May 2004 - Posts
Mike Schinkel, president of Xtras.Net, made an offer on his personal blog of a free XDN Professional membership (http://www.xtras.net/xdn) during the month of May 2004 for anyone that blogs about .NET frequently. If you are a .NET blogger, see Mike's post for how to get your free XDN membership.
Yep, me too.
[UPDATE] - Rob Caron posted a fix for the help problems. Thanks, Rob (and Josh and Saurabh, for responding to my post).
So I installed the May CTP drop of Visual Studio 2005. Unfortunately, I haven’t been having too much luck with it so far. For example:
- I created a basic Windows Forms app, dropped a MenuStrip on it, and picked “Insert standard items” to populate the toolbar. Unfortunately, when the menu draws itself (both at design time and run time), the menu item text and the hotkey are drawn overlapping, so what you see is a jumbled mess. Not too good. I didn’t have that problem with the March drop.
- I’m having zero luck with the help. Picking “Search” pops up a message box which says “The operation could not be completed. No such interface supported”.
- Also in Help, I can navigate the index successfully, but when I pick a topic, it never gets displayed. The status bar says “Downloading…”, but it never finishes.
On the plus side:
- Adding a web reference in the IDE seems to work better. The March drop never worked for me (at least with our web service). It also seems to add a bunch of data source stuff for the generated proxy classes, which looks interesting. Unfortunately, the proxies still generate with fields, not properties. However, if you run WSDL.EXE from the command line, you get properties and serializable classes, which is great (that was true in the March drop as well). I do wish there was an option to generate partial classes, as I think it could be useful to be able to attach behavior to the proxies.
- The test generation stuff is very interesting – but seems to be rather broken. The generated test code doesn’t compile (at least for the tests that it generated for me). Question – do the tests get compiled into the assembly? Are they excluded from release builds? I don’t see anything obvious that would cause them to be excluded from a particular build configuration.
Other quick comments:
- I don’t like the fact that the selected tab in a tab dock is lighter in color than the unselected tabs. This is the opposite of previous versions, and I constantly fight it.
- There still doesn’t seem to be AspCompat support in ASMX web services. I’m still holding out hope for that one.
- The default mode for a web project seems to have changed back to separate ASPX and CS files. Not sure what that’s about, or if it will stay that way. In fact, combined mode doesn’t seem to be working very well at all (can’t seem to hook up server events).
Barely scratched the surface so far…
Microsoft has posted the May Community Tech Preview of Visual Studio 2005 on the MSDN Subscriber download site. Woo hoo!
Looks like Web Services Enhancements 2.0 final release just popped onto MS Downloads. Download here.
I ran across
this post recently which mentions that the default indentation character for Whidbey has changed from tabs to spaces for the default C# profile. I'm not sure I like the sound of that. Now, I'll admit I'm a tab guy, not a space guy, but that's not my concern. Won't we end up with a mess of mixed indentation styles as we edit existing code? Sounds potentially very ugly. I realize that you can set the option back to tabs, but I'll bet most people won't.
I just discovered that
Reflector 4.0 includes a really cool new feature - it can automatically update itself when new versions are released. Wicked cool. Staying up to date on Reflector has always been a bit of a pain, but no longer.
Adam Nathan has posted a VS.NET add-in to gotdotnet.com that lets you easily find and insert PInvoke signatures directly into your code, using the PInvoke.net web site as its data source. Bugger! I had already started writing a similar add-in for my entry to Roy Osherove's add-in contest. Guess I'll have to come up with something else.
Very nice tool (and web site). Installed.
Update - Updated the URL, which changed after my intial post.
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