Greg Robinson's Blog

Harddrive crashes....

Well, it is gonna be a long day for me.  Came in this morning to a dead machine.  Good think I have nothing backed up...... :-(

Good VB.NET book

I am just about finished reading 'The Book of VB.NET' by Matthew MacDonald.  I also have his Windows Forms book. 

At first, I was not excited about 'The Book...'.  It seemed rather elementary, with a very slow start.

However, at about the mid-way point of reading it I started liking it.  Matthew writes the way I read, meaning I can learn quickly from the way he writes.  This book is not for folks who have been coding with VB.NET for 2+ years.  I highly recommend it for the beginner or one migrating from VB6 to VB.NET.  The book does not offer a lot of details nor does it go into depth on most subjects.  Having worked with most of the subjects covered, I can say that the book does hit them enough to get one started.   

It has been a quick read for me, however I have picked up some pointers along the way.  If you are new to VB.NET or have been working with it for less than 1 year, grab this book and add it to your bookshelf.  

Long time, no Blogs

So, I have been quite the quiet Blogger.  Been on vacation and we are also cranking away trying to get our first release out.  We have been living in  ADO.NET, BindingContext, Threading, Stored proc and User|Custom Control world.  One thing for sure, MS got it right with DataBinding and BindingContext.  Wow, how sweet this is and how much time and effort it has saved us.  We are using Janus's GridEX for our Grids.  All I can say is buy it now.  Do not waste your time with the .NET DataGrid (WinForms).

Our app pulls back a massive Dataset on the initial load. This was taking 6-7 seconds.  Using Threading, we are now spawning off many worker threads in the background to retrieve data the user does not need immediately when the app loads.  Doing this has cut 3-4 seconds off our app start up time.  Wow, threads scared me in VB 6.0, now, what a wonderful thing.  

We still have our headaches with the IDE and countless mini-dumps. We have to blow away our obj folders 2-3 times a day.  Still having problems with Project references and the compiler getting confused.  Hopefully this will be fixed in the next release.

Remove these headaches, and VS 2003 gets a A+.  Hovering around a B+ - A- for now though!

Scott, can we get some aspweblog blogger gear like Blogger is selling?

https://www.googlestore.com/cgi-bin/googlestore/GO0068.html

Go Agassi, Go Roddick, Go Capriati !!!

ADO.NET and Access

I see a lot of questions on ADO.NET and MS Access.  This white paper may help some folks:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnadonet/html/adon_wtaccessdb.asp

Yet more VS 2003 Woes

OK, so I am really disliking VS 2003.  I plan to purchase a stop watch just to see how much down time I have with stupid IDE hang ups!  My favorites this week:

"Could not copy temporary files to the output directory.
The file 'Maintenance.exe' cannot be copied to the run directory.  The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process."

All applications are shut down, only the IDE is running.  What fixes this?  Oh, about 10-15 closes and reopens of the IDE, or, going to the bin directories and deleting everything, all dlls, everything.  Then, I can do a Rebuild.  Usually keeps me down for about 10 minutes.  Yeah!

Caching Application Block

Now this looks promising:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=b55164c9-94c8-4077-aa29-afe4074746de&displaylang=en

File Ref vs. Project Ref

So, in follow up to my previous post, it seems there is a documented bug with Project References.  This is caused by a bug in the compiler.  In our case, it related to Forms inheritance.  Our workaround thus far is to use File References, and, so far so good. Good news is MS will not count this against our MSDN incidents when you decide to close the case.

VS .NET 2003

So, am I the only one totally frustrated with this?  We are building a Windows Form application and  went from MS VS .NET to .NET 2003 last week.  The application loads and runs fine.  However, the IDE is crashing all over the place.

It takes approx 2 minutes for our solution to open; used to take about 10 seconds.  Forms drop controls on Builds and of course the compiler throws Build errors when they are missing.  We can 'hack' at it for 10 minutes or so and will finally get a clean Build, then, next time, same thing. 

We can build one project and get a successful build.  We can then build another project that references the successfully built project, and suddenly, controls are missing from the successfully built project!  Sometimes, if we check out the project from VSS, we can get a good build.  Sometimes, if we close the Solution and re-opn, we can get a good build.  Other times, we hack for 1-2 hours and finnaly, without changing any code, can get a good build. 

This is happening on projects that contain window forms (SubType = "Form") only, ones that have not been modified in months.

Moving to V1.1

So, we finally moved to VS 1.1 Friday.  Initially, all tests were successful.  This week, MAJOR problems and headaches.  Windows Forms are dropping controls on Builds, we can 'Get Latest Version' from VSS and more problems I do not have time to document.  We have spent probably 5-10 hours of down down trying to work these out.  Problem is, this is V 1.0 code that has not been edited in months.  Now, Builds fail, VSS fails....GRRRRRR  

Not .NET related, but too cool

Too cool not to share

http://home.attbi.com/~bernhard36/honda-ad.html