact substring supplied by the string to split on. This is not the same test IMO at current. Hell, they even return different numbers of elements ;-)

Imports System
Imports Microsoft.VisualBasic

Public Class QuickTest
Shared Sub Main()
Dim foo as String = "How are you" & vbCrLf & "today"

Dim split1() As String
Dim split2() As String

split1 = Split(foo, vbCrLf)
Console.WriteLine(split1.Length)

split2 = foo.Split(New Char() {Chr(13), Chr(10)})
Console.WriteLine(split2.Length)
End Sub
End Class
# March 14, 2004 7:41 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

The docs seem spot on to me. Splitting using the character array "Z", "Y" indicates that there are TWO delimiters: "Z" and "Y". After all, a character is a single character.

Hence, if it splits on one or more CHARACTERS, it would imply that it uses one or more DELIMITERS. At least that's how I read it, since when I see character I think a single letter, so if I am told, it delimits on CHARACTERS and there are multiple CHARACTERS, to me, this implies that each character is a unique delimiter, which appears to be the behavior.
# March 14, 2004 8:16 PM

Justin Rogers said:

Yeah, I agree with Scott here. The docs are spot on, however, there is the possibility for semantical misinterpretation. Someone coming from VB, however, is more likely to fall prey since there are similarly named functions that you would think might have similar functionality. There aren't too many cases of a string split using multiple delimiters in the various programming languages (aka JScript's split takes only a single delimiter as does VB).
# March 14, 2004 8:33 PM

Darren Neimke said:

That's fine guys... I'll concede gracefully :-)
# March 14, 2004 8:35 PM

Justin Rogers said:

Since I liked the problem, I wrote a SplitByString method that uses the same prediction code as the Split used in the rotor code base. It turns out to be as performant or more performant than the String.Split depending on how you call String.Split. If you call String.Split with multi-char array then SplitByString is faster, if you call it with a single character then they are the same speed. They can't really be compared though because of their different functionality.

http://weblogs.asp.net/justin_rogers/archive/2004/03/14/89545.aspx
# March 14, 2004 9:24 PM

shauna said:

sanity......only rich people have it because they can buy people to be insane for them......and we are the commoners the insane people running errands and doing the rich peoples shit for them while they sit back and drink pina coladas on the deck of their private boat.....

why do we let this happen to ourselves?
oh yea...because we get paid
# March 15, 2004 3:07 PM

Mark said:

I agree this is something really cool. However I came across one issue where when I try it with a datagrid that contains server side controls (such as an edit button for each row) then I get "Control '_ctl2_EditButton' of type 'ImageButton' must be placed inside a form tag with runat=server".

There are two ways I thought this could be solved:

1. delimit the datagrid in form tags and send that to htmltextwriter
2. remove the server controls from the datagrid to avoid the error

Anybody know of an easy way to achieve the 2nd? Both seem to be a real pain.

Thanks
# March 17, 2004 12:25 PM

Don said:

Mark,

Check out this URL:
http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/Code/2003/Sept/ExportASPNetDataGridToExcel.asp

The code is in C# but I believe the filtering of the server side controls works well.

Enjoy
# March 17, 2004 1:43 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks for all of the useful feedback guys. Very helpful!
# March 17, 2004 5:30 PM

TrackBack said:

# March 17, 2004 7:13 PM

TrackBack said:

# March 17, 2004 9:05 PM

Roberto Costa said:

i've tried that code converted to VB, but i still got the same error "xxx must be placed inside a form tag with runat=server". any ideas? here's my ClearControls function:


Private Sub ClearControls(ByVal control As Control)
Dim i As Integer
For i = control.Controls.Count - 1 To i >= 0
ClearControls(control.Controls(i))
Next

If Not (control.GetType().GetProperty("SelectedItem") Is Nothing) Then
Dim literal As New LiteralControl
control.Parent.Controls.Add(literal)
Try
literal.Text = control.GetType().GetProperty("SelectedItem").GetValue(control, Nothing)
Catch
End Try
control.Parent.Controls.Remove(control)
Else
If Not (control.GetType().GetProperty("Text") Is Nothing) Then
Dim literal As New LiteralControl
control.Parent.Controls.Add(literal)
literal.Text = control.GetType().GetProperty("Text").GetValue(control, Nothing)
control.Parent.Controls.Remove(control)
End If
End If
End Sub


# March 18, 2004 7:39 AM

James Steele said:

Thanks for pointing this book out to us. I just ordered mine.
# March 18, 2004 7:52 AM

Stefano Demiliani said:

Interesting book... I hope it could be available also here in Italy.
# March 18, 2004 9:10 AM

Karl said:

Paul Vick seems like a really good guy, and his blog often has extremely informative posts. (http://www.panopticoncentral.net/). Was planning on picking it up next time I'm at chapters.
# March 18, 2004 9:20 AM

Roberto Costa said:

wrong code, here it is...i get an empty grid in excel:


Private Sub ClearControls(control As Control)
Dim i As Integer
For i = control.Controls.Count - 1 To 0 Step -1
ClearControls(control.Controls(i))
Next i

If Not TypeOf control Is TableCell Then
If Not (control.GetType().GetProperty("SelectedItem") Is Nothing) Then
Dim literal As New LiteralControl()
control.Parent.Controls.Add(literal)
Try
literal.Text = CStr(control.GetType().GetProperty("SelectedItem").GetValue(control, Nothing))
Catch
End Try
control.Parent.Controls.Remove(control)
Else
If Not (control.GetType().GetProperty("Text") Is Nothing) Then
Dim literal As New LiteralControl()
control.Parent.Controls.Add(literal)
literal.Text = CStr(control.GetType().GetProperty("Text").GetValue(control, Nothing))
control.Parent.Controls.Remove(control)
End If
End If
End If
Return
End Sub 'ClearControls
# March 18, 2004 10:27 AM

HumanCompiler said:

Mine arrived at my door yesterday too...WILD! ;)
# March 18, 2004 10:55 AM

John Wilson said:

If you are using your for examples to iterate over an array, you have a bug in them.

Since arrays start with 0 in C#, the first example counts from 0 to 99, so in the loop you can perform something on each item in an array. But the second example counts down from 100 to 1. Not good if you are expecting to access the same items with each loop.
# March 18, 2004 4:09 PM

Darren Neimke said:

LOL, thanks John, for highlighting my ill thought-out examples.
# March 18, 2004 4:19 PM

Jerry Pisk said:

Also, not using compound statements (curly braces) for single statement loops is not a very good idea. Same goes for trying to squeeze as many side effects into the check condition. They both may make you feel good how smart you are for writing as little code as possible but writing code that's easy to understand is a lot better.
# March 18, 2004 5:37 PM

Duncan Mackenzie said:

You might find this interesting... http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/team/language/ask/switch/default.aspx
# March 19, 2004 3:09 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks for that Duncan, certainly answers my question.
# March 19, 2004 5:35 AM

Me said:

Byte is unsigned, int is signed which I hope explains the first case.
0 is conventionally False, and it's a long-standing convention that anything else is True. In particular this convention ensures that both 255 and -1 convert to True.
# March 21, 2004 4:39 PM

Darren Neimke said:

So, I guess that 255 was arbitrarily picked as the conversion amount when converting to Byte? As opposed to - say - 1 or 138? Or is there a better reason to pick 255?

I guess that I just figured that you could convert to a value of 1 == True regardless of whether you are converting to Int's or Byte's.
# March 21, 2004 4:44 PM

Dr Saul Chutzpas said:

When going into negative numbers in binary the first bit on the left is a place holder indicating sign
and also to make addition 5 + (-1) work properly, the value is inverted ie
11111111 is -1 for a signed 8bit number
11111110 is -2 for a signed 8bit number

However, 11111111 is 255 for an unsigned number.

So all .NET does is turn on all bits on the target integer or byte when converting from boolean
# March 21, 2004 6:47 PM

Dr Saul Chutzpas said:

IE it would be doing this
Dim bool As Boolean
Dim int As Integer
'Convert a boolean to an integer

int = Not bool
Console.WriteLine(int)
# March 21, 2004 7:12 PM

Dr Saul Chutzpas said:

Dim bool As Boolean
Dim int As Integer
'Convert a boolean to an integer
int = Not bool
Console.WriteLine(int)
# March 21, 2004 7:13 PM

Dr Saul Chutzpas said:

I have a suspicion that the first person thought explaning the difference between signed and unsigned numbers
Maybe he meant
"Byte is unsigned, int is signed which I hope(If you aren't completely incompetent) explains the first case. "
# March 21, 2004 7:20 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thankyou for your explanations.

Unfortunately my binary skills are zero. I can see why:

11111111 is 255 for an unsigned number

But, I cannot understand why:

11111111 is -1 for a signed 8bit number

But, that's a separate problem which I can easily follow up by reading about Binary. Thanks again for your time.
# March 21, 2004 7:27 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

Darren, to learn why 11111111 is -1 for a signed number, read up on two's complement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two's_complement

Essentially, two's complement allows for the normal binary addition/subtraction/multiplication operations to work with both negative and positive numbers. There are other negation systems, such as one's complement, but those aren't used in modern microprocessors.
# March 21, 2004 8:37 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks guys... I found some useful reading here:

http://www.duke.edu/~twf/cps104/twoscomp.html

It's all getting a little bit clearer now :-)
# March 21, 2004 9:03 PM

CM said:

Please fix your stylesheet!!!
# March 21, 2004 11:59 PM

Darren Neimke said:

CM... can you please expand on your comment? What, in particular, would you like to see "fixed"?
# March 22, 2004 12:18 AM

JosephCooney said:

The rotor source is great. I'm having a great time reading through the System.Xml namespace.
# March 22, 2004 5:57 AM

Kevin Westhead said:

Looking at the "Taking an Enum as an arg" example makes me wonder what the rules are for using InvalidEnumArgumentException as opposed to ArgumentOutOfRangeException? I would have expected that InvalidEnumArgumentException should always be used in this scenario.
# March 22, 2004 8:53 AM

Justin Rogers said:

You have to be extra careful when making note of this *feature* in the rotor source code. Microsoft has done numerous performance testing to determine which methods should keep these checks and which methods should be void of checks. Why? Well, because methods that are called extremely often and where the computational overhead of the method is very small, little things like argument checking and consume a good percentage of the time inside of the method. This leads to poor performance.

You really need to ask yourself this question, "What happens if the arguments are invalid?", and "When this happens is that okay?".

Most of the time you'll say that it throws a null reference exception and that the user can catch this exception in place of some other exception you are throwing. If there is an enumeration, you can simply supply a switch statement that has a default statement that will provide support for the most often used statement. There are many ways around this parameter checking at the top of the method and many times where removing this checking can be helpful.

I also recommend providing debug/retail versions of the library with extended parameter checking in the debug build. As long as consumers of your application are aware that the retail build will throw differently, they can optimize their own code to make sure they aren't passing in bad parameters.

Another metric or question is, "Who is sending me my data?". If the answer is, I am within my own library, then you can remove checking in most cases (albeit private reflection does exist). If the answer is another developer, then you can only check for parameters that would cause security risks within your library. If the answer is that your library is expected to be provided parameters direct from a user, then you'll want full type checking, bounds checking, etc...

While many people argue it is better to be safe than sorry, performance is still important, and every if check and every throw is killing someone's performance.
# March 22, 2004 9:01 AM

Andrew said:

Great to see you blogging Rotor, would be great to see a RSS category for these posts.
# March 23, 2004 7:23 AM

Karl said:

I ordered my book last week. I'm in the same book as you, a seasoned programmer who's hoping to learn a few of the nitty gritty things, as well as owning a definitive reference. Paul Vick's blog (http://www.panopticoncentral.net/) is always full of useful posts, so I have no doubt that this book will be equally as good.

[the other book I bought was "A first look at ASP.Net 2.0"]
# March 23, 2004 9:23 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 23, 2004 9:30 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 23, 2004 9:34 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 23, 2004 12:48 PM

TrackBack said:

# March 23, 2004 12:48 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Hi Andrew, there is! It the category ambiguously named "Rotor" :P
# March 23, 2004 1:39 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

It's been a while since I've created a parser, but I believe what you have here is a lexer, not a parser. A lexer turns free form text into a series of tokens. A parser turns the series of lexicons into meaning.

For example, take the statement:

If x = 4 then Response.Write("foobar")

Lexing would identify that the statement consists of the lexicons:

If
x
=
4
then
Response.Write("foobar")

Parsing would then turn the lexicons into, say, an abstract syntax tree corresponding to VB.NET's grammar.

Again, it's been too long since I've looked at this stuff, so my terminology may be off/incorrect. :-)
# March 23, 2004 11:35 PM

Frans Bouma said:

Darren, that's a scanner, not a parser. :)

(Just what Scott says)

To extend what Scott says:
A lexical analyzer transforms streams of characters into tokens. He defines 'if', 'x', '=', '4', 'then', 'Response.Write', '(', '"Foobar"', ')'.

That's all it does. Then the parser (!) is started and the stream of tokens is fed to the parser. The parser just sees tokens and tries to recognize known sequences of tokens. This can be done in 2 ways: LL(n) and LR(n). LL(n) is the most simple form. In the example of If x = 4 then Response.Write("foobar"), it first sees an If token. The parser then calls the If handler routine. The If handler knows only how to parse an If statement. It expects an expression after the If statement, so it calls teh Expression handler routine. The expression handler routine scans x=4. It stops when it sees an illegal token. It returns a NON TERMINAL to the caller, in this case for example a boolean expression. The If statement handler continues and expects now 'Then'. If 'Then' isn't there, it's a syntax error. The parser can then decide to simply die and throw an error or it can try to recover by reporting the error and also assume that 'then' was there, so continue with the next token, 'Response.Write'. However, because everything can be stated after 'then', it simply goes into recursion and calls the main token handler again.

LR(n) is different. LR(n) works with infinite state diagrams which can be used to construct action and goto tables. It works with a current 'state' (state + current nonterminal) and the current 'token' or 'terminal'. It then checks in the action tabel what to do: shift (put the terminal onto the stack and make the current state the state number specified in the action table) or reduce. Reduce is the action which replaced a serie of terminals and nonterminals on the stack with a single non-terminal. After a reduce the goto table is used to move to a new state.

Reducing is illustrated below: (EBNF, simple example)
IfStatement -> IfStart BooleanExpression ThenToken Statements EndIfToken
IfStart -> IfToken
BooleanExpression -> Identifier BooleanOperator Identifier
BooleanExpression -> Identifier BooleanOperator Value
BooleanExpression -> BooleanExpression BooleanOperator Identifier
etc...
IfToken is for example reduced to IfStart. the complete If statement, if it is specified in the code text parsed correctly, is reduced to IfStatement. In the end, everything is reduced to the single start symbol and that means no errors occured.

When a grammar rule is reduced, interpretation of the rule is executed most of the time (but doesn't have to).

LR(n) is very complex, and it requires a 'parser generator' to set up the action and goto tables (which can be parsed by a general parser btw). There are however more grammars parsable using LR(n) than LL(n).

Nevertheless, most parsers for popular computer languages like VB.NET, C# and the like are written using LL(n) parsers (LL(1) to be exact, it looks '1' ahead). Check the rotor or mono sourcecode. This is due to the fact that often languages are ambiguistic:

Dim i As Integer(10) {}

' some code
a = i(6)

When the parser sees 'i(value)', is it a constructor call? A method call? An array index? How to reduce this set of tokens? It can't, it requires information about 'i'. This is what's called a reduce / reduce conflict in LR(n): the parser can't decide how to reduce the current stack contents. However with an LL(n) parser this is easily doable, as the rule checking is in code, and it can easily check the symbol table to verify what 'i' is in this context.

Last year I wrote an LR(n) parser generator. It was a great thing to do as it had been a long time since I've read the 'dragon book' by Aho-sethi-ullman. However for the templates in LLBLGen Pro I decided to write an LL(n) parser, because I had too many shift/reduce conflicts to solve and the grammar became too complex.

If you have the time, check out 'Compilers' by Aho-sethi-ullman: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0201100886/qid=1080120057/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-8955096-0256959?v=glance&s=books
It's full of complex theory about parsers and compilers. It's perhaps TOO complex at first, but I'm sure that will go away after a few days of reading. :)
# March 24, 2004 4:23 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks so much Frans and Scott for taking the time to comment on my code. As you can probably tell, I'm just a NEWBIE at this stuff trying to learn some new tricks ;-)

As for the Dragon Book recommendation Frans - you are too late; Scott already mentioned it to me and I've added it to my Amazon Shopping Cart.

Gee I love learning stuff :D
# March 24, 2004 6:01 AM

Anonymous Coward said:

You can take the "Is that legal integration?" past just sockets. You can take it to the GUI layer. At one point in time there was DOS, and Microsoft added a GUI layer and shipped it as an add-on. Eventually it combined both and shipped it as Windows 95. And it's not like there weren't other competing 3rd party GUIs (and non-GUIs that offered one of the new features of Windows: multitasking!). And there were even competing DOSes, although they had a small share of the market.

So it leads to the obvious question: Would the competitive landscape been better off if Microsoft had been forced to continue selling DOS, while competing seperately on the GUI layer. What happened if a competing GUI layer beat Microsoft's and then decided to remove their dependency from DOS? Will, now no one is buying MS-DOS anymore. And what about the transition from DOS to NT? Would Microsoft have been required to ship a text-based NT OS that works seamlessly as the DOS version does with their Windows add-on? Or should Microsoft continue to offer DOS, but NT is a brand-new product obviously requiring a GUI?

And its not like MS-DOS didn't have a significant share of the PC market. So if MS is a monopoly today, one might conclude MS was a monopoly around the time of Windows 95 being released. So it gives weight to the argument.

Software's a strange beast when you start talking about integration and competition. Given enough development an individual software product could grow, and grow, and grow encompassing more and more functionality. It doesn't even have to be an operating system: Look at Emacs!
# March 25, 2004 2:33 AM

JosephCooney said:

I feel a bit sorry for Microsoft Australia on this one. There seems to have been a lot of ill feeling expressed towards Msdn Connection programme before it even got off the ground. I think the programme is cool and am looking forward to participating as much as I can. Speaking of points Darren how's your download count on GotDotNet? I'm hoping to reach 6K downloads on my 4 demos in the next week or so. Maybe we should have a competition or something ;-).
# March 25, 2004 5:40 AM

Darren Neimke said:

> I feel a bit sorry for Microsoft Australia on this one

Not sure about that, the people that I've spoken to down here in Adelaide have been pretty supportive of it actually. It will be interesting to see how many people get involved.

> I'm hoping to reach 6K downloads on my 4 demos in the next week or so

LOL... I've already surpassed you mate ;-) I cracked the 6K mark just yesterday:

http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/User/viewprofile.aspx?userid=00016E10F7AF3614

Next week I'll be releasing my TimeMachine (written in javascript) which should see my figures soar! :-)
# March 25, 2004 5:46 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Frans has his say: http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/archive/2004/03/25/95846.aspx
# March 25, 2004 5:54 AM

Chris Ormerod said:

I joined up and it does seem like a good idea (and who doesn't like going to User group meetings at MS - free Coke and Pizza :))

But... When I signed up one of the benefits was "free ASP.Net hosting", but this has been nocked down to be only included for the "Recognised Developer" level, but I am an MCP so I am at the "Active Developer" level - which now doesn't appear to include the free hosting.

They have rearranged the screen from 3 columns:
Tier | Entry Requirements | What you will receive

Into 4 columns:
Tier | Entry Requirements | What you will receive: | Foundation Member Rewards

Previously the asp.Net hosting was listed under "What you will receive" and the "Active" level said "All of the above plus some other stuff", but now the ASP.Net hosting is in teh "Foundation Member Rewards" section and it doesn't look like that is a "all of the above" category.

But hey, you can't complain when its free right? But if you look at the Gold level for Msdn Connection Hong Kong: http://www.microsoft.com/hk/msdn/connection/default.mspx you get a MSDN Jacket. Sounds even better!
# March 25, 2004 7:36 AM

AndrewSeven said:

I don't mind having Media Player built in,
but I would rather have none than have 3 (Media Player + Real + something else).

# March 25, 2004 7:55 AM

Colt said:

Hi Darren,

Thanks for your kind words. :-)

I'd like to add one more attributes to your "high profile member list" - Enjoy & have fun in (both online & offline) communities. =)

The Msdn Connection program is initialized and covers Asia Pacific countries only (up to this moment), whereas INETA cover all user groups over the world. I 100% agree with you that it's a very cool program BTW, and, of course, including the goodies. ;-)

All in all, Msdn Connection and we (INETA Asia Pacific & Greater China Region) provide a SUPERB environment and communities to all developers (feel excited?), more good news will come.. stay tune..

>> Next week I'll be releasing my TimeMachine
Thanks for your great work, I really enjoy your useful JavaScript projects and RegEx info. (I like and implement your DatePicker in several projects)

>> if you look at the Gold level for Msdn Connection Hong Kong
Hey Chris, I got the jacket... and it's not as good as you imagine... I mean the size and quality... but, I can't complaint when its free, right? :0)
# March 25, 2004 8:34 AM

JosephCooney said:

I seem to recall a few comments on Frank Arrigo's weblog when the programme was first announced that were not so positive, and at the recent users group meeting Greg Lowe made a point of trying to explain the motivation behind the programme (from MS's perspective) and cast it in a positive light (so presumably he had received or read some negative feedback too). Good to hear you folk down in Adelaide are not letting that get you down <insert regional slur on Adelaide here>.
# March 25, 2004 10:08 AM

Todd Moon said:

Heheh. Looks like Andy Smith in the middle with the plaid shirt? :-P
# March 26, 2004 10:32 AM

Todd Moon said:

Oops, that _used_ to be a question, but I rephrased it.
# March 26, 2004 10:32 AM

rx said:

you MS people are weird man.. linux will own MS..
# March 26, 2004 12:32 PM

TrackBack said:

# March 28, 2004 11:51 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 28, 2004 11:53 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 29, 2004 2:52 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 29, 2004 2:52 AM

poop said:

dirty girls with hairy toes and a big fat ass.
# March 29, 2004 5:52 AM

Scott Sargent said:

Darren, would you say this is a really good book? I've heard people discuss the book, and I'd love to get a copy but $96 is beyond my impulse purchase price range. That's in the concievably not a wise idea price range :) Anyways, I just wanted to get a feel for how super technical it is, do you need a phd to understand it or is it pretty down to earth? I've been enjoying the stuff in this book. Some of it speaks to writing VM based applications

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1584500778/qid=1080605495/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/102-1594657-9389713?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
# March 29, 2004 7:12 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Scott, I'll try to keep writing about it as I progress through it. It's not super-technical (as in Math) just very dry and concise. It's very logical.

I guess that I'm enjoying it because I have a real interest in parsing/lexing etc and I'm very keen to learn how it all hangs together.
# March 29, 2004 7:15 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Oh... almost forgot; thanks for the link :)
# March 29, 2004 7:16 PM

SBC said:

yikes... that 'Dragon' book is still around from nearly 20 years ago!
:-)
# March 29, 2004 8:15 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

Scott S., you can usually pick up a used copy of the Dragon book on Amazon.com for ~$40 with shipping, if that's more in your range. Another possibility is to go to a college campus when the semester ends, and chances are you can find students selling their (re)used copies.

One part of the compilation process that I've only read a bit about, but which held some keen interest for me, was optimization.
# March 29, 2004 8:40 PM

Scott Galloway said:

Looks like spam...I wouldn't be surprised if that url suddenly redirects to a porn / online pharmacy site - and you've just increased his Google rank ;-)
# March 30, 2004 5:03 AM

Fabrice said:

Exactly. Probably you should remove the link and the comments.
# March 30, 2004 7:26 AM

vashili dad said:

Please show me the 15 times that this russian post in your blog and I'm going to talk seriously with him. That's it. Dad
# March 30, 2004 7:30 AM

Matt Hawley said:

Got this one 2 times as well, in my first post... definately spam.
# March 30, 2004 8:04 AM

G. Andrew Duthie said:

Yup. Me, too. My first thought was comment spam, but it doesn't look like the comments are actually showing up in my blog. Rather, I'm getting an email notification with each post. Sigh.

# March 30, 2004 11:38 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

FYI, not all context-free grammars can be expressed as regular expressions.
# March 30, 2004 11:40 AM

Paul Vick said:

Yeah, but scanners are usually written in the form of regular expressions since it's usually just pattern matching for the lexical grammar. Hmmmm. I just hand-wrote a scanner for fun, maybe I should have used regular expressions instead!
# March 30, 2004 2:02 PM

Dominic Cooney said:

Although it gets *terrible* reviews on Amazon, Appel's Modern Compiler Implementation in ML is an *excellent* book. It is smaller than the dragon book yet manages to cover a really wide variety of interesting topics. It is my unequivocal recommendation.
# March 30, 2004 3:40 PM

Nick said:

What aspects of encapsulation do you think ASP.NET provided that actually made your own experience less painful?
# March 31, 2004 6:55 AM

TrackBack said:

Take Outs for 31 March 2004
# March 31, 2004 8:18 AM

Darren Neimke said:

The ability to easily package controls and components for re-use. The fact that I was able to pull controls from Metabuilders and Dennis Bauer's sites as well as creating and using dozens of my own made the whole process much more manageable.

Aside from re-using pre-built server controls, it was the simplicity of UserControl creation which was the big winner. Being able to "whip-up" a Pager User control and easily expose events etc. off of it is the sort of encapsulation that I was thinking of.

These things will make it very easy to maintain (compared to previous and competitor technologies) over time.
# March 31, 2004 4:52 PM

secretGeek said:

nice article. and very nice formatting.

i've just been going through my blogroll trying to get rid of as many blogs as possible (i spend too long reading them).

this article of yours meant there was no way i could ditch you.

keep up the good work! (but maybe it's adios to Scoble?)


# March 31, 2004 9:17 PM

Ben said:

Nice.

I'm currently trying to solve a similar problem - we want to keep the form definitions in the database and have them generated "on the fly" instead of a whole pile of static pages.

You appear to be using GridLayour in the page loaded in the Iframe. Did you try to attempt this approach in Flowlayout?

I've gotten the DynamicControlsPlaceholder control to work (I've only spent about an hour on with it so far). I'm just not happy with how (in Flowlayout) the controls just get jammed up against each other in the rendered page. What I'd really like to do is stuff some BRs in between the elements or do you think I'll have to use GridLayout and pass in position parameters like you do?

Thoughts?
# March 31, 2004 11:04 PM

Darren Neimke said:

I don't use grid layout per se. (although I could), I don't ever actually view the forms in design view - it wouldn't make sense to. I just make sure that, when I create a control (DynamicControlFactory.Make) and add it to the DynamicControlsPlaceholder that I set a css style on the control like so:

ctl.CssClass = "DynamicControl"

That class determines - amongst other things - that absolute positioning should be used.

# March 31, 2004 11:26 PM

Darren Neimke said:

I'll blog some more about this positioning stuff later with some fresh code snippets too!
# March 31, 2004 11:32 PM

Ben said:

>> I'll blog some more about this positioning stuff later with some fresh code snippets too!

Cool ... that would be great :-)
# March 31, 2004 11:49 PM

Daniel Okely said:

I reckon it's a great program, looking forward to recieving my package in the mail.

I've signed up, and I am a "foundation member". Does anyone know how I can access my "Free ASP.NET Hosting" yet?

Regards,

Daniel
# April 2, 2004 2:12 AM

Jerry Pisk said:

I would tell you not to do it in Asp.Net. Simply having multiple database support is a pain since IDbCommand won't let you specify parameters so if you want to use parametrized queries (and you should if you want a secure application) you have to restrict yourself to a single db provider.

Skinning and especially localization is lot easier done in frameworks that actually support it, like Struts with Tiles (and even JSTL). Asp.Net provides absolutely no support for localized web projects. And MVC framework as Struts also separates business logic from presentation, unlike Asp.Net.

Asp.Net is simple to use, but it just doesn't cut it when it comes to large projects.
# April 2, 2004 3:02 AM

dsgfdg said:

dsfgsdfgsfg
# April 2, 2004 4:13 PM

Christian Nordbakk said:

Wow! Thanks for sharing this with us Jerry. I guess your right though, and I only wish I had know this a little earlier; before throwing away three years on this lame asp.net stuff.

Yup, Struts it is then...
# April 6, 2004 4:39 PM

Darren Neimke said:

LOL... Thanks Christian ;-)
# April 6, 2004 9:18 PM

TrackBack said:

# April 7, 2004 9:42 AM

TrackBack said:

# April 7, 2004 9:42 AM

Rich Moss said:

Maybe the documents are correct about the behavior if character arrays are passed, but look at this:

Dim Str As String = "1, 2, 3".Split(", ")(1)
MessageBox.Show("'" & Str & "'") ' expected: '2' or '' got: ' 2'

String.Split happily accepts a string as an argument instead of a char() and then ignores all but the first character in the string.

It would make sense to raise an error when a string is sent to a method that expects a character array, especially since a string is a valid argument to the Split() function.
# April 7, 2004 8:38 PM

Atirus said:

What is wrong with this code?
I get error in line 6 (conn.open source)

<%
Dim conn, source

Source = "Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=" & Server.Mappath("DATABASE.MDB") & ";Persist Security Info=False"
Set conn = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
conn.open source
%>
# April 8, 2004 7:13 PM

Christian Nordbakk said:

Oh, don't mention it ;)
# April 8, 2004 8:26 PM

Scare_Crow said:

Hi all,

I´m trying to do exactly the same thing... I need a timer to refresh some Iframes at my page, after few seconds.

The sample you post have this error : The sample requested is not available.

:-(

Please, could you send me an example too ?

Thx

-=-
Scare_Crow
BRazil
# April 10, 2004 7:26 PM

Scare_Crow said:

Sorry, I forget my email

mcid@brturbo.com


>Hi all,

>I´m trying to do exactly the same thing... I need a timer to refresh some Iframes at my page, after few seconds.

>The sample you post have this error : The sample requested is not available.

>:-(

>Please, could you send me an example too ?

>Thx

>-=-
>Scare_Crow
>BRazil
# April 10, 2004 8:20 PM

Sunny said:

If we clear controls, that looks fine, but still exports current webpage to Excel only. How can we export all pages to Excel?
Meantime, after exported the DataGrid to Excel, all mouse click event on the webpage cannot works any more, and generated errors on the browser's left bottom corner. How to solve it?
# April 12, 2004 12:55 AM

TrackBack said:

# April 13, 2004 3:52 AM

TrackBack said:

# April 13, 2004 3:53 AM

mosius said:

can i use this code with VS 2002?
# April 13, 2004 12:34 PM

mosius said:

will it work in VS 2002?
# April 13, 2004 12:42 PM

Brian LeRoux said:

Sorry for the OT but how did you highlight that code and command line? -- looks great!
# April 13, 2004 2:21 PM

chris said:

hi,
i tried the code

Private Sub RenderGrid()
Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel"
' Remove the charset from the Content-Type header.
Response.Charset = ""
' Turn off the view state.
Me.EnableViewState = False
Dim tw As New System.IO.StringWriter
Dim hw As New System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter(tw)
' Get the HTML for the control.
DataGrid2.RenderControl(hw)
' Write the HTML back to the browser.
Response.Write(tw.ToString())
' End the response.
Response.End()
End Sub


but i get an error




Server Error in '/application' Application.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Control 'DataGrid2__ctl3__ctl0' of type 'DataGridLinkButton' must be placed inside a form tag with runat=server.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Web.HttpException: Control 'DataGrid2__ctl3__ctl0' of type 'DataGridLinkButton' must be placed inside a form tag with runat=server.

Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

Stack Trace:


[HttpException (0x80004005): Control 'DataGrid2__ctl3__ctl0' of type 'DataGridLinkButton' must be placed inside a form tag with runat=server.]
System.Web.UI.Page.VerifyRenderingInServerForm(Control control) +152
System.Web.UI.WebControls.LinkButton.AddAttributesToRender(HtmlTextWriter writer) +38
System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl.RenderBeginTag(HtmlTextWriter writer) +17
System.Web.UI.WebControls.DataGridLinkButton.Render(HtmlTextWriter writer) +25
System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer) +243
System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildren(HtmlTextWriter writer) +72
System.Web.UI.WebControls.TableCell.RenderContents(HtmlTextWriter writer) +55
System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl.Render(HtmlTextWriter writer) +29
System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer) +243
System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildren(HtmlTextWriter writer) +72
System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl.RenderContents(HtmlTextWriter writer) +7
System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl.Render(HtmlTextWriter writer) +29
System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer) +243
System.Web.UI.WebControls.Table.RenderContents(HtmlTextWriter writer) +99
System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl.Render(HtmlTextWriter writer) +29
System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer) +243
System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildren(HtmlTextWriter writer) +72
System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl.RenderContents(HtmlTextWriter writer) +7
System.Web.UI.WebControls.BaseDataList.Render(HtmlTextWriter writer) +27
System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer) +243
pos_application.WebForm2.RenderGrid() in C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\VSWebCache\nysvrprod02.us.speedimpex.local\pos_application\WebForm2.aspx.vb:267
pos_application.WebForm2.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) in C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\VSWebCache\nysvrprod02.us.speedimpex.local\pos_application\WebForm2.aspx.vb:80
System.Web.UI.Control.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +67
System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() +35
System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain() +731




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:1.1.4322.573; ASP.NET Version:1.1.4322.573
# April 13, 2004 4:02 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Hi Brian,

take a peek at this:

http://weblogs.asp.net/dneimke/archive/2004/04/14/112645.aspx
# April 13, 2004 6:53 PM

Brian LeRoux said:

Thanks!
# April 13, 2004 7:55 PM

stic said:

hi,

as you mentioned above you play in the terrarium game - my question is - is there other way to play it when you are over NAT or firewall than this given by Terrarium doc (they say that I need to translate the 5000 port on NAT) - couse I want my bug on it... Or maybe I have to set up my own server to do this in local network ?

--
best regards
& have a nice weekend ;-)
# April 16, 2004 3:04 AM

john said:

Pass the object by referencenot by val
Public Function TestMethod(ByRef obj as TestB) as string
return "Hello"
End Function
# April 16, 2004 11:14 AM

TrackBack said:

# April 18, 2004 6:24 AM

TrackBack said:

# April 18, 2004 6:24 AM

Ryan Gregg said:

Steve,
Yes, but AND & OR are also boolean in VB. They can be either bitwise or boolean due to the way booleans are represented. There's no need to do AndAlso or OrElse for a boolean compare, and in fact if you don't want short circuiting of your operators, it's a good way to accomplish that.
# April 20, 2004 9:43 AM

TrackBack said:

# April 21, 2004 6:10 AM

Damian said:

I'd call it a feature of the formatter of Console.Writeline. It isn't really a VB issue.
# April 21, 2004 9:19 PM

Josh said:

Be wary! Don't click the all responses link after the quiz! Installs fun spyware that takes forever to get off your machine.
# April 21, 2004 9:30 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks Josh!
# April 21, 2004 9:35 PM

Justin Rogers said:

The appropriate signature for the method you are calling should be <Out()> StringBuilder or the two string buffers you are using. That'll fix your problem altogether. Then just pass in a string buffer with a pre-planned capacity of 200 for each. You'll also note that some of the other parameters are uint and not int values as you have them in your sample.

In .NET the \0 character can actually be embedded in the middle of a string. That is why internally the String object maintains a length, which is conceptually more important than a null terminating character. Here is some C# code that demonstrates the null character in the middle of a string.

Console.WriteLine("foo\0foo\0foo\0");
# April 21, 2004 9:37 PM

Eddie said:

Can findstr be used accross mapped drives?
# April 21, 2004 10:38 PM

Darren Neimke said:

I don't think so.
# April 22, 2004 12:08 AM

Jerry Pisk said:

You should get the same results using any other .Net language.
# April 22, 2004 12:34 AM

Mischa Kroon said:

Whoohooo im also a grammar God.

And im a native dutch speaker :)
# April 22, 2004 4:24 AM

SecretGeek said:

it's a bit too kind that test.
our intellectual vanity is so easily fooled!

(i posted it on my blog too -- thinking it was something special. only later did i purposely get a few questions wrong and see that it was far too lenient)
# April 22, 2004 6:45 AM

harish said:

hi,

make sure the form tag of the aspx page has the runar="server" attribute.

sometimes, when we alter the form tag properties, or manually write the form tag, we might miss this attribute, which generates similar errors.

hope this helps
# April 22, 2004 8:10 AM

rstyer said:

Thanks for posting your ContextMenu. I've found it very useful. Keep up the good work.
I'm fairly new to ASP.NET and controls and I'm trying to convert a Windows desktop app to run as a ASP.NET application. The desktop app has two connected menu items and uses a checkmark to indicate the previously selected option. I was looking for a way to indicate the last menu item selected. Can I use a CSSStyle on the context menu item to change colors, font style etc? Is it possible to set the CSSStyle from the code-behind side for ContextMenu?

Thanks for any help you can give.

rstyer
# April 22, 2004 9:11 AM

Constructing Language Processors for Little Langua said:

This book might also help you out.
# April 22, 2004 10:38 PM

Morten said:

Nice, but it's stuck with the "wrong" day order - not all starts the week with sunday... and also it should have some choises for different dateformats like dd.mm.yyyy etc.
# April 23, 2004 9:55 AM

Ken Harvey said:

I don't think it's a feature or a bug... it's simply the way different layers of the user interface present the information.

Put simply, the behaviour in the MsgBox() function seems to have been valid for many years. This is expected behaviour, no matter how 'unusual' it is considered 'today'.

Times change, but not all UI's do. :)
# April 26, 2004 10:24 AM

Kaskooye said:

I had the same problem, and just fixed it.
This occurs only when you give a name to your window : "foo" in your sample.

here's my workaround

function openPopUp()
{
alert( "starting") ;
var hWnd = window.open("about:blank", "") ;
}

Have a nice day
;-)

J.Philippe
# April 26, 2004 11:02 AM

rohrby said:

You know. It is nice to see some excitement coming from someone about their work and then have positive feedback coming from others.

I was starting to think this kind of interaction didn't happen anymore, except from 'happy' people.
# April 28, 2004 4:35 PM

rodeo said:

no, not really.

I've been playing around with the ClearControls sub, but indeed, that renders an empty aspx page.

I wrote my own sub, which checks the servercontrol types, and replaces them. Columns with a Linkbutton are removed.

However, apparently this (removing columns) can no longer be done once the grid is bound. This means you need to tell the function in advance what columns should be dropped?

Who can give me a workable sollution post-binding?

My code : [quote]
Private Sub Replace_WebControls()
'dimension integers to loop through the datagrid
'+ a string to hold the controlType
Dim iRows As Integer
Dim iCols As Integer
Dim iCtls As Integer

Dim sCtlType As String

Dim lblTemp As Label
Dim txtTemp As TextBox
Dim chkTemp As CheckBox
Dim rbtTemp As RadioButton
Dim hrefTemp As HyperLink
Dim lbtTemp As LinkButton
Dim tmpCol As DataGridColumn

'dimension a boolean to define column removal
Dim blDeleteCol(dtgExcel.Columns.Count - 1) As Boolean

For iRows = dtgExcel.Items.Count - 1 To 0 Step -1
With dtgExcel.Items(iRows)
For iCols = dtgExcel.Columns.Count - 1 To 0 Step -1
For iCtls = .Cells(iCols).Controls.Count - 1 To 0 Step -1
sCtlType = .Cells(iCols).Controls(iCtls).GetType.ToString.ToLower
'myResponse.Write("col " & iCols & " - ctl " & iCtls & " : " & sCtlType & "<BR>")
If InStr(sCtlType, "webcontrols") > 0 Then
Select Case sCtlType
Case "system.web.ui.webcontrols.label"
Dim lcTemp As New LiteralControl
lblTemp = CType(.Cells(iCols).Controls(iCtls), Label)
lcTemp.Text = lblTemp.Text
.Cells(iCols).Controls.Remove(lblTemp)
.Cells(iCols).Controls.Add(lcTemp)
Case "system.web.ui.webcontrols.textbox"
Dim lcTemp As New LiteralControl
txtTemp = CType(.Cells(iCols).Controls(iCtls), TextBox)
lcTemp.Text = txtTemp.Text
.Cells(iCols).Controls.Remove(txtTemp)
.Cells(iCols).Controls.Add(lcTemp)
Case "system.web.ui.webcontrols.checkbox"
Dim lcTemp As New LiteralControl
chkTemp = CType(.Cells(iCols).Controls(iCtls), CheckBox)
If CBool(chkTemp.Checked) Then
lcTemp.Text = "Yes"
Else
lcTemp.Text = "No"
End If
.Cells(iCols).Controls.Remove(chkTemp)
.Cells(iCols).Controls.Add(lcTemp)
Case "system.web.ui.webcontrols.radiobutton"
Dim lcTemp As New LiteralControl
rbtTemp = CType(.Cells(iCols).Controls(iCtls), RadioButton)
If CBool(rbtTemp.Checked) Then
lcTemp.Text = "Yes"
Else
lcTemp.Text = "No"
End If
.Cells(iCols).Controls.Remove(rbtTemp)
.Cells(iCols).Controls.Add(lcTemp)
Case "system.web.ui.webcontrols.hyperlink"
Dim lcTemp As New LiteralControl
hrefTemp = CType(.Cells(iCols).Controls(iCtls), HyperLink)
If "" & hrefTemp.NavigateUrl <> "" Then
lcTemp.Text = "<a href=" & hrefTemp.NavigateUrl & ">" & hrefTemp.Text & "</a>"
Else
lcTemp.Text = hrefTemp.Text
End If
.Cells(iCols).Controls.Remove(hrefTemp)
.Cells(iCols).Controls.Add(lcTemp)
Case "system.web.ui.webcontrols.linkbutton"
tmpCol = CType(dtgExcel.Columns(iCols), DataGridColumn)
dtgExcel.Columns.Remove(tmpCol)
End Select
End If
Next iCtls
Next iCols
End With
Next iRows
End Sub
[/quote]
# April 29, 2004 9:16 AM

rodeo said:

lol, 12:16 AM. over here (Belgium) it is only 15:17 PM, on the 29th :-)
# April 29, 2004 9:17 AM

rodeo said:

My problem seems to have to do with the binding, indeed. If I add "dtgExcel.databind" at the very end of the above code, the error "Control 'grid_ctl1_ctl0' of type 'DataGridLinkButton' must be placed inside a form tag with runat=server" is no longer cast. However, now my page is completely blank (because all literals are unbound, of course).
# April 29, 2004 9:36 AM

Dave Burke said:

THAT'S FOR SURE!
# April 30, 2004 12:45 AM

TrackBack said:

# May 2, 2004 8:22 AM

Ricky Dhatt said:

"Elegance" is overrated, IMHO. I wish could reclaim the time I've wasted trying to come up with an elegant solution when the "dodgy" one was just fine.
# May 2, 2004 6:55 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Hi Ricky, yes, your comments are quite true.

In the real world I'd be happy enough shipping the stuff that I hacked together to do this.

Thanks for the feedback!
# May 2, 2004 6:59 PM

Justin Rogers said:

The elegant solution isn't far off from what you have. Elegance is simplicity, and adding a custom control that renders it's own <spans><text> and a hidden field per control would make things a bit easier. First the javascript would become easier since you aren't combining values into a single control. Second your code for handling the postback would also be encapsulated into the post back data handlers so you wouldn't have the big nested foreach loops.

I'm not sure how long it would have taken you going this route. Looking at the problem, and having written a large number of composite controls, I could have probably hacked the sample up in 30 minutes as well.
# May 2, 2004 8:44 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Yeh, good point Justin, I think that I'll dummy up a custom control to see the difference in effort required.
# May 2, 2004 10:56 PM

stephen said:

a nice article to read
# May 5, 2004 2:58 AM

Terri Morton said:

Hi Darren, this 40,000 ft view is much appreciated, thank you! I had started a similar project almost 2 years ago and could not conceptually grasp a good approach.
# May 5, 2004 7:25 AM

Rodrigo Pineda Icaza said:

Hi All

Good article, love to see other people doing Data driven form generation.


Ben

There are oly two ways for position forms in HTMl :

1. Using standard HTML tags such as <P> , <BR> , <TABLE> which gives you better control.

2. CSS positioning which gives you X,Y positioning.


Keep the good wor


# May 5, 2004 9:05 AM

Rodrigo Pineda Icaza said:

Hi Darren

I got question for you on this ? hehe

Why not use simple Input controls ?

If you are using your own Field to carry information is there any need on using webcontrol at all ?

You can chnage the background colors using styles ?




# May 5, 2004 9:19 AM

Luciano Evaristo Guerche said:

I guess it is due to function signatures. Prompt is of type Object and value of primitive type String:

Public Function MsgBox(ByVal Prompt As Object, Optional ByVal Buttons As Microsoft.VisualBasic.MsgBoxStyle = 0, Optional ByVal Title As Object = Nothing) As Microsoft.VisualBasic.MsgBoxResult
Member of: Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction

Public Shared Sub WriteLine(ByVal value As String)
Member of: System.Console
# May 5, 2004 10:01 AM

cindy ottani said:

can you direct me to a website that gives the day of the week for a particular date?

Thank you.
# May 5, 2004 12:03 PM

Josh said:

What if the form is already fully built and you want to adjust a control's attributes based only on information retrieved from the db. The control name (ie Label1),attribute name (ie text), attribute value (ie "This is a Label"), and control type (web control or html control) is queried from the db on page load. Any ideas on how to bind these new attributes to the controls at run time?
For example (using above):

dim controlStr as string
controlStr = "label1.text = 'this is a label'"

eval(controlStr)


Thanks
# May 5, 2004 2:33 PM

brajabhusan said:

can somebody please help me display a histogram chart in the excel sheet on which we are displaying data from the datagrid.

please reply to my ID: Brajabhusan_Panda@infosys.com
thanks and regards
# May 6, 2004 8:25 AM

Rob said:

Yes, I've figured out how to successfully export to excel but I only get the,
'DataGridLinkButton' must be placed inside a form tag with runat=server error when paging is allowed and you have more than one page of data within your grid. I did find that the error does not occur if you allow the number of lines per page to be large enough not to have to page. Not sure how to handle this for all instances.
# May 7, 2004 3:50 PM

Asbjørn Ulsberg said:

'language="JavaScript"' should be replaced with 'type="text/javascript"', btw. :-)
# May 9, 2004 4:46 PM

Darren Neimke said:

oooh! that's pretty pedantic :-) old habits die hard I guess!
# May 10, 2004 7:00 AM

scorpion53061 said:

Pleas post an example of sorting a datatable with the compute method.
# May 10, 2004 7:22 AM

Darren Neimke said:

I'm not really sure what you mean by "sorting with the compute method"? Can you give me an example?

In the meantime, check out the Sort method of the DataView...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/cpref/html/frlrfsystemdatadataviewclasssorttopic.asp?frame=true
# May 10, 2004 7:29 AM

Roly Walter said:

I'm impressed you've found this so easy! My first project on .NET is similar to this: a content management system with entry forms dynamically created from the database.

Although I like the speed that compiled .NET gives me, I keep thinking how easy this would be to do in old-style ASP, since the control-data-persistency actually hinders things. I keep ending up in catch 22's whereby I want to know if an event has happened, but if it has then I don't want the associated controls to be loaded too.

Also, in ASP.NET, I can't work out a good strategy for splitting up pages into different ASPX files: put everything on one page and then use Panels to show and hide them, or split up into different files? Then you get into querystring problems conflicting with subsequent postback data.

Can anyone recommend any good books /links on these subjects?
# May 10, 2004 11:15 AM

Patrick Santry said:

Just as an FYI for a resource on provider patterns. DotNetNuke (www.dotnetnuke.com) uses the provider pattern for the data abstraction layer. This enables developers to design multiple access classes for each specific database. Since the provider is an abstraction class within DotNetNuke, the core code doesn't need to change or really care about whether or not you changed the database. So if you want to see provider patterns in practice I'd recommend downloading DotNetNuke and checking out the database provider.
# May 11, 2004 9:24 AM

Robert W. McLaws said:

Rob came out with a second article that stated, amon other things, not to use ____ProviderBase as a naming scheme. You can find it at.

http://tinyurl.com/2yj3k

And a word of warning. Lots of people have been rolling their own architecture and calling it the "Provider Model". I myself am guilty of it. Be wary of who you learn your from. Even Rob Howard's article does not do it the Whidbey way.
# May 11, 2004 2:49 PM

Robert W. McLaws said:

Also, it's going to take a LOT more work than that to create your own Provider Model API. I built mine exactly like the architecture for Whidbey on .NET 1.1, and complete implementation weighs in at over 2000 lines of code.

There are a few gotchas with the current Whidbey build as well. The class that manages Provider instantiation, System.Web.Configuration.ProvidersHelper, is sealed. Meaning that if you want to initialize your providers, you'll have to roll your own solution. Hopefully I'll be able to convince Microsoft to fix that before RTM.
# May 11, 2004 2:52 PM

Madhusudanan said:

Hi
In C# With out using "break" the switch case won't work...This is the real speaciality of c#...
# May 12, 2004 7:16 AM

Your guardian Angel said:

I agree with you but suicide is not the only way out of your problems.Cause once you do that you are going straight to hell...I have thought about things like that but i would never do it.Cause it would really hurt the ones you love the most and their life could be great and when you do that they might feel that their is nothing left in the world for them and end their life too.And you will be asking yourself why and then their is nothing you can say to make them understand....
Think before you do things this is not just for you but it is for others who come on here .....Read this and think about your life and others...
# May 12, 2004 3:28 PM

b3w4r3 said:

It's not "theoretically" true what the guy said about an object moving away appearing farther. Relativity says (among other things) that light is the same for all observers. Thus an object travleing at faster that light speed would outrun it's own light. The light would not travel at the objects speed + light speed if that makes sense.
# May 14, 2004 8:50 PM

madeline said:

all i know about light is that there is two forms of light witch are the sun and man made
# May 15, 2004 4:00 AM

madeline said:

all i know about light is that there is two forms of light witch are the sun and man made
# May 15, 2004 4:00 AM

madeline said:

all i know about light is that there is two forms of light witch are the sun and man made
# May 15, 2004 4:00 AM

pods said:

This often bothers me to. Most of my asp.net projects are being published on root when they go to production. But on development machine I do not run Windows Server, therefore only cannot create more than one site. Respectively asp.net applications must run in virtual directories. I have not found yet "the shortest and most elegant" statement of combining ApplicationPath with path relative to application root. I would never suggest using ApplicationPath + MyPath. ...could be(Request.ApplicationPath.Lengt == 1 ? path : Request.ApplicationPath + path). Does not look great either
# May 17, 2004 7:32 AM

Paul Wilson said:

Just use ~ and add a runat=server and it will work for images and hyperlinks.
For stylesheets you have to do a little more work, but ~ with ResolveUrl works.
# May 17, 2004 8:11 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks Paul... that's exactly what I'll do!
# May 17, 2004 8:12 AM

Scott McCulloch said:

You can also use Page.ResolveUrl("~/somelink.aspx") as Paul mentioned

and

Control.ResolveUrl('~/somelink.aspx") to have it relative from a controls physical position, (very useful in developing dotnetnuke modules!)
# May 17, 2004 8:32 AM

AndrewSeven said:

Abstraction.
Among other considerations, I don't like to see <%= Request.ApplicationPath %> in the html.
In every project, we have the virtual root in a property of the base class or a "Settings" object.
We also plan it so that paths are always expressed the same way, no slash before the foldre: src='<%=VirtualPath%>Images/Foo.gif'
# May 17, 2004 9:18 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

Control.ResolveUrl(...) works well. If you need this functionality in an HTTP module or handler, which doesn't have a page instance, you can always use Reflector to view the source code of ResolveUrl() (it's only a few lines), and off you go! :-)
# May 17, 2004 11:36 AM

Rolando said:

To Pods :

"But on development machine I do not run Windows Server, therefore only cannot create more than one site"

check

Multiple IIS Virtual Servers on XP Pro
http://weblogs.asp.net/stevencohn/articles/59782.aspx
# May 17, 2004 1:09 PM

Brian Schkerke said:

Let me know how it goes. I've been trying to teach myself trigonometry for a long time. Part of the problem is the lack of educational resources complete with an answer key (how do I know if I got the friggin answer right?) followed by the disruption of a two and six year old child.

I'd be especially interested in any books you find that help you along the way. I've only found a few -- very thing -- books.

# May 18, 2004 9:43 AM

William Bartholomew said:

Likewise, if you come across any good books I'd like to know. Maybe we could start a .NET maths study group ;)
# May 18, 2004 9:45 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

**********************************
What I wanted to know is... Is Mathematics similar to computer programming languages?
**********************************

Computer science is but an extension of mathematics. :-) I've always found those mathematic fields closest to computer science most interesting - discrete math, number theory, automata theory, combinatorics, set theory, etc. I've never been that interested in the math vital for engineering (calculus, differential equations, etc.).

As far as books, pick up any Discrete Mathematics text book - it'll probably run $70-$125, but it should have extensive information on those important mathematic fields for computer scientists to know. When I was in grad school, here's the discrete math book used in the Discrete Math classes I TAed:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0534944469/4guysfromrollaco

Anywho, best of luck. :-)
# May 18, 2004 10:05 AM

Sacha said:

I have to agree with Scott that Computer Science is but an extension of mathematics. I have an Honours B.Sc. in Mathematics and I can still recall a 3rd year course where the professor essentially explained the foundations of computer science in a two hour lecture. Ever since that lecture I received nothing but A's in all of my "theoretical" computer science courses. I emphasize theoretical because to a mathematician theoretical computer science is usually nothing more than applied algerba.

Now, back to the original question of where does a newbie start. The two main pillars of mathematics would be calculus and linear algerbra. One could argue that number theory and logic could also be considered pillars but for the purposes of someone starting out I'd say pick up a good calculus book and a good linear algerbra book and go from there.
# May 18, 2004 10:54 AM

Mikhail Arkhipov (MSFT) said:

I have MS (I abandoned pursuit for Ph.D.) in Applied Mathematics. Which branch of math you want to study depends on what is interesting to you in other knowledge areas and where you want to apply your new knowledge. If you like and know physics and mechanics, begin with algebra and proceed with integrals, and differential equations. Then try staistics and probability. Many of mentioned math areas have equivalents in real world so it is fairly easy to learn.

If you are in computers, discrete math is recommended. If you want to study assorted optimizations, or figure out modeling of society or services, probability is the key.

Basically linear algebra, matrix algebra, integrals and differential equations are everywhere and you will need this foundation no matter where you go. Probability and statistics is another huge foundation.
# May 18, 2004 11:15 AM

Mikhail Arkhipov (MSFT) said:

Number theory, set theory, game theory, logic and combinatorics I used very little. Numerical calculations may be of interest since you are computer person, but only after integrals and linear algebra. Numerical calculations are fun since you'lll understand why it is so difficult to calculate stuff precisely :-)
# May 18, 2004 11:20 AM

Justin Lovell said:

Sacha is right -- the essense of learning is from calculas. But, there is one thing before that which most people hate: trig. Learn that like the back of your hand and you should not have a problem.

And as for the question of "essence", there are two things to consider:

* To be accepted into university to study computer studies (at least in South Africa... in fact, all my comments will be based for South Africa), you will need to have Maths on a C for higher grade or a B for standard grade.

* Considering that you learn maths (as a seperate course) while studying computer studies, I would consider that Maths is somewhat influenced into computer studies.

Maths *can* really help you out.
# May 18, 2004 1:28 PM

Justin Lovell said:

"To be accepted into university to study computer studies (at least in South Africa... in fact, all my comments will be based for South Africa), you will need to have Maths on a C for higher grade or a B for standard grade. "

That is your final high school results (they call this "matric" mark in South Africa).
# May 18, 2004 1:29 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

I think the importance of "real-numbered" math is overstated for computer scientists (this includes linear algebra). Unless you are going to be doing graphic algorithms or numerical analysis, which you likely won't be doing unless you're working on imaging algorithms, software for engineers, or analyzing test results from engineers, etc., etc., then calc, or any math that deals with reals and imaginaries seems unecessary. At least that has been my experience.

More important, I have found, is a strong foundation in number theory, logic, set theory, etc. - topics touched upon in any discrete math class.

As a computer scientist, I'd wager you've used sets, the properties of integers, modulo arithmetic, propositional calculus, graph theory, probability, combinatorics, and other related material much, much more often than you've used integrals, derivatives, Eigen vectors, and so on.

Just my two cents...
# May 18, 2004 6:55 PM

Darren Neimke said:


Wow! Thanks for all of the great feedback guys.

The 2 "bits" of Maths that I think I'd most like to understand are: Set Theory and Logarithms. Sets come up quite a bit at work when we are trying to do overly complicated matching of sets of data - I'm hoping that there's something in set theory which might make me a better Sql programmer. Logarithms interest me because "boffins" always talk about them when discussing the efficiencies of this sorting algorithm over that sorting algorithm; how can I ever hope to argue against them when they are speaking a language I don't understand :-)

I'll look into it a bit more over the coming month and maybe find a discrete maths book. I'll blog my findings into a new category titled "Maths".

Again... thanks for all of the great feedback :-)
# May 18, 2004 7:01 PM

TrackBack said:

Take Outs for 19 May 2004
# May 19, 2004 10:44 AM

TrackBack said:

# May 19, 2004 11:51 AM

TrackBack said:

# May 19, 2004 12:07 PM

Dan said:

I got the code to return an aspx file instead of a .xls file.. Any Ideas?
# May 19, 2004 2:04 PM

denny said:

well if you want to get deep with the basis of SQL then set's is what you need.

look for info on "Relational Algebra" this is the basis for the logic of SQL.

# May 19, 2004 11:27 PM

Darren Neimke said:

> well if you want to get deep with the basis of SQL then set's is what you need

Thanks Denny, that's exactly what I'm after!
# May 19, 2004 11:56 PM

Justin Rogers said:

Hell yeah Darren. I have been eagerly awaiting some math blogging. I'm very interested in where you are going with this, and I'll help out as much as humanly possible with lists of book references. I'll start through my collection now and see if anything I have covers the area you are working in.

Most of my books in this field are on group theory, something you'll probably start looking into after set theory. So I can probably give better references then.
# May 20, 2004 6:11 PM

Justin Rogers said:

Well, you should hit logs first then and branch into Big O notation. That is an area of work that should take far less time than examining all of the intricacies of set theory.

I'd be very interested in hearing how your meetings use set theory in order to examine SQL matching. Too big for a blog, drop me an email or something. People always use different tools when looking at problems, and if I have used sets in solving SQL problems, it has only been a cursory use.
# May 20, 2004 6:17 PM

Justin Rogers said:

Math is always the interesting topic, especially when examining it's beginnings. When taking up the study you really have to decide between classic math or new advancements. Both are great, but you can often find yourself travelling a path where some new advancement completely removes the need to understand the classical theory.

You have to appreciate a field of study where 300 year old results are still hard to comprehend and you can spend weeks examining them. However, when a modern explanation cuts this examination to only a few days deciding which to use is hard. Working through the classics can build a large degree of mental tools for examining future problems, but working through the modern explanation can build instant understanding and put you on to your next task. Which one is correct?

I helped a friend of mine examine some texts in search of a 4th dimensional root number. It was immense the number of texts and material we went through. In the end, every time we thought something looked promissing his professor put us onto some other text that proved us wrong. We could have easily gotten all of the answers needed to start *new* work on the subject in a relatively short period of time, but I think understanding all of the *old* work and having some many false starts really had a positive impact on me.
# May 21, 2004 6:39 AM

Justin Rogers said:

For key point 1, I think that lexing is an integral part of any language processing. I've seen numerous parser implementations where the parser made heavy use of character scanning, but these truly aren't scalable. Recognizing this is hard in a little language because project vision or the ability to quickly and easily see a full code-path is enticing. When your lexer fails, it is often a track to find the bug. When your character scanning method which is one step from your parser fails the failure is more easily seen. As Darren points out the error is also easier to make.

Enumerators are extremely important in my opinion. A large number of languages support the semantics of forward and backward scanning prior to eating tokens and this can be much more easily done in a well written enumerator. To point out, enumerators working over a token array perform the backward/scanning logic much more easily as they allow random access into the array. When thinking about a good model for input chunking (partial reads from files), input buffer scanning, providing prior buffer access, and other features the stream concept gets more complex. Thank god for little languages and the fact we don't have to worry about these issues.

On point 3 I can ONLY agree. Logical separation of processing regions is important. More important is to logically think about how you are going to break the problem before starting. Any compiler/parser book will talk about the various portions of a compiler (upwards of 11 modules in some designs) and how often times many of these modules can be combined. The goal is to make the proper trade-off between compactness, readability, speed, scalability, and finally flexibility.
# May 21, 2004 6:47 AM

malik said:

help
i cant declare and handle the timer in vb.net asp.net
# May 21, 2004 7:41 AM

paul said:

it seems the forecolor of the text on hover style can not be changed. Any idea how to change it?
# May 25, 2004 2:00 PM

TrackBack said:

# May 25, 2004 6:03 PM

n/a said:

i need to learn algerbra
# May 26, 2004 7:34 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Paul... here's a link to some information about how to do that:

http://weblogs.asp.net/dneimke/archive/2004/05/27/142250.aspx

Hope that helps,
- Darren
# May 26, 2004 9:03 AM

ersan said:

You can remove paging from datagrid. After that no error will found.
Other way you create same grig without button and paging. While you send to excel, visible grid , when complete write to excel invisible to grid.
# May 26, 2004 9:33 AM

Jerry Pisk said:

This is not a very good approach. It's easier to add a class name on mousein and remove it on mouseout so you can set the style of the menu in one class (font, color and so on) and then only change what's different when the item is highlighted instead of having to redefine everything else as well (such as font face or size). If you're going to use CSS do it right (it's called Cascading after all).
# May 26, 2004 10:11 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Jerry, I'm going to show my ignorance here but... how is what I've done *different* to what you are suggesting? You wrote:

> It's easier to add a class name on mousein and remove it on mouseout

That's exactly what I do! That's what the MarkItUp_ContextMenu_MenuItemOver function does.
# May 26, 2004 7:21 PM

Jerry Pisk said:

Darren, your menu item has one set of class names (MarkItUp_ContextMenu_MenuItemBar and MarkItUp_ContextMenu_MenuItem) when it's not highlighted but completely different class names (MarkItUp_ContextMenu_MenuItemBar_Over and MarkItUp_ContextMenu_MenuItem_Over) when it's got the mouse over it.

My take is to have one (or more) classes in normal state (in your case MarkItUp_ContextMenu_MenuItem) and add another when it's highlighted (so it would have two class names, MarkItUp_ContextMenu_MenuItem and MarkItUp_ContextMenu_MenuItem_Over). And of course your code needs to parse the existing class names and remove/add to it, instead of just replacing it with what it thinks should be there.
# May 26, 2004 11:03 PM

Jerry Pisk said:

Here's how to add/remove a class name using a client side script:

function highlite(elem, active)
{
var arrClasses = elem.className.split(" ");

for( var i = arrClasses.length; i > 0; i-- )
{
if( arrClasses[i - 1] == "highlite" )
{
break;
}
}

if( i )
{
if( active == false )
{
delete arrClasses[i - 1];
elem.className = arrClasses.join(" ");
}
}
else
{
if( active != false )
{
elem.className += " highlite";
}
}
}

You can parametrize the class name to add/remove as well.
# May 26, 2004 11:05 PM

creonnoir said:

Hi, I'm searching for an asp.net timer similar to the javascript countdown timers. I found this timer control, but I don't know if I can code it do what I'm looking for (small countdown timer in upper corner of screen to let the user know how much time is left on the test). If anyone knows if this can be accomplished in asp.net I would greatly appreciate it! (I have several javascript versions, this is more for curiosity's sake)

Creon Noir
# May 27, 2004 4:10 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Sorry Jerry... I just don't get it! Your way seems too complicated for me.
# May 28, 2004 6:14 AM

Davin said:

You might want to check out my gotdotnet project which is an issue tracker that is based on the Issue Tracker starter kit.

Some features that I have implemented include:

-Attachments
-Reports
-Detail Change history (what, when who)
-Improved email notifications (issue assigned to you,issue changed)
-Web Service to add an issue

I will be releasing a new version(with the features above) this week. Right now I am just working on a nant build / deployment script.

I am also looking for people to help me work on it
if anyone is interested.

# May 31, 2004 8:49 AM

Davin said:

The url:

http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/bugnet
# May 31, 2004 8:50 AM

Frans Bouma said:

How secure is the starter kit on a webserver? How good is the tool protected against malicious people?

If you want to use local todo lists, I'd recommend ToDoList :)
http://www.codeproject.com/tools/ToDoList2.asp
# May 31, 2004 9:25 AM

Justin Rogers said:

Darren, send me an email detailing the code path. Depending on the code-path you take and the scope you set, the attributes that affect the path are different.
# June 1, 2004 4:00 PM

TrackBack said:

# June 1, 2004 5:18 PM

TrackBack said:

Link Interface 31.
# June 1, 2004 8:48 PM

Thomas Freudenberg said:

Scott has already planned to add global categories to .Text: http://asp.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?tabindex=1&PostID=490432
# June 2, 2004 7:12 AM

Fredrik Normén said:

A proposal: Instead of using ICollection you can for example use the List<T> class. With a List you will have binary search and Find method etc that aren't implemented into the Collection.
# June 2, 2004 8:32 AM

dhana said:

asfd
# June 2, 2004 9:28 AM

James Avery said:

I think the problem is that with too many categories, and category specific feeds, you start to lose the personal aspect of it all. The main feed of weblogs.asp.net has the same problem, which is why I don't subscribe to it anymore. When I read a weblog I am usually interested in the person and what they have to say, whatever it happens to be about... for category specific stuff I usually just go hit up feedster or google.

# June 2, 2004 10:24 AM

lev said:

Great article. Here is what I'm trying to achive though. Say a user logs on to the system using Form authentication and then is redirected to an aspx page, on which I can sure capture User.Identity.Name. There is a link on this page, which will redirect to a classic ASP page. I created and registered (using the technique above) a class, that has a method to capture the same value:

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.SessionState;


namespace ASPNETServer
{
public class UserService
{
public UserService()
{

}
public string GetUserName()
{
string userName = "";
try
{
userName = System.Web.HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name;
}
catch(Exception err)
{
userName = "error: " + err.Message;
}
return userName;
}
}
}

I keep getting the "Object reference not set to an instance of an object." error while calling this class from an ASP page:

set aspnetServer = server.CreateObject("ASPNETServer.UserService")
Response.Write aspnetServer.GetUserName()

If I hard code the return value and re-register the assembly, all works fine. And if I call this from an aspc page, works fine as well. Any idea what's going on? Thanks in advance!
# June 2, 2004 1:30 PM

Mark Zimmermann said:

Neat concept, Darren! --- I must think more about this topic ... and I suspect that most people have a harder time multitasking than you do ... I scribbled something on a more-or-less anti-multitasking theme a couple of years ago ( http://zhurnal.net/ww/zw?TripleThink ) but am having second thoughts about that ... there is much to be said for *efficient living* --- and I esp. like Arnold Bennett's comments on that in HOW TO MAKE THE BEST OF LIFE (1923 - see http://zhurnal.net/ww/zw?BennettOnLife for some brief excerpts) ... ^z
# June 2, 2004 6:28 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks Mark... I loved your article "TripleThink" - extremely relevant to this article!
# June 2, 2004 8:50 PM

Luciano Evaristo Guerche said:

As I have set a lot of categories in my blog and have just posted to only some of them, I wish .Text showed only the ones which have posts on them or show all, but show posts quantity each one has.
# June 3, 2004 8:26 AM

Mike said:

Dan, The xls being returned as an aspx page typically occurs if you do not have Excel installed, or do not have the xls type tied to excel on your CLIENT computer.

I have several machines, but excel only on one. And It works fine on that box, but all the others think they are getting an aspx page, since they have no idea what xls is.
# June 4, 2004 9:57 AM

Justin Rogers said:

Well Darren, the book was a bit light for me, but enjoyable. I don't normally read 260 pages of a physics text in only a few hours, but when the concentration is on thought experiments to explain new theory and not the match it becomes quite easy to do so. I think you'll find this book a great introduction, since it covers all of those things we talked about and provides a natural progression into other areas of science that you'll be able to find similar books for.

In fact I'm going to start a book on Quantum Gravity that I think is precisely identical to this book in terms of approach, but quite different in topic. In fact, Lee Smolin is the author and he is referenced a couple of times in the above.
# June 4, 2004 8:26 PM

Justin Rogers said:

BinarySearch only works on sorted lists, so you wouldnt' have that.

Also, Darren, in many cases you can have a generic interface to prevent those casts. Something like IApplicationObject<T> would be the constraint instead. Not at a Whidbey box, so i can't test, but I know there are some constructs dealing with type parameters in constraints that are declared illegal.

T item = new T() ;
items.Add((T)item.Create(row)) ;

The above could also be made easier, even without this addition by:

items.Add((new T()).Fill(row));

In your code you are creating an object, then using an interface method on that object to create a second object. Just as easy to have a void return method called Fill, that simply fills the object you just created. If you do this you don't even need the generic interface idea.
# June 4, 2004 8:54 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks Justin... the code that I showed was actually "psuedo-code" so, yes, I would actually change it to:

items.Add((new T()).Fill(row));

As Tor your suggestion about doing something with IApplicationObject<T>, I'll have to take a peek at that.

Cheers,
- Darren
# June 4, 2004 10:22 PM

TrackBack said:

# June 6, 2004 8:57 AM

Kirk said:

Does anyone know of a good online Calculus course?
# June 6, 2004 11:30 PM

Ron Green said:

Apress just published a book on this subject.

http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=280
# June 7, 2004 12:49 AM

Justin Rogers said:

You can pass any number of parameters to your custom installer action. I remember passing directory information to the installer we used for the first Terrarium server since we had to specify where to create the database and also where to update the web.config file we just installed.
# June 7, 2004 1:53 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Justin, yes, you can certainly pass any number of params to a custom installer action but, my specific issue is that the [TARGETDIR] environment variable is not available at the time when your custom action code runs.

You should go back and look at how you get the install path... I'd be be interested to know how you did it. In my case I grab the path of the executing assembly which feels like a dirty hack to me.
# June 7, 2004 1:57 AM

David Levine said:

You can pass the TARGETDIR to your custom action by using a param like this...

/TargetDir="[TARGETDIR]\"

I needed to add the trailing backslash but it's been so long ago that I don't recall why.

This will make the value of TARGETDIR available in your custom action using the key of "TargetDir".

string targetDir = this.Context.Parameters["BaseDir"];

It would be convenient if it were available without needing to do it yourself but it's not hard to add it to the data.

# June 7, 2004 4:25 AM

Darren Neimke said:

David, thanks for that. I tried so many combinations for passing TARGETDIR through to the custom action but didn't get the syntax correct. I was expecting the following to work:

/TargetDir=[TARGETDIR]

... but, I'll try your syntax of:

/TargetDir="[TARGETDIR]\"

... tomorrow!

Thanks for the tip :-)
# June 7, 2004 6:02 AM

Justin Rogers said:

I highly recommend checking out my old ProcessSnoop class, since it details some of the intricacies of process redirection, like the fact that you want to actually run all of your process gathering on a second thread. Note that you can only redirect standard output without using another thread as well, so you may also want to trap standard error in which case you'd need a thread for each.

http://weblogs.asp.net/justin_rogers/archive/2004/02/27/81370.aspx

It isn't a bunch of code, so a quick look should do.
# June 7, 2004 7:29 PM

Vasasnth T T said:

I am binding a data from xml file to dataset.
This xml Error_Id column has max value of 10
when i given this query
dsMain.Tables(0).Compute("max(Error_Id)", "")
It should return me 10. But it returning as 9. What is the problem
# June 9, 2004 12:29 AM

Anand Kumar S.R said:

Hi,
I tried your sample.
When the excel sheet opens in the ie, no data is displayed. I have office 2000 installed in my PC
# June 10, 2004 9:29 AM

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# June 10, 2004 11:53 AM

Brad said:

3.5 hours developing! Wow, what a luxury. I suspect your shop runs differently than my former (just hung out a shingle of my own) where I spent anywhere from an hour to three hours a day, perhaps more, just in meetings and on the phone with external partners!
# June 11, 2004 8:24 AM

aussie said:

People have the right to die when they please or feel like, life's not worth living in this judgemental shitty world that we live. I disagree with your belief that suicide and you go straight to hell. That is assuming that there is a hell. Whats wrong with thinking you stop breathing you die, you rot in the ground or be burnt. Then nothing..... I believe people seek religion to stop them worrying about death and that in someway they will go on and have a better after life then they have here on earth. I think that is just a cop out. People should live life as every day may be last as there are no safe guards that there won't be a nuclear war that will kill everything in it's path........... Man has created enough evil and the odds are that if people can fly 4 planes and crash them into buildings killing thousands then the natural progression with be of a far greater level.
On a serious note I have attended many suicides and it is a waste of human life and it is a shame that there cry's for help or misadventures weren't heard.......
I do believe that the brave live on.....
# June 14, 2004 8:38 AM

Matt B said:

Thanks for this. I just spent about 3 hours playing with it until I found this page :)
# June 14, 2004 1:14 PM

William Luu said:

Hi Darren,

That sounds like a really great idea. One of the problems though that I foresee is licensing issues with Windows.

The user will have to have additional Windows licenses.

Although, another option is to do what I'm doing and use one of those Windows 2003 Server Trial CDs they keep handing out at events :)

One issue though, the Server Trial is longer than the VPC 2004 trial!

Better than nothing though! :D
# June 15, 2004 11:32 PM

Thomas Williams said:

Whoa Darren, what a great idea, I'm hoping to get beta bits at some stage at the Melbourne SQL Server SIG but I don't have any idea where to put 'em.

Good luck with the installs!
# June 15, 2004 11:46 PM

girish said:

The simple method for this would be replace your string with some single charecter and then split

For Ex: myString.Replace("test","|").Split('|');

# June 16, 2004 9:53 AM

Patrick R said:

This worked fine on my local developer system, but after deploying the assembly to a testsystem i've got the same error:

(0x80070002)
server/Example.asp, line 22

although i execute gacutil and regasm...

so whats the problem now??
if someone got a resolution, send me a mail to pruhnow@dornbracht.de
or msn messenger with same email address.

THX!
# June 17, 2004 7:37 AM

ashley said:

i just want to scfore top in maths
# June 18, 2004 6:55 AM

Kaya said:

I'm using the same code to display datalist in Excel. But somwhow i couldnt managed to display correctly . My datalist contains Datagrid. Because Datagrid is a control, it clears the datagrid control. so i check if the control is DataGrid then do nothing. it works well. this time the order of the datalist items is wrong. Before the Datagrid there are tables and label but the layout of the excel is datagrid and table-label...
# June 19, 2004 5:11 AM

Mark Dicken said:

Cheers Dude...

I needed a simple sample to work out milliseconds ... the dammn (opps I meant GREAT) MSDN Online help was not too great at giving me a sample

Feedback for Microsoft (if they see this!) ... please make things better inside online help, more samples needed.

Regards

Mark Dicken
http://www.MarkDicken.com
# June 19, 2004 5:26 PM

Walt Ritscher - Thinking about code said:

Our user group NETDA (www.netda.net) in Redmond WA USA did something like this back in March 2004. See http://www.netda.net/Event/EventNewsletter.asp?EventDate=3/29/2004 for the evening agenda.

Microsoft donated copies of Whidbey CD's to the meeting. Attendees installed Virtual PC and then the Whidbey bits. The rest of the evening was spent writing sample code.

So there is a precedent within Microsoft for helping with these type of events.

Contact me if you want to know more. http://waltritscher.com/blog/ramblings/contact.aspx
# June 20, 2004 12:43 PM

pratap routray said:

hi,
i tried the code

Private Sub RenderGrid()
Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel"
' Remove the charset from the Content-Type header.
Response.Charset = ""
' Turn off the view state.
Me.EnableViewState = False
Dim tw As New System.IO.StringWriter
Dim hw As New System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter(tw)
' Get the HTML for the control.
DataGrid2.RenderControl(hw)
' Write the HTML back to the browser.
Response.Write(tw.ToString())
' End the response.
Response.End()
End Sub


but i get an error




Server Error in '/application' Application.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Control 'DataGrid2__ctl3__ctl0' of type 'DataGridLinkButton' must be placed inside a form tag with runat=server.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
# June 21, 2004 11:11 AM

John Layton said:

I've written a few programs in VB6 which write to the registry. I have written another program in C(Win API) which changes these registry settings, but the VB6 programs doesn't recognise the new setting. I know this is to do do with the null terminator. What do you suggest ?
Regards
# June 21, 2004 2:55 PM

J. Ambrose Little said:

Just thought I'd offer my article on the subject as well, since it does suggest possible uses for generics.

Also, Krzysztof Cwalina offers us a draft of MS's guidelines on generics here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/kcwalina/archive/2004/03/15/89860.aspx

# June 21, 2004 8:59 PM

TrackBack said:

# June 22, 2004 6:25 PM

TrackBack said:

# June 22, 2004 6:29 PM

TrackBack said:

# June 22, 2004 6:56 PM

Wesner Moise said:

I will be bloggin more Whidbey content after Beta 1. May CTP doesn't install well for me. http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented
# June 23, 2004 1:21 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks Wesner, I've subscribed to your blog and when the Whidbey content starts to increase, I'll add you to this list.

Over time I plan to make an Opml of this list and hand it out as a resource at our user group - that's why I want to moderate who appears on it.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply though :-)
# June 23, 2004 2:03 AM

Fredrik Normén said:

Thanks for adding me :)
# June 23, 2004 2:32 AM

Tiernan O'Toole said:

snap! i got one yesterday too! sweet phones arent they?
# June 23, 2004 7:08 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Yeh, just having fun trying out all of the features. So many things to play with and learn :-)
# June 23, 2004 7:09 AM

Hannes Preishuber said:

i have one- exact the same

see my article
http://weblogs.asp.net/hpreishuber/archive/2004/06/11/153305.aspx
# June 23, 2004 8:14 AM

Sam Gentile said:

Ah dude, how about us Whidbey bloggers that have been blogging about whidbey for over a year now (I celebrated my one year aniversery with the Whidbey program Jun1 1st):

http://samgentile.com/blog/category/1094.aspx
http://ea.3leaf.com/
# June 23, 2004 8:36 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Hey Sam... thanks for reminding me about you Whidbey "old timers" :-P

Hope things are going well for you - look forward to catching up with you again next year!
# June 23, 2004 8:42 AM

Phil Winstanley said:

I have some stuff on Localisation in mine, probably more to come.
# June 23, 2004 11:45 AM

Asbjørn Ulsberg said:

None of your reference links works, so I need to ask: Will this work in any other browser than Internet Explorer, or does it use (and suddenly support) DOM3 Events?

What does the generated JavaScript look like?
# June 24, 2004 4:25 AM

Dave Verwer said:

Amen Darren, my thoughts exactly
# June 24, 2004 8:19 AM

RyanH said:

Very true comments ;)
# June 24, 2004 8:39 AM

William Luu said:

Indeed, GoogleMail has provided a refreshing change to the stock standard web based emailing systems.

The difference between the Google offering and the other two is that Google has provided some form of innovation (in the form of a diffrent user email experience).

For starters, the "conversations" feature is one useful addition. That's probably one thing I love about web forums. The threading feature on them. GMail's "conversations" feature is quite a similar concept.

As well as the very fast UI. The fast UI is a part of the Google philosophy, I suppose, of keeping to a simplistic and fast design.
# June 24, 2004 8:53 AM

Asbjørn Ulsberg said:

But GMail is still 100% inaccessible to blind users and users without a visual browser, right? Or does it suddenly work in Lynx?
# June 24, 2004 9:46 AM

Nish said:

Must be my bandwidth I guess, but I find the gmail UI terribly slow. Takes ages to show the mail body.
# June 25, 2004 3:24 AM

Nish said:

I also found that gmail has trouble receiving mails from yahoogroups mailing lists - but it might be yahoo's doing there.
# June 25, 2004 3:25 AM

Darren Neimke said:

> Must be my bandwidth I guess, but I find the gmail UI terribly slow

Nish, my friend. Of all the things that you could possibly accuse GMail of you surely cannot accuse them of that. Have you actually used the Internet before? C'mon!
# June 25, 2004 9:47 AM

Sam Gentile said:

No problem Darren, I was only busting ya-) It was good to meet you at the MVP summit. Hope to see you again.
# June 25, 2004 10:03 AM

Sanjay said:

I have created a link on one of my pages to export the datagrid to excel .
when I click the link the first time , i get an empty sheet , when I click the link again , it shows the grid with the records .

can anyone tell what I am doing wrong.

thanks in advance
Sanjay
# June 25, 2004 11:41 AM

TrackBack said:

# June 26, 2004 12:21 AM

TrackBack said:

# June 26, 2004 12:22 AM

TrackBack said:

# June 26, 2004 2:56 PM

Boris said:

It's an interesting thread, but I would like to go further: there is .NET assembly, which I need to consume as ActiveX. Is it possible? How can I create downloadable package (CAB file)? How can I create strong name on client machine?

Any help will be appreciated,
Boris
# June 27, 2004 3:13 AM

Fredrik Normén NSQUARED2 said:

You can also read about Client callbakcs on my blog, I have just updated my article about Client callbacks.

http://normen.mine.nu/MyBlog/viewpost.aspx?PostID=113&showfeedback=true
# June 27, 2004 8:59 AM

Nish said:

Hi Darren

I do admit that I don't use webmail. So coming from a purely POP3 client background, I guess I would find any web-mail slow. So perhaps that comment from me was a little unfair.
# June 27, 2004 10:14 PM

bims said:

i need a timer that counts down time from a specified min to 0 using visual basic.net
# June 28, 2004 5:23 AM

AndrewSeven said:

Will my components (inherit from component) work?
http://www.asp.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?tabindex=1&PostID=620308


I have done a lot of stuff for designTime in VS.Net, what will work and what won't at design time in the new versions?

# June 30, 2004 9:42 AM

Kevin said:

You didn't have to register your assembly into the GAC to get your ASP working. Just use the regasm utility with the /codebase switch and ignore the warning that your assembly should be strongly named.
# June 30, 2004 7:03 PM

LoveHate w/ dotnet said:

I think Microsoft has made it more painful to get this to work than it is to shove bamboo between your finger nails. I still keep getting Server object, ASP 0177 (0x800401F3) Invalid class string. I'm going to break down and rewrite my classic ASP page to .NET.
# July 1, 2004 3:40 PM

JAS said:

When you get this:

Control 'DataGrid2__ctl3__ctl0' of type 'DataGridLinkButton' must be placed inside a form tag with runat=server.

Make sure that in your aspx page your control is inside a form tag that has the attribute runat=server (just like it says)

like this ...

<form id='frmMain' runat='server'>
# July 2, 2004 11:41 AM

DonXML Demsak said:

I agree. I've had this book for a while, and it is pretty good. I think that there are Word templates out there for Use Cases, too. I'll have to look around again and see if I can find them. I think I got them on the Rational site, but I'm not sure.
# July 6, 2004 7:19 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks Don :-)
# July 6, 2004 7:40 AM

Lo said:

And why not simply using this:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vbcn7/html/vawlkWalkthroughCreatingCOMObjectsWithVisualBasicNET.asp ?
# July 6, 2004 10:14 AM

TrackBack said:

# July 7, 2004 6:05 AM

angjiyong said:

The datagrid has successfully emport to excel.but when it can reaponse to any mouse event(like format cell, delete) .Can anyone tell me why and how to solve it
# July 7, 2004 9:32 PM

TrackBack said:

# July 10, 2004 10:48 AM

TrackBack said:

# July 10, 2004 10:56 AM

yangchen said:

When i learn maths it gets so confusin that i cannot even study other subjects
and i always wanted to be the higest.
# July 11, 2004 12:39 AM

adamexologic said:

I am able to display all records in my datagrid on an excel file. I am using a dataview that displays 10 records at a time for each page. I want to display just one page of the dataview (the one they are currently viewing) when the "export to excel" button is clicked. how can i do this with a dataview?
# July 14, 2004 1:23 PM

Michael Ash said:

Was there ever a part two?
# July 15, 2004 11:48 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Ummm.... no, I think that I decided that it probably wasn't worth it. I'm pretty sure that I started looking at it but decided the same as you... that this is clearly a case for the 80/20 rule :-)
# July 16, 2004 6:46 AM

VS said:

dear sir..i just wonder y my toolbox there do not have the ContextMenuItem, ContextMenuLink.....
# July 19, 2004 4:45 AM

Michael Stuart said:

The requirements exam is the only .net exam I have taken so far... and it was actually pretty easy. I passed it while it was in beta form without even studying for it. If you passed the others already, I'd just go give it a shot one day.
# July 26, 2004 10:18 AM

ron richardson said:

this would be something great to add to the Classic ASP Framework (by Chris Calderon), if it's not already in there.

see:
-http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=69b08b15-d456-4cf9-8b12-d4642ef0c22e
-http://www.codeproject.com/asp/ClassicAspFW.asp

# July 28, 2004 8:37 AM

Todd Moon said:

You might know this, but Andy Smith developed a very nice Classic ASP framework a number of years ago. It ended up as a compiled COM object. I forget if it had authentication or not, but the ViewState, postback events, and all sorts of fun stuff was in there.

And of course, Andy being Andy, he developed a slew of databound web controls. Even an editable datagrid! Everything used xml and xslt for rendering.

It was a lot of fun to work with. I used it for probably a year, just before .Net came out.
# July 28, 2004 10:24 AM

TrackBack said:

# July 28, 2004 10:15 PM

TrackBack said:

# July 31, 2004 4:10 AM

Christian Calderon said:

The Classic ASP Framework does have something very similar... it has a PageController that implements Forms Authentication with Role Level authorization...

I will be releasing version 2.0 next week and I expect it to be the last release, since there isn't anything else that I can think about that can be added. I would like to see how Andy implemented his framework, that would be cool. I didn't use COM because from COM you cannot call VBScript functions, so the whole thing would just not work (the framework is event driven, and a COM component cannot notify callback a VBScript).

Anyway, I will look at the code in the link "http://flws.com.au/AuthenticateModel.html" to see if there is anything cool that I can use for the framework :-)

Cheers,

# July 31, 2004 11:58 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Hi Christian, I think that the coolest part of my framework is its simplicity. As I wrote earlier, it's about 350 lines of code and has the essentials needed to implement User, Page, Roles and Authentication.

I presume that yours is much more complete (and therefore much larger) than this; I'll see if I can read up on your article at CodeProject.
# July 31, 2004 6:21 PM

Darren Neimke said:

...also, in a follow-up blog I showed how you would code against the Framework:

http://weblogs.asp.net/dneimke/archive/2004/07/28/199291.aspx
# July 31, 2004 7:10 PM

Christian Calderon said:

I see the benefit of your framework. I think is kind of cool. I believe that the main benefit of ASP.NET is the knowledge and ideas that gave us all. Now, even if we didn't had ASP.NET I'm sure that we all would be writting better applications just because of that knowledge gained. Youre framework is an example that it is posssible to write something that works nice with just a few lines of code.

The CLASP Framework is thousands of lines of code! (the core control alone is 1400 lines, many of them not rocket science however) ...

My goal was to resemble the ASP.NET Framework as much as possible and to also provide a framework to write user controls. The Authentication and Authorization is just a small part. Right now it supports plugable Viewstate (implementations for in session, in hidden variable and SQL Sever are in place), it has almost all Server controls found in ASP.NET (and some more thanks to the ppl that is currently contributing to expand it), it provides an event model similar than .NET (page init, load viewstate, load, save viewstate, terminate) and a similar event model for server controls (init, load, read viewstate, saveviewstate and render)... it also supports pluggable authentication and authorization and skinning... :-) it was a minor effor that became bigger as it started to take shape. I currently use it and is extremely fast and reliable. I ran a few load tests and it can run in an average computer at 25-30 RPS no wait time for pages with 40-50 controls accessing the database... :-)

You can see it running at: http://clasp.csharpjunkie.com/help/help.htm

Regards,
# July 31, 2004 9:25 PM

Christian Calderon said:

Something I forgot. The sample site is old and used v1.8. v2.0 is way better and faster and its event model was enhanced and expanded to resemble even more ASP.NET :-P
# July 31, 2004 9:27 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks for the feedback Christian, your framework sounds very cool. I know how something like this can turn into a labour of love - which yours seems to have :-)

I deliberately kept the scope of mine minimal so that I just had something which added a small amount of value; after that I pretty much stopped writing ASP applications. Had I continued with classic ASP though, I have no doubt that I would have needed to do a similar thing to what you've done because, as you say, .NET taught us the importance of being able to rapidly develop from a stable base of controls and services.

As I said, I'll take a look at your stuff and recommend it to any classic ASP'ers that I come across.
# July 31, 2004 9:32 PM

christine norris said:

I have been searching for a quick and easy function to convert a filtered dataview into a a datatable. This is EXACTLY what I needed. Thanks tons!!!!
Isn't it nice to know you made a difference?
# August 1, 2004 2:50 PM

Christian Calderon said:

Thanks Darren.

You are very right in that something you didn't expect to be a big deal can become sort of something addictive/ a passion that can take some (a lot) of your time...

I just hope that it is of use to some people... anyway it was fun doing it and I learned a lot the "why" of the way many things were done in ASP.NET...
# August 2, 2004 2:26 PM

Mark Boehlen said:

If you want to get rid of the errors like "Control 'DataGrid2__ctl3__ctl0' of type 'DataGridLinkButton' " Just set the properties on the grid that display these. You don't want them in the Excel Sheet anyways.

IE dg.AllowPaging = False

Do this before you send to the sub routine or do it in the sub routine.

Any one know how to do this same thing in a new window?

Mark
# August 2, 2004 7:05 PM

alex said:

what do we do if a key board dose not work
# August 4, 2004 7:15 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 5, 2004 7:35 AM

Ryan said:

I have the same issue that lev posted above.

Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Which tells me that the object isn't being created. What was the solution to this?

Thanks!
# August 5, 2004 3:10 PM

boat said:

i think this might help for the error

http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/Code/2003/Sept/ExportASPNetDataGridToExcel.asp
# August 7, 2004 12:15 AM

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http://www.dnsasp.com
http://www.15159.com
# August 11, 2004 8:13 AM

六合彩 said:

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http://www.2881.com/liuhecai
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# August 11, 2004 8:13 AM

六合彩 said:

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# August 11, 2004 8:13 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 24, 2004 8:32 PM

TrackBack said:

# August 28, 2004 9:41 AM

Ron K said:

Did you know that using Alt + Print Screen Key will capture the active window into Clipboard memory?
# August 29, 2004 4:53 AM

Clarke Scott said:

Hi Darren,

Good luck with the new/old venture mate.

I to have had a business idea floating around in my head for somethime now.
Just need the time and cash flow to get it happening.

And as my grandfather use to say "Keep Punchin".

Clarke
# September 2, 2004 5:41 PM

Greg Low said:

Hi Darren,

Hope it works out ok for you. Will you be up in Qld on either the 3rd Tuesday or 4th Thursday of the month? If so, we'd love to see you at QMSDNUG or QSSUG.

Let me know when you're in town so I can buy you a beer or something.

Regards,

Greg
# September 2, 2004 8:50 PM

James Boman said:

Good to see the Ferris ethos going strong, and hope to see you about the place on a new project soon!

Cheers,
James.
# September 9, 2004 9:06 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Hey James, thanks for the comment... have to catch up some time :-)
# September 9, 2004 9:16 PM

Jeff Key said:

Three things:

1) The Howe jersey was classic.
2) I can't believe the girl's outfit was hot at one time.
3) Good to hear you're living! It's easy to forget what's really interesting outside of our careers in this crazy industry. Congrats.
# September 10, 2004 1:02 AM

TrackBack said:

# September 17, 2004 3:36 AM

JosephCooney said:

Reading stuff like this is quite inspirational Darren. Good to see you're "living your life" in such a positive way. If I had to "visit my accountant" it would probably consist of him writing the letters "ROFLMAO" on a while board and then leaving the room before he wet himself.
# September 20, 2004 9:52 AM

TrackBack said:

# September 27, 2004 6:27 AM

Douglas Reilly said:

I think it was from here:

http://weblogs.asp.net/ericlippert/archive/2004/03/18/92422.aspx
# September 27, 2004 7:14 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Ahh yes, that's it. Thanks Douglas :-)
# September 27, 2004 7:17 PM

Eddie de Bear said:

True, very true..

The one question I have to ask is this:
How often does a client ask for a small application, which eventually blows out into a much larger system as they want extra functionallity. This is where a small app developed with good OO is useful..

It's not the ultimate solution for all projects, it really comes down to the risk you wish to take.

Just my 2c
# September 27, 2004 7:40 PM

Darren Neimke said:

I agree Eddie, that's why I added the caveat: especially when prototyping and building small tools - in the original article. But it's a good point that you make!
# September 27, 2004 7:44 PM

mitchell@4guysfromrolla.com (Scott Mitchell) said:

In theory this works, but if I had a nickel for each "small project" I've worked on that's blossomed into a large project.... well, let's just say I'd have enough bus fare for a couple of days.
# September 27, 2004 8:00 PM

Nathan Maffeo said:

I understand what your saying, but I think the reason you dont see more companies telling you what they can do for you is because - in general - there are more programmers than jobs right now. That means you need them more than they need you.

Wait for another boom, and we you'll start seeing them come after you agian.
# October 19, 2004 6:18 PM

lomaxx said:

I don't think this is limited to the IT sector, i think in general there must be just some managerial course that you have to take in how to bore ur applicants to tears, if they're still awake after 6 hours of questioning maybe give em a second interview.
Perhaps you might wanna try the GLAT http://www.google.com/googleblog/2004/09/pencils-down-people.html

or apply for coles-myer over christmas
http://careers.colesmyer.com/home.asp?ref=

its online and interactive, and from what i've heard the interview is relatively short

One interesting question i did get at an interview was..... "If you came up with a good idea that you thought would bring revenue to the company, what would you do with it?"

go figure.....
# October 20, 2004 9:03 AM

TrackBack said:

# October 27, 2004 1:55 AM

Karl said:

It's very nice...crossroads are indeed difficult...I hope your choice serves you well :)

# October 27, 2004 10:28 AM

Denny said:

a way to build systems by using indipendant services.
a design model that says that systems will change, that if systems talk to each other in a flexible way you can better adpat to chnage and grow.
an example of a soa in action is the internet look at how DNS,HTTP,SMTP and other standard internet parts work for users with different operating systems.
soa is all this taken to the next level.
# October 27, 2004 6:41 PM

Greg Low said:

Hi Darren, the main thing is that the roads always converge later anyway. Have a good one. Greg
# October 27, 2004 7:44 PM

TrackBack said:

# October 28, 2004 10:22 AM

TrackBack said:

# October 28, 2004 11:16 AM

TrackBack said:

# October 29, 2004 12:13 PM

TrackBack said:

Findings this afternoon
# October 30, 2004 2:20 AM

Phil Winstanley said:


I agree whole heartedly.

Chris Garett, Ollie Cornes and I have set up a community in the UK http://www.mswebdev.org.uk just after the demise of Charles Caroll's ASP Friends, the site was just a front page for a list server.

We now have nearly three hundred members, all Web Developers using Microsoft platforms and I'd say 90% of the members are UK based.

We didn't follow a template, we didn't go too quickly - and because of that, the community shaped what we have now.

1. An e-mail list.
2. A Wiki.
3. A fantastic pool of experts at hand when we (UK people) need them and not duing the working hours in the United States ;-) We took the niche of "Your peers are your country men" - it worked great for us.

CodeZone etc are going to have to work very hard to get members and their message out.
# October 31, 2004 6:58 AM

TrackBack said:

# October 31, 2004 1:37 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Good stuff Plip! Thanks for pointing that community out.
# October 31, 2004 2:34 PM

Greg Low said:

Outstanding Darren, that's who I was hoping it was :-)

Regards,

Greg
# November 1, 2004 5:21 AM

William Luu said:

Oh wow!

Congrats Darren, they seem to have quite a large team of MVPs over at Readify!

All the best in your new role! :)
# November 1, 2004 5:24 AM

Wallym said:

Congratulations!
# November 1, 2004 6:54 AM

Geoff Appleby said:

Woowoo! welcome to the big smoke (when you arrive, that is)
Canberra is also a great place for freezing winters and too hot summers, but if you're coming from adelaide, then it's probably only the winters that will annoy you. :)
# November 1, 2004 7:30 AM

Todd Moon said:

OK, "Buridan's ass" is interesting for it's illustrative value, but it's full of crap. The "rational" thing to do in a position like that is to arbitrarily pick a pile, since they are the same. How can Buridan even consider for a minute that the rational thing to do is not act?

You don't need a reason to prefer one pile over another to pick one. Which, of course, seems to be the take-away from this parable. But it's my opinion that a parable shouldn't be full o' shit just to make a point. :)
# November 1, 2004 8:41 AM

Darren Neimke said:

LOL, hey Todd... that's exactly the point! The parable of Buridan's ass illustrates that, when faced with 2 good options, not moving at all is a choice that's worse than randomly picking one (of the 2 piles of food).

So you see... it's not such a silly little parable after all! :-)

- Darren

P.S.: BTW, if you've read some of my future blog entries you will note that I did pick one of the piles ;-)
# November 1, 2004 12:38 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks all!

# November 1, 2004 5:11 PM

Todd Moon said:

Outstanding! Sounds like a really awsome opportunity!
# November 2, 2004 11:22 AM

Alex Lowe said:

We are hoping that this (http://www.microsoft.com/communities/blogs/PortalHome.mspx) will become a nice portal. I think a new version is being worked on. Right now it is only moderately useful.
# November 2, 2004 4:11 PM

Justin Rogers said:

To clarify my post with respect to this problem, the act of categorization alone doesn't necessarily solve the visibility issue. Visibility is all about aggregation and having a way to logically display grouped data in a short, terse form that is easily navigable by the user... A couple of data groups might be:

1. Authors
2. Teams
3. Keywords

Can categorization in turn bring these groups to surface? Well, authors is easy right. It is nothing more than the blog roll itself. Searching by an author is trivial. Some blogs have multiple authors though, so you should take this into account. In general parsing an existing RSS feed is suitable for #1, assuming you know the authors name and they've applied the appropriate adornments to their name.

Teams is a bit more difficult. How do I lock down the entire Teams categorization to prevent fraud? Well, that is something the categorization engine has to think hard about. First, does it really matter if someone shows up on a team listing when they really aren't? What happens when a user changes teams, or are members of multiple teams? There are security models for this entire process. For instance, the categorization server can easily ensure guid/author combinations allowing the blog reader to validate a feed item. Now someone has to admin the categorization server, but the process of having one, where people can create teams and allow users to join isn't hard. In fact, MS can host their own, and the public can have a version.

What about Keywords? Keywords are best aggregated by searching the content, but sometimes the content never mentions the *category* or *keywords* that the author thinks is important. Keywords/categories can also be scoped so that the Performance category type in my local blog is different from the Performance category type in the global index. This last grouping identifies the need for some global control over the categorization and keyword process. Otherwise blog readers can't effectively process content into meaningful categories for the client. The other option is that group categories into local categories is really a one time process. Only when you see a new category on a post, must you actually do something, this is really just another simple screen with a listing of posts, categories, and the identity of being unassigned to local group. A default local group of uncategorized can be used when you don't care to aggregate a category into a local group. Remember here that the general hiearchy is still in place where you can go read all of the postings for a specific blog, the goal here is just aggregating, at the client level, a series of blog posts into a reading or search group when you don't want to have to read the contents of every author's blog.
# November 2, 2004 5:46 PM

TrackBack said:

# November 3, 2004 10:17 AM

TrackBack said:

# November 3, 2004 1:01 PM

TrackBack said:

# November 3, 2004 9:55 PM

TrackBack said:

# November 3, 2004 9:55 PM

Kaushit said:

Hey,

I noticed that Project Distributor has been awared Project Of the Month on http://www.aspxconnection.com .
Good work , liked the concept,loved the project.

# November 4, 2004 3:45 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Yeh... I noticed that tonight! :)
# November 4, 2004 3:55 AM

TrackBack said:

Interesting finds on commute today
# November 4, 2004 6:13 AM

TrackBack said:

# November 4, 2004 6:45 AM

TrackBack said:

# November 4, 2004 6:52 AM

Mikal said:

Heh. Someone else based in Canberra to hassle when something doesn't work. Let us know when you're in town...
# November 4, 2004 10:12 PM

TrackBack said:

Interesting Findings today
# November 5, 2004 5:01 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

Congrats on the notice, Darren. On an aside, have you ever considered providing a more memorable URL to Project Distributor, like ProjectDistributor.com, or something of the like, rather than markitup.aspconnection.com?
# November 5, 2004 11:37 AM

William Luu said:

Yeah, OneNote rocks!

Also, if you have ever wanted to save a webpage for offline viewing, go find the IE to OneNote powertoy which allows you to send the HTML page into OneNote as a "Web Clipping". I've found it quite handy for the times when I want to save the page for later offline viewing.
# November 7, 2004 8:12 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks William I'll take a look at that although I might keep that stuff out of OneNote for now - just until I get a better feel for it. Most of my offline reading can be handled via SharpReader and, if I really need to go offline with stuff I just tend to scrape it into Word.
# November 8, 2004 1:19 AM

Steve said:

Hmm, 80 quid for a notepad replacement - I don't think so!

# November 8, 2004 4:25 AM

TrackBack said:

# November 8, 2004 4:46 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Hey Anonymous Steve,

Notepad replacement? I don't think so!

You should try it, there's free 90 day trials to download. This is not just a notepad my friend, this is a totally new way of organizing your data.
# November 8, 2004 5:46 AM

TrackBack said:

# November 8, 2004 6:55 PM

TrackBack said:

# November 8, 2004 7:23 PM

Greg Low said:

Great post Darren. Tim's done a great job with this site. It just gets better and better.

Regards,

Greg
# November 8, 2004 7:55 PM

TrackBack said:

# November 9, 2004 5:06 AM

TrackBack said:

# November 9, 2004 5:07 AM

Jason Row said:

I used the same strategy when I was studying for these. And you're right, Codeclinic is a great site for that last bit of cramming!
# November 9, 2004 8:38 AM

Ken Cox [MVP - ASP.NET] said:

You're a god? Wow!
# November 9, 2004 8:48 AM

TrackBack said:

Scott Guthrie talks about cross browser support in ASP.NET 2.0, but is the new Client Callback fixed?
# November 9, 2004 1:39 PM

TrackBack said:

Scott Guthrie talks about cross browser support in ASP.NET 2.0, but is the new Client Callback fixed?
# November 9, 2004 1:41 PM

Jorriss said:

Don't forget Transcender (www.transcender.com)! I've used these exams for years and I have never failed an exam.
# November 10, 2004 4:09 PM

Tim Marman said:

The one annoying thing we ran into during the preview was that your color choice isn't "sticky". That is, it picks up the font color of wherever you are typing, not what you have previously selected.

Has this been fixed in the final SP1 release? I'll have to get my colleagues to reinstall and play with it tomorrow ... we have some brainstorming to do anyways :)
# November 10, 2004 11:07 PM

Darren Neimke said:

No, you are correct. The color is not sticky.

You could change your Default Font in the Editing Settings though right?
# November 10, 2004 11:14 PM

TrackBack said:

# November 11, 2004 3:07 AM

TrackBack said:

# November 11, 2004 4:45 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Actually Tim... Mitch and I tested the color stuff tonight. If you set your default font then it persists although, if you enter text into the section of a region which was created by another person in the session you will inherit their font settings.

I can show you an example of this if you need :-)
# November 11, 2004 5:28 AM

TrackBack said:

# November 14, 2004 10:57 PM

TrackBack said:

# November 14, 2004 11:40 PM

TrackBack said:

# November 16, 2004 2:44 PM

TrackBack said:

# November 16, 2004 6:44 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

I agree with your comments wholeheartedly. For the user group meetings I go to, it seems that most people either: (a) arrive on their own and stay pretty quiet throughout; (b) arrive with coworkers and socialize with no one but them; (c) Arrive alone, but clearly already know some folks, perhaps from past meetings, perhaps from past jobs.

There are obviously exceptions, there's usually those one or two people roaming the crowd, talking to folks, but this is more the exception than the rule. Is it any different down under?
# November 16, 2004 6:57 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Hi Scott... that's pretty much the same as you'd expect to see in the Australian User Group meetings.
# November 17, 2004 1:45 PM

TrackBack said:

# November 21, 2004 2:17 PM

Thomas Tomiczek said:

::Interesting to see it determined that WebDav poses a security risk unless you pay
::the $19 annually

Your argumentation is bullshit.

First, naturally, you they want to earn money.

But then, second, this never was about security. THis was about spam. People getting anonymous hotmail accounts, then using WebDav to send out spam.

US$ 19 handles this nicely.

First, this is not free anymore.
Second, you know WHO the dude is - OR you have someone commiting a Federal Crime by using not his credit card. Whatever, you have a some nice pressure you can now apply to his balls.

Makes sense, logically.
# November 21, 2004 2:22 PM

William Luu said:

The interesting thing though, is GMail is now offering POP3 access to their email service.

Which does beg the question whether or not the other big 2 free email providers (Hotmail and Yahoo) will follow suit.

I doubt hotmail will, however, I think there is a chance Yahoo might. They did offer pop3 access a few years ago, from memory.
# November 21, 2004 4:23 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Hi William... yeh, the fact that GMail have allowed it makes Hotmail's timing seem interesting.
# November 21, 2004 5:18 PM

Dictionary said:

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=independant
# November 22, 2004 10:25 AM

Gil H said:

I think you want to show a link to
http://webmessenger.msn.com/
# November 22, 2004 12:33 PM

TrackBack said:

Will's Blog - My.Thoughts == My.World &raquo; highlights from recent posts
# November 26, 2004 6:09 PM

William Luu said:

Hi Darren, very good ideas!

Over here in Melbourne we have been having an annual User Groups Open Day.

That is, user groups across Melbourne get together and have a bit of an open day type of thing. They get to promote their group to those who attend.

The day is hosted by a recruitment company called VTR [www.vtr.com.au].

The good thing with that is that the Melb .NET group got to know them, and they got to know our UG. One of the user group meetings this year actually involved inviting one of them over to a UG meeting to give a presentation in regards to recruitment which was really informative, and also allowed UG members to ask questions.

For the ice breaker, what I did at the last user group meeting was make sure everyone who came through the door put on a name tag. Not something fancy, just one of those sticker labels.

Having your name displayed is the easiest way to break the ice i think. (Always easier to have a conversation when you know someones' name!)

The great thing about the geek dinners is the less formal nature of things. And also during UG meetings the only time people have to socialise is before and after the UG meeting. Though many leave as soon as it is over. (usually they have something to to, hence less time for interaction!).

Increasing the value of attending user groups is a great thing.

Here is a choice quote from Page 9 of the recent edition of the Builder AU magazine - "Something that impresses me is people who start attending user groups, because it shows that they are willing to make a time commitment, mingle, and network so that if opportunities come up they know about them" [Quoted from Amanda Keleher, who is a HR Manager for Thoughtworks] (Can't find a direct link to this article anywhere, don't know if it'll be published online or not... contact Brendon Chase if you want the article and can't find it. Article is called "The Skills to pay the bills")

Perhaps what we need is to help developers in general, to find a way to help promote themselves. To 1) the community 2) potential employers.

Why the community? Well, when you network, you do find out about all those un-advertised jobs. Either that, or you get notification from others who think you are the ideal candidate for the job advertised.

# November 27, 2004 8:45 AM

Darren Neimke said:

Thanks for your comments Will very valid. It sounds as though you guys are doing some good things over there in Melb.; in fact, from what I've seen and heard, it seems that all of the UG's are doing great things - we just need to keep building on top of that and improving.

I just reminded myself that there's another "partnering" industry that we should consider keeping close ties with and that's the Training industry.

I think that there are many natural synergies between training, recruiting and user groups.
# November 27, 2004 3:08 PM

Colt said:

Hi Darren,

I talked with Serena few weeks ago, she introduced her Paladin framework to me too and this generic framework looks promising! I'll try it out in a week or two as well.
<shu...>if you're ready for the Paladin framework, you may try to ping Serena and get the(unpublished) latest build rather than the GDN copy. :)
</shu...>
# November 27, 2004 11:52 PM

Jon Galloway said:

And an accompanying visual a friend recently sent me: http://public.hbk-bs.de/~baumgarn/zoomquilt/zoom.htm
# November 29, 2004 10:44 AM

Jon Galloway said:

Oops, bad link. Try http://www.cyphic.net/zoomquilt/zoom.htm
# November 29, 2004 10:45 AM

Daniel Moth said:

By CF2002 you clearly mean CF 1.0 :-)
Agreed on all the problems with visual inheritance in VS2003 and smart device projects, look forward to proper support in VS2005 (and CF 2.0).
# December 1, 2004 5:38 AM

CD said:

Do you expect everyone to have InfoPath on the desktop/device?
If not - then I have found a new tool InfoView at www.infoview.net.

# December 1, 2004 7:58 AM

Wallym said:

R U the Riddler?
# December 1, 2004 8:27 AM

Matt Tester said:

Had the same problems with the visual inheritance too. I got around it by declaring a Compilation Constant called DESIGN that was applied to a Configuration called Design. That way I could have my forms derive from System.Windows.Forms at design time, but when back in Debug configuration all was as it should be.

Not very clean eh? Looking forward to VS2005
# December 1, 2004 3:46 PM

Cameron Reilly said:

hey Darren, thanks for the plug mate! You rock.
# December 6, 2004 6:03 AM

Chris Frazier said:

But what I want to know is...do y'all REALLY drink Foster's down there? :)
# December 6, 2004 5:08 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Well Chris, I'm from Adelaide so, according to my birth certificate I'm not allowed to drink it. Adelaidean's are only allowed to drink the finest of ale's:

http://www.coopers.com.au/default2.asp

Although, I've heard that Fosters is consumed in other areas of the country :-)

http://www.vic.gov.au/index.jsp
# December 7, 2004 2:10 AM

TrackBack said:

# December 7, 2004 6:56 AM

Chris Frazier said:

OIC...They advertise it here in the states as: "Fosters; Austrailian for Bee-ah". The cans are huge, even by Texas standards.

Maybe I'll have to try a pint or two of coopers someday :)
# December 7, 2004 4:18 PM

Pierre Greborio said:

Just another possible resourse http://www.amazon.com/infopath ;-)
# December 8, 2004 1:52 AM

Matt said:

I find it quite sad that you posted these to your blog...
# December 8, 2004 2:06 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Hey Anonymous Matt... thanks for your disparaging remark.

Here's the rub my friend, this blog is mine. Yup, that's right; mine. Basically I can put whatever I like in the blog. Here's what I find rather sad... when anonymous people such as yourself come along and post rubbishing comments like yours in MY blog.

Mate, if this is the best, most productive comment that you can come up with then I suggest that you just whimper off and find something useful to amuse yourself rather than wasting your time trawling the web in search of crap that you can leave comments such as these against.

By the way do YOU blog? Hrm?
# December 8, 2004 2:23 PM

TrackBack said:

# December 8, 2004 5:55 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

Thanks for your kind words, Darren. Just FYI, a lot of the structure/architecture was modeled from the ASP.NET Forums (or "Community Server" as it's called now).
# December 14, 2004 11:55 AM

Mick (SplaTT) Stanic said:

I can't remember the last time i saw anyone order a Fosters...hang on...i do... it was in a bar in Seattle adn i think it was actually brewed in Canada ;)
# December 14, 2004 10:51 PM

Geoff Appleby said:

Sweet. Let me know when the next one's coming :)
# December 15, 2004 6:46 AM

Luke said:

Infopath may be a great product in so many ways but I've got say I was less than impressed at how it deals with "trust".

While this whole path dependant sillyness may leave me with warm nostalgic feelings, it's not something I want to deal with now that we've moved safely out of the 1980's.

I'm curious why Microsoft picked this method over the more popular hash based approaches.
# December 20, 2004 5:33 PM

Paul Glavich said:

Hi Darren,

Nice post. Very interested to hear about your impressions on Infopath, good and bad.
I blogged about something very similar just recently as well, regarding default namespaces and XPath statements. Post is http://weblogs.asp.net/pglavich/archive/2004/12/09/278565.aspx

- Paul
# December 21, 2004 5:58 PM

Darren Neimke said:

That's cool Paul. Now you just need to add it to your ProjectDistributor account :P
# December 21, 2004 8:02 PM

TrackBack said:

# December 30, 2004 5:08 AM

TrackBack said:

# January 1, 2005 3:00 AM

TrackBack said:

# January 2, 2005 2:52 AM

TrackBack said:

# January 3, 2005 3:27 AM

TrackBack said:

# January 3, 2005 5:03 AM

TrackBack said:

# January 3, 2005 8:47 AM

TrackBack said:

# January 3, 2005 3:51 PM

Eric W. Bachtal said:

Try pinging John Winkle:

http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/weblog/jwinkle/

Justin Rogers links to him, as with you, as a "Close Friends with Blogs".
# January 3, 2005 7:24 PM

David M. Kean said:

Nice and Fosters and in the same sentence, isn’t that an oxymoron?
# January 3, 2005 10:42 PM

TrackBack said:

I've been meaning to learn InfoPath for a while, and the new(ish) Toolkit for Visual Studio .NET, plus Christmas downtime gave me a chance. See the babbling in the full post. You've been warned -- I know, hard to believe I'm supposed to write for a living.
# January 4, 2005 4:07 AM

TrackBack said:

# January 6, 2005 2:20 AM

TrackBack said:

# January 6, 2005 2:33 AM

TrackBack said:

# January 6, 2005 8:03 AM

TrackBack said:

# January 6, 2005 12:01 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

So..................... any word?
# January 6, 2005 2:05 PM

Eric W. Bachtal said:

Any news?
# January 6, 2005 4:19 PM

Darren Neimke said:

Still no word although I'm still trying many different channels in an attempt to get into contact with Justin.
# January 6, 2005 5:36 PM

Eddie de Bear said:

I am clearly a superior nerd to you. I scored exactly 53 more than your score :)
hehehehe
# January 6, 2005 8:32 PM

Robert Hurlbut said:

I have been following this search as well as I recently noticed Justin has a lot of great information that is directly related to some of my own work lately. I have tried email and his web site, and both are down. Has anyone tried calling his number (it is on his resume)?
# January 6, 2005 8:33 PM

TrackBack said:

# January 6, 2005 8:41 PM

anthony m said:

i saw them in adelaide and it was killa...... every1 was smoking weed and dealing drugs
# January 6, 2005 10:13 PM

TrackBack said:

# January 7, 2005 1:34 AM