June 2006 - Posts
Interesting to see that Leslie Giblett, Release Manager on the Visual C++ team is offering specifics about "the upcoming VS2005 Service Pack (SP1) release."
As you see, that team lists the precise issues they're working on for the service pack release. What a great idea!
I don't work in C++, but it would be great to know what the VB, C#, and ASP.NET teams are doing as well. Has anyone seen similar details from them?
I just got a copy of Stephen Walther's latest book, ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed. If you know VB or C# but not ASP.NET 2.0, this book's for you. It's a comprehensive, task-based reference for intermediate to advanced Web developers. There's a good mix of explanatory content and code samples to get you moving on everything from skins to master pages, Web parts, profiles, and AJAX.
This is a very code-oriented book. Rather than walking you through the steps using the graphical interface and properties pages, the author shows the source code that you would type into the code editor or that Visual Studio would generate for you. While emphasizing the code is a perfectly valid approach, be aware that you might miss out on time-saving UI features.
Stephen has an interesting confession in his introduction to the book about Web standards. He recalls that he didn't care about standards when he wrote the first edition of ASP.NET Unleashed, and geared all the examples to Internet Explorer.
"I was young, stupid, and naïve," he writes. "The best way to create cross-browser-compatible websites is to follow web standards." To that end, all the code is XHTML compliant.
My complaint about ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed concerns the screenshots. I don't blame the author - it's the publisher's ridiculous graphical standards that I dislike. For some reason publishers demand that writers capture the full screen rather than just a relevant portion of the browser page. The result is often a half-page of mostly empty space with a tiny area of text and controls (page 152 for example) in the upper left corner. Oddly, two examples of properly-cropped screenshots slipped through in the last chapter (Building an E-Commerce Application) where the author focuses your attention on the AjaxRotator control and a W3C XHTML icon found on a Web page.
I was excited about the possibilities of generating custom Word 2003 documents on the fly using the ServerDocument object in Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005. My goal was to show how you could fill out a form on an ASP.NET 2.0 Web page, click a button, and download a custom document or have it emailed.
After investigating the error "System.Security.SecurityException: That assembly does not allow partially trusted callers", I discovered a severe limitation in the technology: it's almost impossible to use on public Internet sites because of the security model.
My ISP, ServerIntellect, runs ASP.NET pages with less than Full Trust, which makes sense. They kindly installed the VSTO 2005 runtime components. However, VSTO 2005 requires Full Trust permissions even when in the GAC.
According to MS Support, the "solution" is to create a Full Trust wrapper around VSTO's stuff, and tag the wrapper with AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute to allow it to run under partial trust. Trouble is, my wrapper would have to go into the GAC and an ISP would be understandably reticent about allowing that on a shared server.
The upshot is that unless you have direct control of the Web server, you'll have a rough time getting this to work. I'd love to be told I'm wrong about all this because it's really disappointing to limit this fine capability to corporate sites and intranets.
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