re: Caching, why it have to be so complicated ?

James Avery said:

GDI+ is very cool, and one of the best places to read some nice articles about it is over at http://www.aspalliance.com/chrisg/default.aspx. For your purpose if you want to build a web based paiting program you might want to look into building some complex javascript if you can't use flash. Check out this example here, it is pretty simple, but you could expand on it:
http://www.serve.com/apg/workshop/drawing/

# February 8, 2003 7:00 AM

Pascal Leloup said:

James this look cool ! I will try to use that. I don't know if a book on GDI+ is on the air somewhere, but I think it will be a great idea to do one

# February 8, 2003 9:08 AM

Jorge Curioso said:

Can you point to a demo of the justification issue?

# February 8, 2003 11:15 AM

Pascal Leloup said:

I will have Scoilnet 'Beta' running soon on one of our server !

Thanks Jorge for your interest.

# February 9, 2003 1:41 AM

Fabrice said:

Happy birthday Pascal!
How old are you turning, by the way? ;-)

# February 9, 2003 11:24 AM

Pascal Leloup said:

Well ... JKust turning 39 ! The big 40 coming soon ;-)

But the good news is that girls say that I'm looking 30 !

So why complaining

# February 9, 2003 11:26 AM

Daniel Bright said:

Happy BDay. I will be one year older on Wednesday... Maybe we should throw a party!

# February 9, 2003 1:12 PM

Jorge said:

Have you looked into storing the metadata in arrays, or xml, or whatever and then looping through the data and generating the controls at run-time?

I did this quite a bit in ASP and ASP.NET, although just spitting out HTML rather than generation asp: controls for the latter. If you need asp: controls, there are methods to generate these dynamically. (I don't know them off-hand, perhaps someone else can comment).

This also makes changing your layout a lot easier.

# February 11, 2003 10:14 AM

Fabrice said:

Maybe you are looking for window.location.reload().

# February 11, 2003 10:39 PM

Fabrice said:

Unfortunately, the answer is no since this editor relies on a client behavior (=htc, IE specific). If you want an editor that works with other browsers, you'll have to turn to a Java applet or to heavy javascripting.
But such tools already exist I think.

# February 11, 2003 11:08 PM

Fabrice said:

Maybe you could give a look at Soundex.

# February 12, 2003 5:42 AM

Pscal said:

Thanks Fabrice, I forgot Soundex ;-)

I will look at that

# February 12, 2003 5:45 AM

Slavomir Furman said:

Yes, .NET Framework v.1.1 and .NET Framework v.2.0 was developed in parallel starting almost right after release of .NET Framework 1.0

Slavo.

# February 12, 2003 8:41 PM

Jorge said:

Phil, why are you name-calling? It's pretty clear that any claims of fascism should be directed toward Iraq. Reasonable people may disagree over how to deal with the situation. And should not resort to mean-spirited inflammatory insults.

# February 16, 2003 12:35 PM

Robert McLaws said:

I have posted a response to the author of this post in private, where his response should have been as well. Pascal's opinion is noted, and he is allowed to have one. However, opinions can be noted without dropping down to a kindergarden level. I invite adult responses to my posts, but if you're going to resort to name-calling you need to find a better use of your time.

# February 16, 2003 3:20 PM

Chad Osgood said:

Can you provide more architectural details for the curious?

# February 18, 2003 2:18 AM

coacoacoa said:

A good solution is to transform a maximum of dynamics pages to make them statics.
You can generate static content each time the dynamic content is updated. Or you can check when a static page is requested if you have to re-generate it.
The good thing is that when asp.net or sqlserver are down, users can consult this pages.

# February 18, 2003 5:03 AM

Fabrice said:

I haven't seen IE crash for a long while.
I think it used to happen with 5-, but disappeared starting 5.5.

# February 19, 2003 3:24 AM

Scott Watermasysk said:

These fields will not show up in your blog. They are just for the Rss feed, but have yet to be implemented.

-Scott

# February 19, 2003 7:35 AM

Jason said:

If you want some good phone info, check out HowardForums [ http://www.howardforums.com ].

I've had the advantage to check out the T-Mobile PocketPC phone, basically an IPaq with integrated GSM/GPRS. It works surprisingly well, and runs CF.Net apps.
http://www.t-mobile.com/products/overview.asp?phoneid=166765

# February 19, 2003 10:32 AM

Richard Tallent said:

The multi-dropdown approach seems reasonable, I've created my own code to do this in a way that is compatible with Mozilla and IE for internal projects at work (I hate postback). You could also try the Yahoo/DMOZ process of drilling down by links, which has the added advantages of better caching options and a way for them to back out.

On the problem of narrowing the search, here's a partial solution: store the IP address of each visitor who successfully chooses their school. When a new visitor arrives, check their IP. If previous visitors are in the same class C subnet, use that country / state / etc. as the default option ("Are you at Jefferson Elementary in Podunk, Texas?"). Since many votes will likely come from the same schools, you can avoid the selection process for all but the first visitor. Even if a class C is shared by several schools, selecting from a menu of a few options is easier than drilling down through thousands.

# February 20, 2003 5:29 AM

Free Spam For Everyone said:

You can thank Charles Carroll for this one. He is giving lists of email address to those formerly subscribed to his ASPFriends list.

# February 21, 2003 5:49 AM

Jason said:

Yes, there has been a few emails flying around the coffeehouse list at aspadvice.com. Charles is trying to recreate the lists from aspfriends at Yahoo! He claims to have a 99% transfer rate from people that were on the old lists to the new ones. If you email him he will remove you from his list database so you will not receive emails now or in the future.

--Jason

# February 21, 2003 6:37 AM

TrackBack said:

heLP .Net Blog

# February 21, 2003 1:27 PM

Jorge said:

Excellent post, Phil.

I think that the strongly-typed aspect of .NET is one example of the double-edged sword. It gives you better performance and better compile-time checking, but the cost is that tackling a problem that was quick in, say, JScript, is often much more complicated (more lines of code, more types to deal with, etc).

Even though I like .NET, I often find myself working in old ASP/JScript when I need to through something together quickly.

For building a production-quality web app, however, I'd go with ASP.NET (and my own custom controls) in a heartbeat.

# February 23, 2003 7:38 AM

rick said:

Searching for .Net returns all references to .net web addresses (php.net is the first result returned), and I believe all references to just 'net' (such as Net Nanny) as well.

But hey, these .Net vs Java wars are pointless.

# February 24, 2003 11:42 AM

TrackBack said:

GooglFight : ISerializable

# February 24, 2003 5:51 PM

Royo said:

No camera, These were taken by someone else and are circulating via email all over israel...

# February 24, 2003 11:50 PM

Robert McLaws said:

This is the MS implementation of WS-Security, DIME, and other SOAP-based web services extensions. It also integrates these features into VS.NET 2002.

# February 25, 2003 2:20 AM

Pascal Leloup said:

Thanks Robert

Pascal

# February 25, 2003 2:33 AM

Mike Gunderloy said:

No need to wait for the CDs either; you can download it from http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/building/wse/default.aspx . Includes WS-Security, WS-Routing, WS-Attachments and DIME.

# February 25, 2003 2:43 AM

Ben Richardson said:

I would like to see the DotNetWeblogs homepage behave just like any other blog, with the ability to go back to days when you have been online and see what everyone has posted. I posted a comment on Scott W's blog but he didn't say anything about it. I guess he is pretty busy as is at the moment.

# February 25, 2003 9:55 PM

TrackBack said:

Development vs Production web.config files : Mitch Rupp's .NET Blog

# February 26, 2003 2:59 PM

TrackBack said:

Uh-oh... language wars! : Loosely Coupled

# February 27, 2003 2:17 PM

w said:

ddd

# March 1, 2003 2:37 AM

TrackBack said:

I'm a Gold Dragon! : Lance's Whiteboard

# March 1, 2003 9:21 AM

Thomas Wagner said:

Pascal,

Have a look at XML processing on SQL Server. You can hand the entire thing up as one xml string and then have the xml parsed in the sproc and handle the updates.

TW

# March 1, 2003 2:55 PM

kvr said:

Hi,

Please post your code again, cause the code
posted is missing an End If

Cheers,
Keesjan

# March 6, 2003 12:01 AM

Slavomir Furman said:

Hi,

>>Are we going to have more difficult and obscure classes and other strong features, or are we going to have a more 'friendly' model.<<

>>Does anybody know an equivalent link of the C# changes for VB ?<<

Thats are the questions!

I wrote about this in my weblog posts

"Few thoughts on .NET Language wars"
(http://dotnetweblogs.com/SFurman/posts/380.aspx)
and
"Is ASP.NET too complex? It depends."
(http://dotnetweblogs.com/SFurman/posts/2738.aspx)

btw, in mentioned "C# changes" document they stated that

"It is certainly Microsofts intent to support the consumption and creation of generic types in Visual J#, Visual C++, and Visual Basic. While some languages may implement this feature earlier than others, all of Microsofts other three languages will contain support for generics."

so we can get some form of generics (templates) in VB.NET, too. But it is still not know if this will be in v2.

# March 6, 2003 1:20 AM

TrackBack said:

.Net 2.0 request list? It's probably late for this... : SlavoF's WebLog

# March 6, 2003 6:10 AM

andy said:

Pretty fucking cool. What's going on with the earpiece though?

Oh yeah, the red pen seems to be pointing at you multiplying a 4x3 matrix by a 2x2 matrix. Is that 4x2 an answer you're getting? hmmmmm.

# March 6, 2003 1:04 PM

Datagrid Girl said:

Re: the pink--you bet my blogs'll be pink! :)

# March 11, 2003 7:04 AM

John said:

Hi,

Do you have a link to a page that shows your quiz in action?

I've been looking at something that could potentially be used in the open source Rainbow Implementation of IBUYSPY.

Thanks,

John

# March 12, 2003 10:31 PM

TrackBack said:

heLP .Net Blog

# March 13, 2003 4:22 PM

TrackBack said:

WROX Press : Phil Scott's WebLog

# March 14, 2003 10:06 AM

Jay Welshofer said:

I've been generally pleased with OneNote but am surprised by a few omissions.

- No real drawing tools. How about a rectangle and oval tool, or at least have the application try to "tidy" my sketches. Even the Newton did this much for me.

- The outlining tools a pretty poor, especially for a note-taking tool.

- No notion of send to back, bring to front, etc.

All in all it seems promising but I don't think I'll find myself using it much until version 2.

-jlw@pobox.com

# March 19, 2003 7:15 AM

Scott Watermasysk said:

Pascal,

Please remove the javascript from this post (http://dotnetweblogs.com/Pleloup/posts/4197.aspx

-Scott

PS: Here is the script:
<SCRIPT language=JavaScript src="http://amch.questionmarket.com/adsc/d123361/11/124383/randm.js"></SCRIPT>

<SCRIPT>document.onLoad=write_script(randnum)</SCRIPT>

# March 24, 2003 12:32 AM

Datagrid Girl said:

I hope so too!

# March 24, 2003 2:58 AM

Sean said:

Umm... might I suggest dotnetdudes.com? ;)

# March 24, 2003 6:06 AM

Roy said:

Just ask them. thee is an email there on the home page somewhere...
My guess is that if they support 3 groups here in usrael, there is support in ireland as well, someone just needs to step up and do something about it ..:)

# March 24, 2003 10:15 AM

TrackBack said:

We're so Lucky!! (INETA Speakers in Vermont...) : Julia Lerman Blog

# March 24, 2003 10:31 AM

Wally said:

Yo, I think she's married.

# March 24, 2003 11:55 AM

TrackBack said:

INETA Europe : Julia Lerman Blog

# March 24, 2003 5:56 PM

TrackBack said:

User Groups : heLP .Net Blog

# March 24, 2003 5:56 PM

julie said:

sounds like they could use some help (hint hint)...<g>

# March 24, 2003 11:33 PM

Joao Paulo Carreiro said:

They must be using the "popup" object, that you have with IE 5.5+.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/objects/popup.asp

# March 27, 2003 11:33 PM

julie said:

have you tried Andy et alia at www.SQLServerCentral.com?

# March 27, 2003 11:50 PM

Paul Speranza said:

There were articles on MSDN about this problem.

Guess what - it works in Mozilla. You'd think that after the questions MS got about it they would have made it work without forcing you to the IE specific popup object.

Maybe IE 6.5 or 7 will catch up.

Paul Speranza

# March 28, 2003 12:31 AM

Datagrid Girl said:

Cool. I just added it to my articles page. Let me know if you see any other neat Datagrid articles that I'm missing.

# March 28, 2003 2:00 AM

TrackBack said:

Windowed controls : Loosely Coupled

# March 28, 2003 5:38 AM

TrackBack said:

Editing of datagrid with Images : heLP .Net Blog

# March 28, 2003 5:41 AM

Fabrice said:

This kind of things is always a pain for regular users, not pirates.
What is this forcing us to do? Become pirates!

# March 28, 2003 6:03 AM

Deepak Sharma said:

I once followed Rugby..some 3-4 years back...At that time Jonah Lomu (All Blacks) was the greatest...:)

# March 28, 2003 6:58 AM

TrackBack said:

Dana said:

Thanks y'all! I'm just getting the hang of blogging here too - I've now discovered my new anti work time waster! WOO HOO! Glad to be here and I hope to entertain y'all with my innane ramblings!

d

# March 31, 2003 10:44 PM

julie said:

knock...knock...excuse me, hello...

<g>

# April 1, 2003 12:07 AM

sirshannon said:

I don't have an answer for the question, but for me, it IS a money issue. The day AFTER the news leaked that they were shutting down, I was charged for another month's membership. That was March 15. Does that make me a creditor now?

# April 2, 2003 1:12 PM

TrackBack said:

ViewState : Jesse Ezell Blog

# April 5, 2003 11:25 AM

Dan F said:

just fishing wildly in the dark here, but can you
DirectCast the results of findcontrol back to a known interface, then grab the value out of viewstate thru a known member of the interface?
ie:
DirectCast(page.findcontrol("myctl"),MyControlInterface).getviewstatevalue("MyValue")

I don't have .net open at the moment, so thats probably not going to compile!

# April 6, 2003 12:43 AM

Samer Ibrahim said:

Bro,
Quite honestly, I don't think he meant it that way. I think "we" = "the coalition forces". I think the choice of words were just for a show of solidarity with our troops. People use the word "we" for many thing for which they aren't physically present, eg. in sporting events it's not uncommon to hear a fan say "'we' scored". While this is by no means a sporting event, "we" is a unifying word, quite appropriate for these times. Not to mention we is much shorter than the coalition forces.
-Sam

# April 6, 2003 8:53 PM

Dan F said:

"which gets and sets the value inside of the viewstate"
that's the key bit of what Jesse wrote. the public property is merely a window into the viewstate, so it'll persist betwen page loads.
Think about it. Its not that hard!

# April 7, 2003 1:00 AM

Brad More said:

There are also more than a few of us who are former military and are seeing our friends in action. It is pretty easy to slip back into familiar patterns when "your" unit is engaged.

-brad

# April 7, 2003 2:15 AM

sirshannon said:

"we" are at war. Just because I am not there doesn't mean that we are not at war.

# April 7, 2003 3:52 AM

TrackBack said:

Viewstate (2) : Jesse Ezell Blog

# April 7, 2003 4:13 AM

Jesse Ezell said:

From within the control, you can use properties to write to viewstate:

public class MyControl : WebControl
{
public string MyValue
{
get
{
return (string)ViewState["MyValue"];
}
set
{
ViewState["MyValue"] = value;
}
}

public void SomeMethod()
{
MyValue = "Something"; // set persistent property value
}
}

from outside the class, you use the properties as well:

public class OtherClass
{
public void SomeMethod()
{
MyControl c = new MyControl();
c.MyValue = "something"; // Set persistent property value
}
}

# April 7, 2003 4:26 AM

Phil Weber said:

Here's how I do it (the variable 'HTML' is a String containing the HTML code):

Dim regEx As New Regex("<[^>]+>")
Dim Text As String = regEx.Replace(HTML, "")

# April 13, 2003 11:14 PM

Martin Spedding said:

Hi,

a good idea. I would suggest also doing an rss feed, like the one that Chad(http://dotnetweblogs.com/Cosgood/) created from Fabrice's tool list.

Have fun

Martin Spedding

# April 13, 2003 11:39 PM

Scott Watermasysk said:

Its not perfect yet, but this was announced a little while ago: Search

-Scott

# April 14, 2003 12:28 AM

Christian Dehaeseleer said:

If your HTML is not "simple" then RegEx will not work... (what if your HTML contains "<" etc.).

Another option is to parse your HTML as XML with SgmlReader (available on GotDotNet) and then treat the XML as you wish (for instance using a default XSL Template will remove all tags...)

# April 14, 2003 12:34 AM

Robert McLaws said:

I have never once called anything that you have written "crap". I at least have the courtesy of having something constructive to say when I have a rebuttal. You could at least have the decency of showing me the same respect that I show you.

If you don't have a comment, then why did you add one anyways? Doesn't that mean that you <i>have</i> a comment? The very fact that you posted on it was a comment, so you can't say "no comment", because it is one.

# April 14, 2003 3:36 AM

TrackBack said:

A note to everyone : Bob.NET

# April 14, 2003 3:36 AM

TrackBack said:

Irrational behavior : Loosely Coupled

# April 14, 2003 3:36 AM

Robert McLaws said:

BLOGS EXIST FOR PEOPLE TO SPEAK THEIR MIND.

I'm fed up with people who can't tolerate other people's opinions.

# April 14, 2003 3:58 AM

gyurisc said:

here is my quick and dirty solution, although with regular expressions is more elegant, I guess I need to buy a RegExp book :)))

public static string StripHTMLTags(string html)
{
string[] open_fragments = html.Split(new Char[] {'<'});
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

foreach(string fragment in open_fragments)
{
int loc = fragment.IndexOf('>');

// the very last char is the closing tag
if(fragment.Length-1 == loc)
continue;

if(loc>0)
sb.Append(fragment.Substring(loc+1));
else
sb.Append(fragment);
}

return sb.ToString();
}

# April 14, 2003 4:45 AM

Robert McLaws said:

Then why are you ALWAYS the one the says something every time I am controversial? Geez man I was trying to be considerate.

# April 14, 2003 11:54 AM

Robert McLaws said:

I promise I won't bring you up anymore.

# April 14, 2003 11:54 AM

G. Andrew Duthie said:

I'll say the exact same thing to you as I'm saying to Robert...could you PLEASE both take this discussion off-line? I don't care who started it, or who said what, but you're both wasting people's time with this.

# April 14, 2003 12:08 PM

TrackBack said:

ISerializable

# April 14, 2003 12:46 PM

Jeff Julian said:

keep it going, I love it when geeks fight. Its a great time. Honestly.

# April 14, 2003 1:27 PM

TrackBack said:

Today I have discovered... : Bob.NET

# April 14, 2003 7:07 PM

julie said:

Hey Paschal- what happened to using the asp list serves for this stuff? I never see you there anymore.

# April 15, 2003 1:11 AM

Paschal said:

Yeah you right Julie, just didn't think about it ;-))

# April 15, 2003 1:29 AM

Tim Marman said:

Pascal - when I get home today I'll post an extensive rant on this, and some thoughts on how you can work around it. We've dealt with this a lot in the past.

While you're at it.... try using the refresh button on any postback :)

# April 15, 2003 1:43 AM

Jesse Ezell said:

You can create a server side history object and add new entries when !IsPostBack && url != lastUrl, you can use this info to implement your own back functionality. Still, I don't know if you can hook into the back button with JS (or if you would want to, because you need to post back when the user clicks the back button to adjust the cursor in the history).

# April 15, 2003 3:17 AM

Guy Murphy said:

Wrox is absolutely definately bust... currently working with one of thier [ex-]technical editors.

# April 15, 2003 1:52 PM

Wes Haggard said:

I posted http://dotnetweblogs.com/Whaggard/posts/4396.aspx about free asp.net hosting at http://www.dotnetplayground.com/

Wes

# April 16, 2003 1:14 AM

Fabrice said:

The problem with .NET Playground is that they have the same policy than WebMatrixHosting for file size : files bigger than 1 MB are automatically deleted. So it won't do it.

# April 16, 2003 2:39 AM

Thomas Sullivan said:

yes

# April 19, 2003 12:21 AM

TrackBack said:

Interesting ! : heLP .Net Blog

# April 23, 2003 2:26 PM

TrackBack said:

Inside the new ValidateRequest feature : heLP .Net Blog

# April 23, 2003 2:26 PM

TrackBack said:

Inside the new ValidateRequest feature : Eric J. Smith's Weblog

# April 23, 2003 2:26 PM

garrett said:

anyone know where I can download the aol beta test for pocket pc 2002?

# April 23, 2003 3:53 PM

Royo said:

heh - I just tried both of them and both are cool. Since they are both very different(NewzCrawler is mainly for reading and a little for posting and w.Blogger is mainly for posting) I guess I'll use them both!

# April 28, 2003 4:11 AM

Dustin Mihalik said:

I can field this one. Some of the groups may release their code, but there will not be any central location. Most of the groups probably will not. Some are even currently selling thier applications.

# April 28, 2003 5:47 AM

julie said:

So Paschal. If you refer to Bill Gates as God, then who are you referring to here as Jesus? <g>

# April 28, 2003 6:40 AM

Mads Nissen said:

NAnt could be a good idea if its complex enough. http://nant.sourceforge.net i think. I wrote some intellisense schemas for nant buildfiles in vs.net if you should decide to start using nant. link to it on gotdotnet from my blog.

# April 28, 2003 11:00 AM

TrackBack said:

ASP.NET Authentication Question Answer : ISerializable

# April 28, 2003 11:13 AM

Rajesh said:

Check this out
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q810280

# April 29, 2003 9:20 AM

jeff said:

ie6's CSS2 support is weak...also i've had it crash many many times

# April 30, 2003 3:09 AM

Jeff Julian said:

That is soooo cooooolllll. I am a gadget guy and you just made my day.

# April 30, 2003 2:42 PM

HumanCompiler said:

Very nice and a great idea! (y)

# April 30, 2003 7:21 PM

Jim Arnold said:

That's pretty funny. So instead of just requesting the page and handling any errors, you request it once, assert that it exists (or handle any errors if it doesn't), then request it *again* (by which time it might have become unavailable)? Genius :-)

Jim

# May 2, 2003 1:56 AM

cathal said:

I'd recommend books24x7.com . They're a little bit more expensive than safari at $300/year for the ITPro section, but have a very large collection of books, including their own material, and are continually adding books.

They've a trial, that gives full access, but obfustacates content so you can get a feel for it.

# May 2, 2003 2:51 AM

Christophe Lauer said:

Hi,

You must be reading DotNET-fr, don't you ? ;-))

See U,
Christophe

# May 2, 2003 5:39 AM

cathal said:

ASAIK windows authentication requires the users to be authenticated to the same domain as the webserver. Check and see if these users are not domain authenticated, but instead logged on locally. You could parse the request.servervariables collection for LOGON_USER, and check if your domain name is at the start

# May 2, 2003 5:44 AM

TrackBack said:

Inside the new ValidateRequest feature : Eric J. Smith's Weblog

# May 2, 2003 6:03 AM

Editor said:

The ParodyTimes is a satirical online newspaper features news and event from a world remarkably similar to our own.
Don't miss the articles and pitures of the iraqi minister of information, George W Bush, Tony Blair etc

http://www.parodytimes.com

# May 5, 2003 10:20 PM

HumanCompiler said:

This isn't new to 1.1, it was in 1.0 too

Here's one from GDN:
http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/windowsforms/iesourcing.aspx

# May 7, 2003 3:13 PM

HumanCompiler said:

Oops, sorry, forgot...also check out this forum for it ;)

http://www.windowsforms.net/Forums/ShowForum.aspx?tabIndex=1&tabId=41&ForumID=17

# May 7, 2003 3:14 PM

Kenneth LeFebvre said:

I've been using Pocket-Controller (from Soft Objects Technologies, Inc.) with my Pocket PC for over a year, now, and it's great.

Imagine the Pocket PC emulator that you use for developing applications with, only the "emulator" is actually controlling the real thing... it's pretty much like RDP into the Pocket PC.

http://www.soti.net/

# May 8, 2003 12:20 AM

Chris Szurgot said:

If you got to the QuickStarts in the samples (or on gotdotnet.com), there's a good example that will get you started.

# May 8, 2003 1:11 AM

Paschal said:

Yes Kenneth I use Pocket controller too, but I think it's cool if you go to do some presentations, or if you have some notes to write with a bigger screen

# May 8, 2003 1:17 AM

Robert McLaws said:

Since when did passion become such a bad thing?

# May 8, 2003 5:38 AM

SBC said:

Maybe the teenagers in Japan are more grown up?
;)

# May 8, 2003 6:16 AM

TrackBack said:

heLP .Net Blog

# May 8, 2003 12:21 PM

TrackBack said:

Robert McLaws

# May 8, 2003 12:32 PM

TrackBack said:

heLP .Net Blog

# May 9, 2003 5:30 AM

Scott Prugh said:

Yes. It is a shame that TSQL doesn't have crosstab. I'm hoping for support like this in Yukon(plus a lot of over cool TSQL enhancements).

I don't know the specifics about what you are trying to solve but.....

Anyways, if you are doing a lot of sophisticated analysis, you may want to look at OLAP services. You can build a cube that allows you to pivot on dimensions in your data.

# May 9, 2003 5:35 AM

TrackBack said:

heLP .Net Blog

# May 9, 2003 12:59 PM

julie said:

Paschal-
Except for the desire to "buy local" which is very strong indeed for me, why limit yourself to the UK for hosting? I use a host that is far away in northern (I think) Canada. But their rates are great, their level of expertise is awesome and their service is fantastic. Ok - I should do them a nice favor - it's Alentus. But the point is, you can use any host right? Unless this is for your big national school project - then I can understand the importance of using a "local" host.

# May 10, 2003 1:58 AM

G. Andrew Duthie said:

I would tend to agree with you that the proper way of going about things would've been a one-time email to the old list subscribers pointing them to where they could subscribe to the new list(s).

Whether or not the intent was pure, automatically subscribing people to a new list was, IMO, wrong both from the standpoint of netiquette, as well as from the standpoint of the rules of the Yahoo groups.

I know Scott from other venues, and I'm sure he meant well, but I do think the transition from old lists to new should have been handled differently.

# May 10, 2003 8:30 AM

DonXML said:

We do the same thing, but with SVG, using the SharpVectors libraries.

DonXML

# May 12, 2003 4:04 AM

Michael Cook said:

Yes, this would be an awsome thing.

# May 12, 2003 5:21 AM

Jesse Ezell said:

Indexed positions are always going to be faster than string comparisons, not matter what the context of the collection is. Still, even faster would be to use protected members of your class, which ASP.NET will automatically set if you are using usercontrol or web forms. The style code isn't going to make much difference either way, but I would recommend setting the actual property (ie. BackColor instead), since the webcontrols support down level rendering when you use these properties.

If you are so concerned about performance that you need to be wondering about the impact of things like this, you might want to take a look at output caching or just bypass web controls all together and directly output HTML using the Render method instead.

# May 12, 2003 6:41 AM

Jesse Ezell said:

You can cache at the control level. If you are using ascx files, the directive works the same as the page caching directive. If you are using custom/composite controls, then you have to do some footwork to cache the results, but the Cache object is both powerful and easy to use, so you can give whatever granularity you want without much difficulty.

# May 12, 2003 7:56 AM

TrackBack said:

ISerializable

# May 12, 2003 8:14 AM

Sreedhar said:

Wow!! I like your Idea!!

# May 12, 2003 11:18 AM

TrackBack said:

heLP .Net Blog

# May 12, 2003 11:30 AM

TrackBack said:

Don XML Blog (not that Don)

# May 12, 2003 12:01 PM

TrackBack said:

heLP .Net Blog

# May 12, 2003 2:48 PM

Bryan said:

Where can I download Aol for the Ipaq

# May 14, 2003 7:27 AM

SBC said:

It looks like a good tool but overpriced - may be OK for $89 rather than $189.

# May 14, 2003 2:16 PM

Ted Graham said:

Applets never became very popular and people are more concerned about security now than in '97.

# May 15, 2003 7:09 AM

Paschal said:

Ted I am not agree with you. OK for the security but they are still popular.

So if it's not applet, why not something equivalent to let me run a .Net Windows project.

I take for example the differences that you have in GDI+ between a windows app and the web.

I would like to interact on the web like a paint application or something like that

# May 15, 2003 7:25 AM

DonXML said:

.Net does have something that will run in a browser (just IE though). You can host a WinForm within a Webform. Just put the dll on your website and then refer to it thru the object tag. set the classid attribute to your dll and then a # and then the class name for your control.

Like this: classid="ieControl.dll#myControl"

DonXML

# May 15, 2003 7:42 AM

DonXML said:

Here's a link on how to do it:

http://samples.gotdotnet.com/quickstart/winforms/doc/WinFormsIeSourcing.aspx

# May 15, 2003 7:51 AM

Paschal said:

Thanks Don. But I don't want to look to greedy ;-) but what's about other browsers ?

I am trying actually to do so for a Rich Text Editor, and to make it working for every browsers.

Reading Christopher post, I found that's indeed you have already this done with applets.
I would like also to finish one project I have in mind for my school portal, a kinf of Paint application using GDI+. Quite difficult outside a windows project isn't it ?
And the list is not finish, like small games, etc...

# May 15, 2003 8:19 AM

TrackBack said:

Yosi Taguri's WebLog

# May 15, 2003 8:56 AM

Duncan Mackenzie said:

GDI+ apps are cool, but why do them in the browser... do them on the desktop, or as a href exe (they launch from a http://myserver.com/mypaintapp.exe url)

# May 15, 2003 10:33 AM

DonXML said:

If you want to do GDI+ apps in the browser, use SVG instead. As someone who is working on a SVG rendering engine using GDI+, I've got to say that they are very close. And SVG is cross browser. Well most browsers either have a plugin (ugh!) or handle it natively (Mozilla & XSmiles).

Right now you can add the SharpVectors Viewer to your pages for IE, to get SVG in IE, or you can use Adobe's SVG viewer.

DonXML

# May 15, 2003 12:27 PM

Paschal said:

Don SVG is an option. But the problem is the plugin stuff.
In schools, well in Ireland, they have some strong security policies in place.
Duncan, yes an exe why not in an Intranet, but as an internet, no way.
The other problem is that the Paint application f.e, must be embedded in a web template.
I know I sound stubborn but I try some fantastic stuff with GDI+, but on the web the only things I see until now is to draw ellipses or circles. Not really fancy

# May 15, 2003 8:22 PM

Serdar Kilic said:

You know it's only for US and Canada right? :(

# May 15, 2003 9:17 PM

Paschal said:

Yes but you can still found a way to have it :-)

# May 15, 2003 9:48 PM

Damit said:

This isn't much use to us outside the US... unless I go to the US and get it. =)

# May 16, 2003 12:27 AM

Jim Meeker said:

I joined this last year and I'm about to renew my subscription. It's VERY worth while!!! If it included Visual Studio .NET it would be perfect.

# May 16, 2003 12:33 AM

DonXML said:

SVG is just the beginning. It's sort of like calling Don Box, RSS Man. It a passion, but there lots more than just SVG.

DonXML

# May 16, 2003 1:23 AM

Serdar Kilic said:

Pascal, do you mind sharing your solution on how to obtain this, ahh, only if it doesn't rely on you knowing someone in the States :)

# May 16, 2003 1:33 AM

Jeff Julian said:

even though I don't blog here, I still hang out, and DataGridGirl named me "The Speedy Jeff Julian" for my commenting skills :)

http://dotnetweblogs.com/datagridgirl/posts/6823.aspx

# May 16, 2003 2:26 AM

Paschal said:

Well not really difficult I have an address in US ;-))

# May 16, 2003 2:59 AM

Jim Meeker said:

Well if DGG said it, then so let it be written, so let it be done. ;-)

# May 16, 2003 6:05 AM

Frans Bouma said:

In the netherlands: http://www.nedcomp.nl/ (site is in dutch, I don't know if you'll understand that)

There are not a lot of hosters at the moment pushing .net. You can't host the project on your own production servers?

# May 17, 2003 10:35 PM

Frans Bouma said:

Oh this link is much better: http://www.aspnl.com/aspnl/nl/links/hosting.asp

"Ook" means "Also". So if you see "Ook ASP.NET" that's a hoster you might get in contact with.

# May 17, 2003 10:36 PM

Paschal said:

Thanks Frans, I will have a look.

No I cna't host this project, this is something totally not to do with my actual company. I don't understand dutch but well .Net is the same word in every language isn't it :-)

# May 17, 2003 10:39 PM

Phil Jollans said:

Version 1.1 now supports C#.

# May 18, 2003 6:06 AM

Victor Lindesay said:

Some UK .Net hosting links
http://oneandone.co.uk/
http://www.hostinguk.net

# May 18, 2003 8:31 AM

Robert McLaws said:

Does it matter that your servers are in the UK? If not, I own a hosting company in the US, andI would be willing to give you some space on my servers if you like.

# May 18, 2003 8:43 AM

Frans Bouma said:

IE contains some unpatched holes related to javascript. IE is not an application you want to run on a production server :)

# May 18, 2003 10:52 PM

Cathal said:

Looks like fasthosts are supporting it too.

http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/

The main problem I have with them is they overload servers. If you want any amount of performance I'd recommend you upgrade any site to Gold.

# May 18, 2003 10:59 PM

Paschal said:

Yes I know but when MS give me the opportunity to play with a new toy I can't resist ;-)

By the way it's really fast. Of course on my servers, I will not remove windows security.

# May 18, 2003 11:17 PM

Cathal said:

You can instantiate objects via javascript e.g. filesystem object/cdonts etc., and having it running also makes cross-site scripting attacks possible.

# May 19, 2003 12:39 AM

Paschal said:

Cathal good point, but how can you do that ?

I didn't know that you could call a CDONTS object from Javascript. That sounds difficult.

# May 19, 2003 1:29 AM

TrackBack said:

heLP .Net Blog

# May 19, 2003 7:44 AM

Adam Hill said:

I disagree. You as a programmer should be able to distinguish *your* environment and the users. Changing a browser to enable you to deliver more value per unit of time for a client should not be effecting how you test an app in ovbious ways.

To totally isolate things I go so far as to run websites in virgin OS installs in VMWare machines. Then start applying patches until I am current and everything is working.

adam...

# May 19, 2003 10:32 AM

paschal said:

For a web app what a waste of time ! Using vm to test a win app ok, but if you have a standard browser, you will find more efficient to have a standard set of tools

# May 19, 2003 10:57 AM

Craig said:

Cojm

# May 19, 2003 3:59 PM

OmegaSupreme said:

I second this, front page was so WHACK and its just so old microsoft.

We do need a new, cool sounding name, hmmm how about :

server extensions.net

or

servex.net

oh well better leave the marketing gurus to come up with one :D

# May 20, 2003 4:38 AM

Cadmium said:

Seconded, or rather thirded. And please refrain from using the term "Whack"... it hurts the team ;)

# May 20, 2003 8:00 AM

Adrian Harding said:

iPod mate ;)

# May 21, 2003 8:53 AM

Christophe Lauer said:

Hi,

Just drop me a mail (my blogs user's name @microsoft.com, as you can guess) if you want a contact at Microsoft Europe with someone in charge of ISP and hosters.

Regards,
Christophe Lauer

# May 21, 2003 10:09 AM

Michael Wexler said:

A couple of things:
1) SPSS has a pretty good pivot tool built into its newest version (11.5). It may be in 11.0 as well. Check with your spss user (casestovars is the command).

2) There are some pretty good t-sql scripts out there which do pivots; a good one was in sql magazine a few years ago.

3) The best is SAS's proc transpose. I've found no other etl or database tool which comes close to the plain power of this procedure.

Best of luck. Pivots have been top of my list for years of relational database work, but I'm still searching...

Michael
wexler at yahoo dot com

# May 22, 2003 4:41 AM

Gary Cornell said:

It's coming back, we bought it and are going to bring it back better than before - but it is going to take time.

Gary Cornell
Publisher Apress

# May 24, 2003 4:57 PM

Drew Robbins said:

I feel your pain. My HD crashed two weeks ago, on my first day in a two week trip to Japan. Ouch! My most recent backup was spotty. I have some demos and other projects that are not "production," nonetheless I put some significant hours into just before I left. Gone. Stupid me.

I didn't obsfucate any of the assemblies, so I'm going to try some decompilers. The word is they can produce some pretty clean code from .NET assemblies.

# May 27, 2003 4:20 AM

Paschal said:

Drew you have some ideas bout tools to do that ?

# May 27, 2003 4:38 AM

Frans Bouma said:

It depends on how you store / separate your content. Main thing is: store your content in a given format (be it article has 1 or more Items has one or more Elements which are of type string/table/image etc or just a blurp of text) and be able to retrieve it in an XML format so you can apply any viewer to it you can think of using XSLT. This way you keep the content in the database once (as a separate unit) and view it on different locations using different viewers (f.e. on the frontpage differently than on a product page).

In my commercial CMS, CESys, I used containers, with items and elements. An item is of a given type, and per Container-item-element you have a different XSLt viewer. You can then decide to store the XSLT appliance statically (when the Item is saved / added to a container) so you can retrieve html/wml very fast, or you apply the XSLT on the fly, which is more dynamically but slower. This can be done on a per page / user basis, since you have the two stored separately the contents and the cached HTML / wml generated.

Generating HTML / wml on the fly without serious caching (using asp.net f.e.) is very slow compared to static caching in the database and most of the time not necessary. WHen you work with blocks like 'items' you can create user-defined pages even with static generated HTML. :)

# May 27, 2003 5:13 AM

Addy Santo said:

Hi,

After several years of working with CM systems, I can give the following tips:

1. the #1 problem with static sites is that they are useless. You will almost always need at least some portion of the site to be dynamic- for example banners, the date, user info, etc. So creating static "snapshots" of your content is usually NOT a good idea.

2. One of the key parameters to be aware of is the R/W ratio. If your site has a high ratio (~10000:1 or more) then you can usually get away with various caching schemes. Any lower than that and you are probably better off doing dynamic rendering. For example, if you get 10 hits a second and update once an hour, your ratio is 10*60*60 = 36K:1 which means you should definitely be caching. On the other hand, if you implement personalization on the same site, you could have 36K UNIQUE hits each hour, with an effective ratio of 1:1. Then you would need to consider caching at the sub-page level - see next bullet

3. When caching, you need to decide what to cache. The ASP.NET method caches the actual HTML output, which usually isn't very usefull unless you add a layer on top to manage page fragments (ASP.NET does this but not very well). Sometimes it is better to cache the "raw" content and render it on the fly- this approach is more suited toward personalization, multiple device support, etc. Most of the real-world solutions are hybrids which do a little bit of each and also some other stuff.

4. Each CM solution (and it's cache management solution) is geared toward a specific site size... caching for a one box solution will be much simpler than a multi-site multi-farm solution with content propagation, etc.

Bottom line- understand the customer, understand the requirements, understand the budget, then go buy an out-of-the-box solution. Home-grown site management tools are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

# May 27, 2003 5:24 AM

Jesse Ezell said:

Anakrino is very good, Lutz's Reflector is also very good and now has a decompiler built in (I like its disassembler a bit more). You can find links to both on Fabrice's tools list or google.

# May 27, 2003 5:36 AM

Jesse Ezell said:

Don't create static pages under any circumstances, use caching. Remember, the static pages are logically equivalent to cached copies of your dynamic pages. The difference is that you have to do a lot of extra work if you are going to save your pages to the hard disk somewhere (and, synchronization quickly becomes a pain if you have to cluster your systems and you are using static content), but simple caching can be enabled with one little directive at the top of your page.

# May 27, 2003 5:40 AM

Drew Robbins said:

Try Lutz Roeder's "Reflector for .NET." It decompiles to C# or VB. Field names and local names are not recovered (as expected) but its still better than losing everything.

http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/

Lutz's tool seems to be pretty solid. If you find something else that works better, let me know.

# May 27, 2003 5:52 AM

Jesse Ezell said:

You can call functions in the opener window like this:

window.opener.myFunction();

So, the usual approach I take is to have my popup dialog take a parameter called "Handler" which is the name of a javascript function in the main page. Something like this in the caller page:

function myHandler(controlID, value)
{
// do something, such as
// calling "__doPostBack" to fire
// an event handler.
}

And in the popup dialog, you do something like this:

void MySubmitButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Page.RegisterStartupScript("__close", String.Format("<script>window.opener.{0}({1},{2})</script>", Request["Handler"], Request["ControlID"], someValue));
}

# May 27, 2003 5:57 AM

Paschal said:

thanks Jesse

# May 27, 2003 6:14 AM

Paschal said:

Jesse ok I follow you but in this project, each page has a lot of controls, each of them doing a specific function.

The issue I have is that I can't cache those controls, they are dynamic. For example I have a Poll control, which take the questions from the database, or a Story box which contains stories kids can post.

Until now, unless I'm wrong, I have no idea how I can cache some controls and not some others in an easy way.

# May 27, 2003 6:18 AM

Paschal said:

Addy I agree with what you say but not for the last one.
I worked with different CMS tools like Vignette for example, and it was always a painful experience.
I say so for small and medium projects, maybe for a news website they are perfect.
I found many times also their templates approach very restrictive, and difficult to adapt.
I don't want to have my site looking the same for each single page. And finally, they are difficult to work with self made controls

# May 27, 2003 6:22 AM

Paschal said:

Thanks Jesse, but I understood well, this is exactly the opposite effect I want to achieve.

I click on a button on the main page and I want to open a window.

I want to keep the vote selected store it in the database and show in the popup the poll results.
so I could save the vote from the Main page or from the popup, but I want to be sure to include the last vote in the results display on the poll.
Your example seem to do the opposite, it fire an event from the popup.

# May 27, 2003 6:40 AM

Phil Scott said:

Before I got my current machine, I had been using a laptop for all my development work. I got one of those desktop replacements laptops that are around quite heavy, with a nice 15.7" screen.

But the performance of the hard drives was terrible, so I moved to a full desktop.

But you got me on the RAID question short of using a couple USB drives in RAID.

# May 27, 2003 6:46 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Forget the concept of 'page'. Focus on content elements. Apply viewers (xslt is nice to use) to these elements depending where they appear on which page, but do not focus on a page. F.e. a newsitem can be added twice to the same page: once as a headline (using a headlineviewer which creates a link from the item to the actual item on the same page) and once as a full item. It also can then be on the front page as 'the last newsitem added' or similar, you get the idea. The same data, different viewers. Addy's remarks about caching/updating are pretty good and usable what you then should do with those viewers: apply to the item once so it gets rendered very fast or on the fly.

# May 27, 2003 6:47 AM

Datagrid Girl said:

Funny! How can I get those images? :)

# May 27, 2003 6:54 AM

Paschal said:

Jesse, I already have the items concept applied.
I called them boxes, but it's the same, they can be duplicated.
I see the point with the viewers. so if I understand well, I can cache a raw content and apply a viewer (XSL) to render the box. Am I right ?

# May 27, 2003 6:55 AM

Paschal said:

Phil Imagine if I have to add to my James Bond outfit a Raid USB drive ;-)
Wow two mobile phones two PDAs the laptop and the USB Raid. And I don't mention the car !

# May 27, 2003 7:09 AM

Jesse Ezell said:

Yah. You can do that (take a look at the Cache object). Or, you could have a user control called something like "ItemDisplay.ascx" and use output caching at the user control level.

# May 27, 2003 7:10 AM

Addy Santo said:

Guys,

I'd say that 80% of the failures I have seen have resulted not from bad performance or site design, but from problems with the content management process. If you can't efficiently manage and update the site then pretty soon it will be dead in the water. Things like version control, image catalogs, approval processes, content backup/restore and user roles are critical to running a medium to large site, and you definitely don't want to start developing those by yourself. You need a good CM system for your USERS not for you (the developer). Anything which has a half-decent API will allow you to develop whatever front-end you want. For example, MS CMS is relatively easy to start with and has good integration with ASP.NET and IIS.

# May 27, 2003 7:29 AM

Damit said:

Well, given that we have to live with it, and Sars will likely be around for some time to come, I think one of the better things we can do about it is to have a sense of humour and laugh. =)

# May 27, 2003 7:42 AM

Jesse Ezell said:

No, that is exactly what the example is. I assumed you already knew the easy part, popping up the window. The example shows the solution to your problem, how to communicate back with the parent page after your results are submitted.

# May 27, 2003 8:04 AM

Paschal said:

Yes I agree and Marcie unfortunatly this is a hoax !

# May 27, 2003 9:19 AM

Paschal said:

Addy I still think it's not so difficult to build a CMS for a small to medium project.

I had really bad experience with CMS system which didn't understand my website.

Don't flame me on this but I think a lot of CMS companies don't know really what is content management !

# May 27, 2003 9:22 AM

Paschal said:

Jesse can you be more explicit? Because your code tell me that you fire an event from the popup to the caller page AFTER closing the popup page.
If it's the case, I don't want to do that ;-)
What I want is clearly record the vote, open the popup and show the results INCLUDING the last vote.
What's happen if the user let the window open ? Nothing is return to the caller page.
Sorry If I misunderstand what you said !

# May 27, 2003 9:25 AM

Brian Desmond said:

If you can get a second HDD connected/into the notebook, and a server OS loaded, you can do software RAID. Wouldn't recommend it unless you plan to leave the notebook on 24/7 - software raid takes forever @ startup.

--Brian Desmond

# May 27, 2003 9:34 AM

Jesse Ezell said:

a better handler in the popup would look like this:

void MySubmitButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
// Do Some Processing

Page.RegisterStartupScript("__close", String.Format("<script>window.opener.{0}({1},{2}); window.close();</script>", Request["Handler"], Request["ControlID"], someValue));
}

So, what happens is a user clicks a button in your popup (for example, a "Save" button). You do some processing on the data, like saving it to a database. After you have done this, you send a javascript to the browser that fires calls a function on the parent window, and then closes the popup. The function on the parent window is responsible for making sure that the page refreshes. There are a million ways to do this. You could just use DOM with DHTML to update the page automatically, without a refresh. Or, you could use the __doPostBack function to initiate a postback event. Or, you could do something like "window.location = window.location". To simulate a page refresh. Personally, I like using DHTML to dynamically update the page best, but some times that is not an option and firing a custom __doPostBack event is best for those cases.

# May 27, 2003 10:06 AM

Paschal said:

Sorry to be stubborn Jesse but the user click Save on the main page not on the popup. the popup has no button. It's only there to display the results of the different votes.
Of course I can have a close this window button, but if the user don't do anything on this window, what's happen.
anyway I like the suggestion and I think I could be able to include this code on a on load event in Javascript.

# May 27, 2003 10:32 AM

Dan said:

I think you're a little behind the times on the whole "pages not working" thing. IE6 is extremely outdated now, I think you'll find if you tried to use the latest technologies in IE6 it fails on an awful lot of things.

Mozilla supports all the latest standards aswell as IE's good old "quirks" mode (that being IE5, the browser that didnt work very well at all) and enhances the browsing experience tenfold imo.

As for stability, IE6 crashes plenty on my machine where as the latest mozilla has never crashed. I'm sure you can find someone who has the exact opposite though, isn't that always the way :-)

# May 27, 2003 10:52 AM

Dave said:

Dan, you say IE5 was the browser that didn't work very well at all. Um, no. Back when MSIE5 was released, what were the alternatives? NS4? Now there's a browser that works damn well comparative to MSIE5. Mozilla? Yeah right. I sure enjoyed those version 0.8 days. Opera? Exactly what did they offer at the time that was any better than MSIE?

You also say MSIE6 is extremely outdated. You speak the truth there. We're close to 2 years now since any kind of upgrade. But personally speaking, I still prefer MSIE6 to Mozilla. Until Mozilla reaches that critical 30% market threshold I _have_ to make my #1 target MSIE6. I have no choice. Oh, and I never had MSIE6 crash in 2 years of using it.

# May 27, 2003 11:10 AM

Oddur Snær Mágnússon said:

I've just rewritten the whole cache portion of our commercial asp.net CMS system. It allows page fragment caching as well as whole page caching, all configurable from the CMS interface. If you like any pointers, just contact me (oddur@disill.is or msn: oddur@magnusson.is).

# May 27, 2003 11:21 AM

TrackBack said:

heLP .Net Blog

# May 27, 2003 11:47 AM

TrackBack said:

Phil Scott's WebLog

# May 27, 2003 11:47 AM

Paschal said:

Dan I agree with Dave. IE 6 and Mozilla 0.8, the version number speak the truth my friend ;-)

I think for me the worst everdone of IE is the 5.5, and surely the version 4 for Mac.

But Netscape 4 gave me so many nightmares, but I was quite happy to bury him as a bad memory of the past.

# May 27, 2003 12:00 PM

Paschal said:

Oddur that sounds like a good idea. I will send you an email on the subject if you can light my green lantern ;-)

# May 27, 2003 12:02 PM

TrackBack said:

heLP .Net Blog

# May 27, 2003 12:18 PM

TrackBack said:

heLP .Net Blog

# May 27, 2003 12:30 PM

TrackBack said:

heLP .Net Blog

# May 27, 2003 12:30 PM

TrackBack said:

Phil Scott's WebLog

# May 27, 2003 12:34 PM

Dan said:

Paschal, it's mozilla 1.3 (1.4 if you count the beta) and its had a billion more incarnations than IE6, just because the version number is smaller doesnt mean its a worse browser. Microsoft are well known for making big version number jumps, it makes people think its something far better if the numbers bigger. How about you try it before knocking it, you obviously havent for a long while if you think the versions at 0.8.

Dave, sure we have to dev for MSIE6, else we'd be cutting out 90% of the browser market. It doesn't make it a good browser though and it doesn't mean as a user you should ignore other more capable browsers. From a development perspective yes, you need to limit yourself, but as an end user, why should you?

As for my comment on IE5, well uhm, yes it was a bad browser. But so was NS4 and so was opera before version 7. Yes, IE lead the field for a long time regarding support for things but its behind the pack now, even Opera manages to work better than IE these days.

# May 27, 2003 1:18 PM

Dan said:

As a sidenote, I've used IE as my browser of choice for years, its only in the last few months where I've become frustrated with it that I decided to swap. It would be interesting to see your standpoint on the topic if you tried mozilla for a few weeks as your main browser.

# May 27, 2003 1:20 PM

Colt said:

I'm not sure can you read the words on the pic, and I'm not sure should I laugh or not when seeing this pic as many people die because of Sars here. Anyway, the pics are creative! :)

# May 27, 2003 1:50 PM

TrackBack said:

heLP .Net Blog

# May 27, 2003 1:56 PM

TrackBack said:

Georged Weblog

# May 27, 2003 1:56 PM

Dave said:

Dan, don't take me wrong, MSIE6 _is_ outdated, and MSIE5 _does not_ work very well. IMHO you are quite right about Mozilla now leading the pack. But that is only in terms of W3C standards compliance. And only as of the last... 8 months?

I was speaking about two things that are very tough to ignore as a .NET developer (or any type of web developer for that matter).... MSIE5 in a historical perspective and MSIE6 for market share.

The bulk of my browser development today dictates that I stick to MSIE5+ for everything. This has to remain the case - even for my extranets - until Mozilla craks that 30% saturation.

Let me say one more thing in another comment....

# May 27, 2003 3:57 PM

Kenneth LeFebvre said:

I use a notebook with a wireless adapter as a "terminal" into my development server using Remote Desktop Protocol.

# May 27, 2003 4:05 PM

Dave said:

If you look at what MS has done with ALL of their product releases following Win2K you see a very clear pattern. Nearly complete rewrites from the core code on up.... VS.NET, Win2003, Office 2003, Yukon shortly and eventually Longhorn. This is nearly everything they do.

Now look at non-profit things you've seen.... ISO compliance, XML, large amounts of .NET source code releases and this almost religious conversion to blogging.

In each of these things I've mentioned here they actually "lead the field" in ways no other software producer does. Show me the combination of talent, MONEY [emphasis intended] and vision from any other corner. Mozilla? Hell, they took at least 3 more years than anyone wanted and came up with a product that LEADS in only one thing: standards compliance. It certainly does not lead the way in breaking new ground when compared with this reinvention MS has undergone IMHO.

One last comment to come....

# May 27, 2003 4:12 PM

Dave said:

Sorry for this lengthy comment, but I feel very strongly and didn't want my thoughts split up.

Consider all the recent 'talent' hirings MS has done. Consider the extensive recoding of their flagship products. Finally, consider how they actually do lead in one thing: prevention from internal stagnation/hubris.

Can one really believe they are simply ignoring MSIE? Or is it that they are reinventing it? More than one can make a case that Mozilla will eventually trump MSIE in the browser market, one can argue that something very unbrowser-like will trump ALL browsers. And who today is best postioned for this? MS.

# May 27, 2003 4:19 PM

sirshannon said:

my only concern would be that doing anything via querystring drops the security level down a bit. This can be overcome, of course.

# May 27, 2003 5:15 PM

TrackBack said:

.NET Brain Droppings

# May 27, 2003 5:28 PM

TrackBack said:

heLP .Net Blog

# May 27, 2003 5:28 PM

TrackBack said:

.NET Brain Droppings

# May 27, 2003 5:28 PM

Jesse Ezell said:

Putting the name of a javascript function that a person could view source on your files to find and merely causes a page refresh is hardly dropping security down a level.

I think I might have misunderstood a little bit though, looking back on your comments, the vote is taking place in the main window, not the popup, right? If this is the case, the problem you see is that the child window launches, then the results are saved. So, that is an even easier fix. Instead of having an "onClick" attribute on your vote button that opens the window, just add a Page.RegisterStartupScript directive with the window opening script to the end of your server side event that saves the results to the DB. What will happen then is that the page will post back, save the results, then popup the window.

Or maybe I had it right the first time... One of these two should fix the problem, depending on what exactly you are trying to do.

# May 27, 2003 5:39 PM

Paschal said:

Jesse I think you're right. The second solution seems to be the one I was looking for.
I forgot that I can generate the server side script after saving the data. I am going to try that.

# May 27, 2003 8:38 PM

Dave said:

Yeah yeah, I really do need my own blog! :-) Thanks for letting me ramble back there. BTW, Scoble had more to say on this that kind of sounds similar to my thinking.

# May 27, 2003 11:55 PM

Paschal said:

Dave continue to comment ;-) That was great to see dan and yourself arguments, a good moment of blogging.

# May 28, 2003 1:47 AM

TrackBack said:

Georged Weblog

# May 28, 2003 4:33 AM

TrackBack said:

JonGalloway.ToString()

# May 28, 2003 5:46 AM

G. Andrew Duthie said:

From a technology standpoint, that's interesting, but from a science standpoint, there's reason to question whether the device would tell anyone anything useful, given a recent study that concludes:

"The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality, although they do not rule out a small effect. The association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed."

The study, from the British Medical Journal, can be found at:

http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7398/1057

So it's an interesting gadget, and might even spawn a few lawsuits, but the claim that it "allows people to monitor the damage passive smoking is doing to them" is exaggerated at best.

# May 28, 2003 10:31 AM

Damit said:

You should tell us where you get these from. ;-)

# May 28, 2003 2:41 PM

ColtK said:

Why don't he wear a mask in 'black'?
It's more suitable and match his "look & feel".
You know, I saw TENS of different color, styles and patterns for mask. :o)

# May 28, 2003 3:06 PM

Roy Osherove said:

Sam moved here:
http://www.samgentile.com/blog

# May 30, 2003 2:48 AM

Duncan said:

There's a ban on smoking in public places currently being debated in the Dáil (Ireland's congress, if you like) and this device has been getting a lot of airtime as a result.

# May 30, 2003 8:54 AM

Sam Gentile said:

Thanks for the worry-) Yes, see above

# May 31, 2003 2:26 AM

SBC said:

Thanks for the link - been looking for that one.

# June 3, 2003 1:42 AM

Colt Cooper said:

That last comment is not the correct solution for the problem.

At my company we all had the same problem - about every one in 3-6 compiles of a web project, the aspnet_wp.exe worker process would spike at 99% for 5-10 minutes.

We finally found that it was an unhandled exception in a "Release" object that was being referenced by all of our projects (it was a SQL connection manager we wrote).

Apparently the object was trying to do something after the Finalize method was called.

Anyway, we couldn't see the error because it was compiled in "Release" mode. Once we went back to using the debug version of that library we eventually found the error (it was able to bubble up).

# June 3, 2003 12:37 PM

damit@mvps.org (Damit) said:

I wonder what my signature would look like... maybe a cat? =P

# June 4, 2003 3:21 PM

Stephane Rodriguez said:

I wonder whether Reporting Services will be freely available. It could hurt a lot the BI space if so.

# June 5, 2003 11:01 AM

Datagrid Girl said:

Come to Toronto sometime and I'll buy you a meal "for real" :)

Marcie

# June 6, 2003 3:13 AM

chadb said:

nice site!

# June 6, 2003 5:31 PM

Chad Osgood said:

Exceptional design work Paschal, imo.

# June 6, 2003 5:59 PM

Fabrice said:

Bravo ! Félicitations !

# June 7, 2003 12:32 AM

Roy Osherove said:

Congratulations!

# June 7, 2003 1:24 AM

Tim Marman said:

Looks awesome! Congrats!

# June 7, 2003 6:13 AM

Blair Stephenson said:

Very good design.

# June 8, 2003 1:52 PM

Damit said:

I can't really imagine it in pink.. but on the other hand, I could imagine it in "Microsoft blue" (which I used for a website).

BTW, your link to weatherpixie.com seems to be broken...

# June 9, 2003 5:06 AM

TrackBack said:

Christian Nagel's OneNotes

# June 9, 2003 8:53 AM

Scott Watermasysk said:

The short answer is if you really want a .NET user group...start one. "If you build it...they will come". My INETA experience has been if you want it to happen they will help you make it happen...but it is up to you to get it started.

-Scott

# June 10, 2003 3:37 AM

Duncan said:

I'd be interested in joining if you do set this up.

# June 10, 2003 5:14 AM

Christian Nagel said:

Do you know "The Irish Developer Network" with locations in Dublin and Limerick? http://www.irishdev.com
Kieran Lynam organizes monthly meetings.

# June 10, 2003 6:04 AM

Phil Scott said:

Looking good. Do you do the design yourself, or do you have a graph design person do them? I'm like you, I like bright colors on web pages :)

# June 12, 2003 4:21 AM

Paschal said:

I do a lot of design, having working in another life in professional publishing and design.

Yes I like brigtht colors, and it works well for kids !

# June 12, 2003 4:24 AM

Phil Scott said:

I'm impressed :) I'm stuck in the drab corporate world, so I've got a lot of dark blues and greys on our website. Sigh...

# June 12, 2003 4:29 AM

Paschal said:

Phil I know what you feel, I used to work for a mortgage website, and it was quite dull ;-)

# June 12, 2003 4:37 AM

Fabrice said:

Note: Shawn A. Van Ness could probably help you if need more info.
See http://weblogs.asp.net/savanness/posts/2544.aspx

# June 12, 2003 5:33 AM

OmegaSupreme said:

LOL , man he truly is a geek among geeks, I salute him :D

# June 12, 2003 5:39 AM

Paschal said:

Thanks Fabrice for the link. I didn't know the developer was on this blog !

# June 12, 2003 5:45 AM

Nino said:

Ah..the Leszynski Group.. they wrote most of the Power Toys for the Tablet PC.. sharp, sharp folks. Their booth was next to ours at the Cincinnati and Columbus Tablet PC launches, and I was able to talk to their guys. These guys rock.

-Nino

# June 12, 2003 7:41 AM

David Stone said:

Out of sheer curiousity, why not just use Reflector?

# June 12, 2003 8:30 AM

chadb said:

ditto on the design - my 5 yr. old loves the Scoilnet site - and this one looks promising for my 7 yr. old :)

# June 12, 2003 9:04 AM

Roy Osherove said:

OK. You win ;)

# June 12, 2003 1:44 PM

sergio said:

jkljkljkljklj

# June 13, 2003 1:10 PM

Stephane Rodriguez said:

Useful for those developing with .NET without an install of MSDN, and who have obviously no access either to the MSDN .NET framework pages.
:-)

Man, who are you trying to kid ?

# June 14, 2003 2:01 AM

TrackBack said:

Darrell Norton's Blog

# June 16, 2003 7:24 AM

julie said:

thanks Paschal. I guess I better get on that email list myself!! :-)

# June 16, 2003 3:19 PM

Frans Bouma said:

obviously you've never looked at the code it actually produces. :)

If a person wants deeper insight in what n-tier development is, how to start etc, I'd suggest that person should check out some examples for the .NET framework, read some n-tier development articles on the MSDN, or read my n-tier article, which is included in the llblgen docs:
http://www.sd.nl/software/llblgendocs/ntier.htm

When the person understands it's just a concept, not a religion or a set of rules, that person can adapt the concept to the project he's working on.

# June 17, 2003 5:58 AM

Paschal said:

Frans that's great comment, but I remember when I started few years ago to work on the concept, I wish I would have something to built the basics for me.

Yes of course, when I say newbie, I should probably say midrange developer.

But surely the code produced by NTierGen is quite complex, but the structure seem to be good IMHO

# June 17, 2003 6:04 AM

Frans Bouma said:

In the newsgroups there are a lot of questions about 'what is n-tier' and 'how do I set it up?'. It's indeed confusing at first, since it seems that it's a very well defined technology with easy steps to follow and in the end you're done, however it's very fuzzy. :) What also doesn't help is the fact that with .NET MS has abandoned the 'n-tier' / windows DNA concepts a bit it seems, not a lot of material addresses n-tier development, perhaps that'll change (or I haven't looked good enough ;)).

My comment on the nTiergen code was more towards that it seems very 'hacked together' (at least to me). I've betatested it, and it fell apart a lot, however some ideas were good.

# June 17, 2003 6:22 AM

Paschal said:

Yes Frans I agree, but VS.Net seems to keep this idea when you look at the way you manage many assemblies in one source project

# June 17, 2003 7:41 AM

Nino said:

You beat me to it, Paschal. =) Just to note..the Nevo and iPAQ Image Viewer are HP-only applications. Pay careful attention to the *all-new* Connection Manager (thank you, MSFT!) .. woo hoo!

<returns to fiddling with the Pocket PC 2003 SDK> ...

-Nino

# June 17, 2003 10:17 AM

TrackBack said:

Dan's .NET Wasteland

# June 17, 2003 1:03 PM

Jim Meeker said:

US Government sites have to comply with the Section 508 law. Their web site has a lot of information on how to comply. Of course the techniques are applicable to anyone who wants to have an accessible site.

# June 17, 2003 3:18 PM

John Renaud said:

Here's another CodeProject article that demonstrates a .NET spelunking technique that uses reflection: http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/UndocumentedFusion.asp

# June 17, 2003 6:47 PM

Frans Bouma said:

What's a breadcrumb, besides a small piece of bread that's left on your plate? ;)

(btw, public fields? )

# June 17, 2003 10:47 PM

Frans Bouma said:

Do a google search on "VB.NET code to HTML converter", one of the hits:

http://www.vbcity.com/encoder/

There are more. I had one for C#, but I lost it somewhere..

# June 17, 2003 11:06 PM

Paschal said:

Thanks Frans.

I will give them a try

# June 17, 2003 11:20 PM

Paschal said:

Frans is right it should protected fields, not public ones.

# June 17, 2003 11:21 PM

Roy Osherove said:

heh. She did have a point, though :)
consistency is important....

# June 17, 2003 11:22 PM

Frans Bouma said:

Thanks :) Will look into it :)

# June 17, 2003 11:23 PM

Paschal said:

Roy yes you're right but most of the people are right handed no?

And my point is that you can't satisfy everybody ;-)

# June 17, 2003 11:24 PM

Darren Neimke said:

.NET and CMS eh? So, presumably that means the site is developed withing CMS2K2 framework? Cool!

I've got 3 or 4 CMS 2K2 sites under my belt now and am really starting to enjoy developing for it.

# June 18, 2003 12:34 AM

M M said:

The Site Design (forget the CMS for a moment) looks nice. :-p

# June 18, 2003 12:39 AM

SBC said:

yup.. good site.. includes stuff for project management and SDLC as well.

# June 18, 2003 12:54 AM

Darren Neimke said:

hehe... sorry, I actually meant to mention that too! Very friendly UI :-)

# June 18, 2003 2:15 AM

Hansel said:

From "Hansel & Gretel" (Grimm's Fairy Tales)

| Hansel comforted his little sister and said
| "Just wait, Gretel, until the moon rises, and
| then we shall see the crumbs of bread which I
| have strewn about, they will show us our way
| home again."

Like in the fairytale breadcrumbs are a way for the user to find their way back home after navigating deep into the site.

# June 18, 2003 2:27 AM

TrackBack said:

heLP .Net Blog

# June 18, 2003 3:35 AM

coacoacoa said:

Or of their Google PageRank ?
http://www.coveryourasp.com/Snippet.asp?snip=61

# June 18, 2003 4:22 AM

Jeff Julian said:

I think to use of subdomains has caused this

http://jjulian.geekswithblogs.com

# June 18, 2003 4:32 AM

Marc said:

I sure hope so. It was always a silly prefix.

# June 18, 2003 4:32 AM

Paschal said:

Yes I agree. Life is better without this prefix.

But what's about the marketing aspect.

Imagine now on poster, how we going to visually identify a website from a brand name ;-)

# June 18, 2003 4:39 AM

Kartal Guner said:

Ever hear of backups?

# June 18, 2003 4:45 AM

Alex Lowe said:

Um, Source Control on a machine that is regularly backed up would probably be a good idea.....

# June 18, 2003 4:55 AM

Paschal said:

Guys you're right but this happened to everybody and the laptop was only 2 months old.

And the weird it crashed when I was doing a backup.

At the end I lost **only** two weeks

# June 18, 2003 4:57 AM

Oddur Magnusson said:

My Dell Inspiron Laptop crashed the other day, didn't boot up, and when it finally did it just showes some crazy lines on the LCD. Tried changing the memory and all that, but nothing worked. had to take the HD out and mount it on a desktop machine and copy all the data of it.
But the laptop just sits on my desk, dead :(

# June 18, 2003 5:01 AM

Paul Nicholls said:

Pagerank isn't quite as important as it's made out to be, it's keyword-to-content relevancy.

There are sites with lower pagerank that score higher than others for searches - and this trend is only going to get stronger, as Google get better at working out what you're looking for.

It should also be pointed out that the Pagerank you see in your Google toolbar atm is highly inaccurate at the moment... :)

# June 18, 2003 5:36 AM

Cyril said:

For me, this (nice) story should bring to us two conclusions:

1. PageRank and Google are not that good
Should'nt a decent tool be able to recognize by itself that these pages, the one without and the one with the "www", are the same, and that there is no need to index both of them?

2. People should be aware of the problem...
...and choose by themselves to check if the website they want to link to *really* need an extra (and quite cumbersome) "www".

On the contrary, the solution proposed by the author (in short, that all webmasters should communicate on their "www" address, even if they don't need to) is not the good one. Why bother with something longer and unuseful?

# June 18, 2003 5:47 AM

Greg Robinson said:

Just curious, why did you blog this?

# June 18, 2003 6:14 AM

Jesse Ezell said:

You can't just assume they are the same site, because it is perfectly possible to have different content at www.mysite.com and mysite.com. I suppose google could implement a CRC32 or MD5 checksum, and then check it against the other pages in the DB and then do a full text compare if it finds a match. But, this would add to the processing time and this isn't exactly foolproof, because it takes quite a bit of time to re-index, so it is possible that the pages will change between when www.mysite.com is indexed and mysite.com is indexed. You could minimize the chances of this happening by doing a sort on the domain for your indexing order, but it still isn't foolproof.

# June 18, 2003 6:27 AM

Brian Desmond said:

It's the way the site's DNS is configured. An A (Host) record is actually defined for www.yourdomain.com in DNS in order for www to point to the web server. One can define an A record that everything in the parent domain goes to; hence the lack of www.

# June 18, 2003 12:30 PM

Jesse Ezell said:

Something I have been saying for a long time. Nice to see someone a little more "official" agreeing :-).

# June 19, 2003 12:58 AM

Paschal said:

Jesse that's why I blog this, because it's a current issue in some projects I am linked to.

OSS has a long way to go ;-)

# June 19, 2003 1:04 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Interesting article. At the moment on a dutch programmers forum there is a discussion going on about 'build tools', and I ventilated my opinion about how horrible they are to use because they are mostly without an interface and work with an own fileformat, have no handy tools and leave a lot to the user (NAnt). Clearly the developers of these tools think what they think is right, is what the users of their tools want. Which is not the case, since developers are users, namely the users of the tools they use to build the software. The major error OSS projects (I refered to NAnt above) make is that the developers who write the software think what they seem to find reasonable for 'developers' (f.e. the target audience) is also what these 'developers' think will find reasonable. But when you consider 'developers' as 'users', i.e. they do task ABC very well, but lack skills in task XYZ, most OSS projects fall short (also a lot of closed source software projects).

It takes a lot of time to make software that is useful for the developer who writes it also useful for another user who uses that tool to avoid extra work because it is 'overhead' for that person.

# June 19, 2003 1:09 AM

Duncan said:

"A screen on the wall in the foyer reads your email aloud as you hang your coat. "

I can only hope Bill Gates doesn't get as many obscene spams as I do or the house would be a mess of cursing ;-)

# June 19, 2003 1:11 AM

Paschal said:

The thing is also that commercial software put the money on the table for Usability.

In OSS, I feel that the free way of thinking make this part totally forgotten.

I also feel that if OSS wants to be competitive, not sure if it's the right word to use here ;-), they should also have too some Usability gurus.

I am sure that some specialists could be happy to work for that, but how solve the equation of time and money ?

# June 19, 2003 1:21 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Well, development time is also time spent, so when a usability expert is spending time on an OSS project, that would be the same I guess. The problem with most OSS projects is that they are driven by the developers, not by a concept that is then handed to the developers. This means that the developer cooks up a new feature and also which functionality it will represent, how it will function and how it will be embedded in the rest of the functionality. The developer is not the expert on usability so he will code it as he think it is ok, which is most of the time horrible ;) MInd you: most successful OSS projects have equivalents which are sold by closed source vendors (linux, open office, KDE/Gnome) or are indeed horrible to setup (apache). :)

I think oss will be competitive in the end, it's just that the mindset what oss really is (it's just a devteam like there are at microsoft with a publicly accessable sourcebase) has to change, so they too work with concepts and designs, which then will result in better software because then you have teams with specialists which do other things then writing code. Now most OSS projects are formed by solely coders. An exception is phpBB f.e., which has also gui-artists, and looks very polished.

# June 19, 2003 1:31 AM

Alex Hoffman said:

I'm currently writing a helpfile/manual - and I tell you it IS harder than writing the software! @#*! Thanks for the links.

# June 19, 2003 3:48 AM

Jonne Kats said:

I know i am definetly not going to use sms to publish to my blog...

# June 19, 2003 4:29 AM

Duncan said:

Colour blindness is not usually so severe that colour is seen as grey - I'm colour blind myself in the red/green area but don't see either colour as grey.
What should be avoided in my experience (or lack of experience, if you see what I mean) is text on similar temperature backgrounds.

# June 19, 2003 4:50 AM

Paschal said:

I agree Duncan. By the way I still have in mind the idea of an Irish user group, but I don't have the time at the moment to organise that.
Maybe in few months ?

# June 19, 2003 4:54 AM

Duncan said:

As colour blindness is caused by a lack of accuity in the cones there should be a way of mathematically working out how likely two colours are to be seen as one and apply this to the HTML colour elements? I shall have a google around for info.

I think an Irish user group would be a good idea but I don't have much to offer it at the moment as I'm back in VB5 land for this current gig.

# June 19, 2003 5:06 AM

Roy Osherove said:

Heh. Nice....

# June 19, 2003 5:12 AM

Paschal said:

Yes Roy and you have a lot to discover from this website ;-)

# June 19, 2003 5:18 AM

Paschal said:

And Roy as you can see by yourself I am actually ranked 1 on talking about you ;-)

# June 19, 2003 5:20 AM

Brian Desmond said:

Works the other way around with my servers. Password is needed to get the webfolder listing. Win2000/IIS5/.Net 1.1/FPSE

--Brian

# June 19, 2003 12:05 PM

Daniel Nolan said:

I've always felt that links should be descriptive, they should be intuitive to the user and describe where the link is going, or at least give them a vague idea. If a link says "click here" the user is more than likely going to ignore it, so its not just about new users, its hardened webusers aswell.

If a link said ".net reflection tutorial" it would more likely to be clicked than one that said "click here" and required you to read the surrounding context to figure out what the link is.

Click here died a death a long time ago, users are lazy and they will follow the path of least resistance.

# June 19, 2003 1:57 PM

Paschal said:

Brian I have Win2003/IIS6/.Net1.1/FPSE.

Well if this happen only to me fine, but I am not quite sure !

# June 19, 2003 2:05 PM

Addy Santo said:

I disagree that "click here" diead a long time ago. I personally prefer informative links, but less computer-literate people (grandparents are classic examples) still get along better with "bla bla bla bla [click here for more information]" then "bla bla bla [more information]" [ ] = links

# June 19, 2003 2:39 PM

Jim Meeker said:

That's true Duncan. But others have color-blindness to differing degrees (at least that's how it was explained to me. I'm not color-blind.) We should design with everyone in mind.

I'm of Irish descent. Can I join? ;) Thanks for the post Paschal.

Jim

# June 19, 2003 5:48 PM

Duncan said:

Two of my colleagues were at this - they are volunteers for the next couple of weeks - and they thoroughly enjoyed it. Getting up at 6:30am this morning probably put everything in perspective though.

All concerned should be proud of what they've achieved - a great start to a great games.

# June 22, 2003 1:31 PM

Anonymous Coward said:

Bono and Nelson Mandela - how predictable. Would have preferred to see real members of the special olympic community, rather than two people who have become part of the "rent a celebrity" set. After all they are the real inspiration.

# June 22, 2003 1:43 PM

Paschal said:

Thanks Duncan.

Anonymous Coward you sould be more brave by writing your real name, how predictable you are with a name like that !

# June 22, 2003 1:54 PM

Duncan said:

I did think that Colin Farrel was, at best, innebriated though....perhaps the "Dublin Daily" will have more info ;)

# June 22, 2003 11:03 PM

clauer said:

You're right. XML and RSS make documents portable and universal, as long as they contain English ;-)

/CL,
natural born froggie

# June 24, 2003 4:19 AM

ChrisG said:

If you want more up to date information let me know, it's an area I work in quite a lot and really enjoy talking about :O)

# June 24, 2003 10:06 AM

TrackBack said:

Fabrice's weblog

# June 24, 2003 11:19 AM

Marc said:

Time to brush of that Gaelic/English dictionary...

# June 26, 2003 3:29 AM

James said:

# June 26, 2003 3:30 AM

Duncan said:

One screen, one mmouse, one keyboard...and six DELL GX1s connected through a Cybex multiview switch. Together they give off as much heat as a 2 bar electric fire, or so it seems on a hot day like today...

# June 26, 2003 4:04 AM

Paschal said:

Duncan I imagine you cook your lunch with a hot system like that ;-)

# June 26, 2003 4:06 AM

Scott Watermasysk said:

What would be really cool is if they let you specify your own blogs api. This way you did not have to be a bloggar user to use blogThis.

-Scott

# June 26, 2003 4:25 AM

Paschal said:

Scott yes it's sad but maybe something can be done. You can surely influence Google with all your magic powers ;-)

Bo seriously I think that's why they buy BlogThis earlier this year, to justify their investment by including thme on their site.

# June 26, 2003 4:28 AM

Rishi Bhatnagar said:

I agree with Scott. I wish they would give an API. Google continues to amaze all the time!

# June 26, 2003 5:39 AM

Roy Osherove said:

Good stuff!

# June 26, 2003 6:07 AM

Paschal said:

Hey folks the popup blocker rocks !

# June 26, 2003 6:21 AM

Vazz said:

Any idea if Ipaq 3650 can be upgraded to PPC 2003?

# June 26, 2003 7:42 AM

Paschal said:

Well not officialy I am afraid ;-)

I have myself an 'old' (not so after thoughts) ipaq 3630, and I would like to see something for this machine done by HP/Compaq !

# June 26, 2003 7:50 AM

Cadmium said:

Looks neat, but it only seems to instal for vs.net 2k2, not vs.net 2k3 :(

# June 26, 2003 8:40 AM

Frans Bouma said:

I installed it 2 hours ago on my server (dual p3-933 serverwerks chipset/asus board, dual scsi drives, ide drive, tapedrive, 512MBram) with SQLServer2000, exchange 2000, active directory etc. and it works like a charm. Installed it, rebooted, done. No wicked eventlog entries either.

I'm especially happy with several bugfixes that fix network errors where the os didn't accept new connections. My online box appeared dead several times but when I rebooted using the hw switch and logged on via a remote desktop toolkit, it hadn't crashed, networking simply died. I hope that's fixed now.

There are a terrible amount of stop error fixes, which really disturbs me, especially the ways some would turn up. Clearly some testing methods and programming skils weren't up to par.

# June 26, 2003 10:53 AM

Paschal said:

Thanks Frans, I will have a try tomorrow ;-)

# June 26, 2003 12:34 PM

TrackBack said:

Jim Meeker

# June 26, 2003 2:20 PM

Kartal Guner said:

I had smart navigation on a page and it would take for ever to load. I couldn't figure out what the problem was. I turned smart navigation off, and the page started loading immediately.

# June 27, 2003 10:37 AM

TrackBack said:

Dan's .NET Wasteland

# June 27, 2003 4:27 PM

TrackBack said:

David Stone's Blog

# June 27, 2003 4:27 PM

Nick Bradbury said:

I'm not sure why you're associating FeedDemon with spyware. Please substantiate what you're claiming here, because I can assure you that FeedDemon is not putting spyware on your machine.

# June 27, 2003 5:04 PM

G. Andrew Duthie said:

Paschal, are you running as an administrator? If so, that could explain some of your issues, since any code you run from an admin account leaves you wide open to all sorts of issues. Whether it's actually FeedDemon or not, installing any code that you're not sure should be trusted can lead to just this sort of problem.

# June 27, 2003 7:57 PM

Moogles said:

im am in need of some information concerning the matter of sprinkler systems, I need information on the design of the sprinkler systems, the machines that control them a map of the sprinkler systems in hastings minnesota and i need to know if it is possible to hack a computer controlled sprinkler system using a wireless ethernet adaptor

# June 29, 2003 1:10 PM

Duncan said:

Isn't there a registry monitor component in .Net? If so you could knock up a little proggie that monitored the registry and warned you when an app was trying to change it - like ZoneAlarm you could then allow/deny access...

# June 30, 2003 12:42 AM

Paschal said:

Hi Duncan , yes ZoneAlarm is surely a option I am going to try.

# June 30, 2003 12:43 AM

Damian Barrow said:

Totally agreed man. I freakin' hate it when my daughter gets on the machine - lop.com madness usually ensues and if the machine isn't toasted by that, its finished off by Kazaa.

The Google toolbar beta 2 has a popup blocker built in. Might be worth a look

# June 30, 2003 12:49 AM

Frans Bouma said:

What I wonder though is: what are your security settings in IE? I mean: even if a HTML page wants to install an activeX control, my IE never will automatically install it, simply because I blocked that in the security settings. Therefor, an RSS reader, which uses IE as a viewer, will not install an activeX control (and thus a bot) without me knowing it. I suggest you'd crank up the security settings for the various zones you have and set every automatical installation option to 'prompt' or disable.

You can set rights on registry keys, by using regedt32 (not regedit, but regedt32) under win2k or regedit under XP. If you run your desktop as administrator, this is of course not doable, since you'll override any security settings anyway, but you can make keys readonly for even the administrator, so it's worth a shot. (set change rights to 'system' f.e.)

Any free program is potentially a spyware host, never forget that. If you can download a full featured free mp3 player from a .com domain which is clearly a company and the player is their one product, you can be sure the player does nasty things, simply because how would the company earn money otherwise?

# June 30, 2003 12:50 AM

Paschal said:

Frans, the spyware like Totalvelocity are not coming by ActiveX.
I have a high level settings scurity for IE on this machine, in susch a way that I need to blog from my laptop to be able to post something.
Unfortunatly an HTTP stream can transport anything, and it surely the door for those crap stuff to come in.
Of course any free program can be a potential candidate for spyware, but if Feeddemon was not coming with feeds, I am sure I could avoid the problem.
And again, I am quite sure it's coming from Feeddemon, because the problem happen just after installed it and play with some feeds.

# June 30, 2003 1:01 AM

Paschal said:

And my request to Microsoft is that they have to provide a solution from the core system.

I heard they already thinking blocking more and more HTML content in Outlook mails to block the spammers, so why not doing something with spyware ?

# June 30, 2003 1:03 AM

Frans Bouma said:

But if http can inject an executable somewhere which will run when you run a given program, any system is vulnerable to any trojan. I can't believe that's true, unless the trojan exploits a given IE flaw (and there are some left without a patch)

I don't think MS will ever solve this, simply because there are still people in charge which cook up goo like scripts in WMA or asf files, so when you watch a video or listen to a wma audio, and your media player isn't patched, it can execute these scripts, which will result in a trojan installation.

A browser should be a sandbox, or at least be configurable as such. However, MS doesn't do a damn thing about that, since they are not willing to modify IE to make it run as a sandbox when accessing a file / URI that's not located in the filespace of the local system.

# June 30, 2003 1:25 AM

GuyMurphy said:

Your registry is already protected.... you choose to circumvent that protection by running in admin mode. That's your choice to throw away the Windows security model, which is fine. You don't however get to throw away the most basic of securities and then whine about how you're unprotected.

Now I run mostly in admin mode, but I accept that it's a risk I'm taking and that I'll have to pick up the slack.

I recommend SpyBot - Search and Destroy. Along with being quite capable at cleansing your machine, it also has a bunch of settings for locking down your registry ect.

# June 30, 2003 2:17 AM

anonymous said:

the registry is already secure, try running regedt32 and click the security tab as suggested.

I don't think it's within microsofts remit to protect users from their own actions. The best solution is precaution and the regular runs of spybot/adaware etc.

# June 30, 2003 3:48 AM

Simon Jefford said:

Any idea which feeds the spyware came from?

# June 30, 2003 5:57 AM

Paschal said:

Simon not sure from which feed but I suspect the entertainment feeds.

# June 30, 2003 6:02 AM

Anon said:

Do you really want to read about who they go to dinner with?

# June 30, 2003 6:11 AM

Paschal said:

I see you can read german ;-) lucky you are

# June 30, 2003 6:13 AM

Chad Osgood said:

He explained in his blog, in English, why he chooses to write in German.

# June 30, 2003 6:36 AM

Paschal said:

I know Chad but I am still against this practice on an international weblog, with so many tongues, we should all make an effort to use only english one.

# June 30, 2003 6:41 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Praat mar Frysk, in oar hat dêr forlet fan!

Or something :)

# June 30, 2003 9:55 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Funny. The one source for sql server related security problems is Microsoft itself. The reason for that is that is that it is impossible to impersonate f.e an asp.net website into a native windows domain user which has role based security in a sqlserver. You simply can't do that. You have to maintain credentials on multiple machines. Most people therefor do not use trusted connections but sqlserver connections using sqlserver accounts for situations like this (which are very common), which force you to store the credentials in the connection string.

MS clearly made a terrible mistake when they designed the asp.net user security and multi-machine websites. Ah well... thankfully sqlserver 2000 at the moment still allows you to specify a sqlserver account (but I heared support for this will be dropped in a later release)...

Also, MS has made it very hard (if not impossible) to communicate encrypted with your sqlserver machine. You have to jump through hoops to get it working and even then... (using ssl). In the unix world, they have ssh and can tunnel any connection through that secure connection protocol. Very clever and neat. How else did MS envision the secure, remote maintainance of webservers and sqlservers in a DMZ which are not part of ANY domain?

# June 30, 2003 10:34 AM

Srinath said:

We tried to capture many common web-app-db scenarios and implementation-challenges in our first security guide "Building Secure ASP.NET Applications" http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnnetsec/html/secnetlpMSDN.asp , specifically under the Intranet, Extranet and Internet chapters. There is also extensive discussion on both Authentication & Authorization in the 'Data Access Security' chapter

'SQL 2000 sp3 security best practices' shares some of the content with our our second security guide 'Improving web application: Threats and Countermeasures' (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnnetsec/html/ThreatCounter.asp), which is primarily focused on Threats and how to countermeasure them. For Designing and Building AuthN and AuthZ, you will find more information in the first guide.

We hope the 10+ scenarios in Intranet, Internet and Extranet chapters (from 1st guide) will reduce the pain of jumping through hoops to get it working.

And if I am not wrong (I have not tested this) IPSec will work with systems not part of domain (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/reskit/prcc_tcp_bhzb.asp)

# June 30, 2003 12:01 PM

Paul said:

You can - it's just usually turned off. In the AD for Windows 2k it's called trusted for delegation. In 2k3 they have a more controllable method called constrained trusted for delegation.

# June 30, 2003 12:19 PM

scottgu@microsoft.com said:

You can enable impersonation within ASP.NET by simply changing the <identity> section of either your web.config or machine.config configuration file.

In general, though, impersonation is a bad idea and can lead to a variety of other security and performance issues (which is why we turned it off specifically with asp.net). Specifically, it can cause the database to "leak" access to data to end-users on middle tier applications (ie: because a user has access to the data, they can bypass the webserver middle tier logic and access the sprocs/tables directly -- something that a lot of apps don't protect against).

Rather than use SQL authentication when connecting from ASP.NET to SQL Server, you should use native windows authentication -- but lock down access not to the identity of the calling user, but rather to that of the ASP.NET worker process identity of the running application. That way you can restrict access to only allow the application access to the data (not the end users using it). You also do not have to worry about the SQL authentication usernames/passwords ever being compromised and access in these scenarios -- since no username/password is ever stored in an unencrypted way.

Hope this helps,

- Scott

# June 30, 2003 12:30 PM

Frans Bouma said:

"Rather than use SQL authentication when connecting from ASP.NET to SQL Server, you should use native windows authentication -- but lock down access not to the identity of the calling user, but rather to that of the ASP.NET worker process identity of the running application. That way you can restrict access to only allow the application access to the data (not the end users using it). You also do not have to worry about the SQL authentication usernames/passwords ever being compromised and access in these scenarios -- since no username/password is ever stored in an unencrypted way"
That's wrong, sorry. If I have 2 machines, one being the IIS server and the other one being the sqlserver machine, the ASP.NET account is LOCAL to the IIS server. I can't use that account to access the sqlserver instance and do things there. I then have to add the SAME user to the sqlserver machine as well with the SAME password, also as local account.

-> 2 times the same user and it 'works' because they have the same credentials, but they are different users.

On the DOTNET-CLR mailing list we had a lengthy discussion about this a month or so ago and we all concluded that it wasn't possible to do this how MS tells us to do it. On 1 box, it's no problem (sqlserver and IIS on one machine). There is however a problem with the contradiction between the advice from MS not to run your sqlserver/iis boxes in a domain / as a PDC/BDC, so you use local defined accounts on the IIS box, not domain users, and the fact that it is impossible to access box B from box A when you are logged in on A as a local user (ASPNET) of A which is not known on B.

# June 30, 2003 10:39 PM

Frans Bouma said:

"You can - it's just usually turned off. In the AD for Windows 2k it's called trusted for delegation. In 2k3 they have a more controllable method called constrained trusted for delegation."
No you can't. THe IIS box is running as a standalone server, as MS advices everyone. ASPNET is a locally defined user and you can't send those credentials over the wire to use it on another box in the DMZ. _that_s the problem. If everything runs in one domain, it's not a problem, but who will run the webserver in a domain? No-one.

# June 30, 2003 11:23 PM

Frans Bouma said:

Check the thread: http://discuss.develop.com/archives/wa.exe?A2=ind0305A&L=DOTNET-CLR&P=R4787&I=-3

# July 1, 2003 12:50 AM

Darrell said:

Yes it is possible. There is a Microsoft knowledge base article on how to make the ASPNET_WP a domain account. If it is a domain account you can add that account as a user (or better to make the domain account a part of a local group, and only grant logins to local groups). Second, you can "mirror" the ASPNET_WP on the SQL Server. You would then be responsible for maintaining the password (no longer machine-generated) but 2 local accounts on different machines with the same login name and password will work.

# July 1, 2003 4:05 AM

TrackBack said:

Frans Bouma's blog

# July 1, 2003 5:21 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Darrell: running your two boxes (the IIS machine and the SQLServer machine) in a domain is FATAL for security. If the website runs under a domain user, and it gets compromised, the attacker has access to the domain. Not good. What you want is the credentials to ONLY log into the sqlserver instance and ONLY into the databases specified for that account. The ideal situation would be that the sqlserver machine (B) would validate the local ASPNET account of the iis machine (A) with A.

'mirroring' credentials is also a hack. Not only is it not maintainable (you have to give administrators access to both machines to add users, plus you have to keep the passwords in sync), it's also weird that it works in the first place. "Keep the uid and the password the same and it works", this SHOULDN'T be possible, because you are already logged in on A (the webserver) as a given user, and can use that login info on box B 'because' the credentials are the same, even if the local user ASPNET of A is local to A, and ANOTHER user is local to B.

All in all, I can only conclude Microsoft has its head up its @ss when it comes to serious security configuration and is still in a state of denial. Why is it so darn hard for them to create a solution for such a simple problem? Any solution based on "Domain", "Mirroring credentials" or "Sqlserver login credentials" are not enough. It's 2003, however most 2-3 machine based webapplications can't live without OR compromising their security configuration (by using a domain or worse) OR using sqlserver credentials, something that is scheduled to be defined deprecated.

It's shocking how many people simply do not understand the problem.

# July 1, 2003 5:29 AM

Lawrence Oluyede said:

Wow! A very exciting project! I'll wait for the next post about it :)

Great

# July 1, 2003 6:34 AM

Paschal said:

Thanks Lawrence.

Yes it's really exciting, and I hope that everybody will learn something from this.

And I am sure that some 'bricks' could be useful for other different projects.

I have already quite some brick ready, just some clenaing and I will start to publish them.

# July 1, 2003 6:38 AM

Lawrence Oluyede said:

Mmm I have a question... Is the dScribe layer (the presentation layer) customizable? I mean CSS stuff

# July 1, 2003 8:28 AM

Paschal said:

It should be, because it's a web app.

# July 1, 2003 12:56 PM

Cadmium said:

If you are still having issues with spyware you should check out spybot and adaware, they are the two best spyware removoval apps. Also if you are interested in a great popup/ad blocker try proxomitron. It's development was stopped recently, but its still an excellent tool.

# July 2, 2003 11:23 AM

Paschal said:

I am using spyware and adware, but unfortunatly they let pass some spyware.

So if I use ZoneAlarm and block whatever get out of my computer,it's working well.

# July 2, 2003 10:56 PM

TrackBack said:

SBC DotNet Weblog

# July 3, 2003 6:37 PM

SBC said:

This is terrific news !

# July 4, 2003 4:00 AM

Datagrid Girl said:

Why would you want to?

# July 4, 2003 4:44 AM

Paschal said:

I have a class with anew constructor to a sql connection.

I would like to see if I can store in a statebag the object to avoid calling the object everytime I need it in my code.

Maybe I'm wrong ... or stupid, but the sqlConnection seems to be not serializable.

For the moment I call my object evrytime, but just to see if I can improve a bit the performances ;-)

# July 4, 2003 4:48 AM

Frans Bouma said:

I assume you run your asp.net app on a domain controller under the 'system' account ;)

the ASPNET user can't modify a file on disk.

# July 4, 2003 4:53 AM

Patrick Steele said:

Why not just store the connection information -- that's easily serializable.

# July 4, 2003 5:48 AM

Yosi Taguri said:

sql connection is not serializd because it makes no sense. a connection is not a cheap resource, you might want to pass the connection string itself and open it when ever you want. it seems you have a design problem if you need to solve such a thing.

# July 4, 2003 6:38 AM

Paschal said:

OK guys your're right I was wrong. Thanks ;-)

# July 4, 2003 6:40 AM

Morten Abrahamsen said:

It's sort of hard to serialize an active network connection now isn't it :)
(and at the end of the day that is what an SqlConnection is!)

Generally, MarshalByRef objects don't serialize :)

# July 4, 2003 6:58 AM

Gavin Joyce said:

Frans,

I wish that you would actually use nTierGen before you give your opinions on it.

By your own admission you have only beta tested it. I don't appreciate you comments that it seems 'hacked together'. I have spend a lot of time carefully sculpting the generated framework, and my many customers are very happy with it. nTierGen.NET is being used on many diverse projects, some quite large and complex. nTierGen.NET also has many benefits over the Data Access code produced by your tool.

Gavin Joyce
http://www.nTierGen.NET/

# July 5, 2003 5:53 AM

OmegaeSupreme said:

Super cool that ;), very nice.

# July 5, 2003 6:51 AM

gary ouellette said:

thank you

# July 8, 2003 3:06 AM

Martin Spedding said:

Hi,

here is a code example for encrypting and decrypting using SHA1

http://www.obviex.com/Samples/Encryption.aspx

Martin Spedding

# July 9, 2003 1:52 AM

Scott Galloway said:

Ummm...you can't, that's the whole idea - a hashing algorithm provides a condensed, non reversible representation of the input bytes. You arent't encrypting, you're hashing - it's a very different thing...see http://www.itl.nist.gov/fipspubs/fip180-1.htm for more infor on SHA-1

# July 9, 2003 2:57 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Rob Helms obviously needed some attention and barked around some hot are. .NET is in the open for 1.4 years now, not 3 and it clearly is in the 'early adopter' stages of a product.

perhaps Rob Helms should read Eric Sink's blog at: http://software.ericsink.com/rss.xml and then it might open his firmly shut eyes a little...

# July 9, 2003 4:53 AM

Duncan said:

What a fantastic demonstartion of my colour-blindness...nearly all the reds look like the same colour to me.

# July 9, 2003 6:15 AM

Paul said:

Rob helps works for 'Directions on Microsoft" NOT microsoft - http://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/

# July 9, 2003 9:04 AM

Roy said:

sigh... - just another groupie - that sentence is such esoteric crap that it must have been written under the influence of some illegal substance

# July 9, 2003 2:19 PM

Damit said:

If it helps, there are no events in Singapore either...

# July 15, 2003 8:28 AM

Phil Weber said:

Paschal: I agree that the PDC is prohibitively expensive for many developers, but I disagree with your statement that its content "will become obsolete in two months." Remember, .NET was unveiled at PDC 2000, and it's far from obsolete nearly 3 years later! I suspect that the information to be unveiled at this year's PDC will have similar longevity.

Whether or not the privilege of seeing it first is worth $4,000 is up to you. ;-)

# July 15, 2003 10:02 AM

cathal said:

Paschal,
I agree microsoft don't do enough in ireland, I can only look on with envy even to england, where their Reading complex does tons of stuff. They're poor in advertising their conferences which is why noone knows of them. Once you're on their lists, they do email and write to keep you in touch, but theres nowhere it's obvious to join these lists. Generally I keep an eye on http://www.microsoft.com/ireland/events/ , which lists any events. They also have at least 1 or 2 free msdn/technet events in dublin/cork/belfast every year. Once you subscribe to 1 online, they'll contact you about all future ones.

# July 15, 2003 11:02 AM

TrackBack said:

Slightly Bent Archives

# July 15, 2003 12:47 PM

Mads Nissen said:

the google search string "site:msdn.microsoft.com param1 param2" usually does the trick for me:)

# July 16, 2003 6:16 AM

Donny Mack said:

We also are running the class browser application:

http://sampleapps.dotnetjunkies.com/ClassBrowser/

# July 17, 2003 9:37 PM

Julien C. said:

Well, Roy mentionned more than an alternative browser. MyIE2 is cool but adds no real value to web surfing... I just watched the flash demo of iRider and i'm just impressed ! The Surf-Ahead feature is really surprising... You should check the demo...

But I agree that we shouldn't have to pay for a web browser...

# July 18, 2003 12:33 AM

Paschal said:

Julien ok it's cool, and I saw the demo.

But what this stuff does that I can't do with my current browser, apart the tabbed pages ?

Nothing ;-)

# July 18, 2003 12:37 AM

Matthias Cavigelli said:

Bitflux http://www.bitfluxeditor.org/ has an online demo at http://cvsdemo.bitfluxeditor.org/

I don't think it works in IE.

# July 18, 2003 2:52 AM

cathal said:

Paschal,
if you're working on a CMS project, check out www.dotnetnuke.com. Whilst the core doesn't have full workflow, plenty of (free open source) enhancements have been released to support most aspects of CMS.

# July 18, 2003 4:45 AM

Paschal said:

Thanks Cathal I will have a look at thhi site.

# July 18, 2003 4:49 AM

Paul said:

I use Avant Browser - it's free as well - non surf ahead though

# July 18, 2003 5:25 AM

Paschal said:

Paul do you have the weblink for Avant browser ?

# July 18, 2003 5:28 AM

Phil Weber said:

Paschal: http://www.philweber.com/net/stories/2002/11/20/aTaleOfTabbedPages.htm

# July 18, 2003 5:31 AM

TrackBack said:

Small Query Blog

# July 18, 2003 7:06 AM

TrackBack said:

UnknownReference

# July 18, 2003 7:06 AM

TrackBack said:

UnknownReference

# July 18, 2003 7:06 AM

TrackBack said:

UnknownReference

# July 18, 2003 7:06 AM

TrackBack said:

Philip Rieck

# July 18, 2003 7:06 AM

Bill Rapoza said:

Except, of course, that C was no more revolutionary than Java. In fact, its origin is more like C#: it was a refinement (generally speaking) of a language called BCPL. The real revolution was moving applications from "Big Iron" to the desktop. C simply combined the features to make facilitate the move: high-level expressiveness (compared to assembly) and fast execution speed.

# July 18, 2003 7:18 AM

Diogenese the Cynic said:

I'm suprised no one is asking this question about VB.NET and C# in particular. C# is just a gimmick language to entice C++ and Java developers to the .NET platform. VB.NET is VB6 with OOP features thanks to the CLR. Both of them might as well be identical, and neither one really provides a compelling reason to use it over the other.

C'mon Microsoft - why don't you really do something to make these languages stand apart from one another.

And while you're at it, give the development community a huge favor and fix all the bugs in .NET Framework 1.0 and VS.NET 2002 before trying to sell the development community a "service pack" in the form of a new product.

# July 18, 2003 7:39 AM

The Jeff said:

FreeTextBox is working grrrrrrrreat for me

# July 18, 2003 9:07 AM

Jesse Ezell said:

FreeTextBox

# July 18, 2003 9:19 AM

Jerry Dennany said:

I wish they'd dish themselves up a nice helping of VSS - talk about dog food...

# July 18, 2003 9:28 AM

When I was a kid said:

When I was a kid we walked to school, both ways, uphill, in the snow, and invented radical new programming languages for fun! We never built on existing successes, you could hardly hear yourself think over the noise of all the paradigm shifts we were causing... anything more then one, two years old is obsolete anyway right? Where is my Windows 2003-07-18 1:00pm? I think I'm still using the 8am build :(

# July 18, 2003 9:48 AM

Dave said:

Well said. Very well said.

I'm momentarily stuck in my career path, doing SAP programming. Sucks big time, but one way or another I'll be rid of this this coming fall.

A department of 15 programmers, millions spent on consulting, system purchased over 16 months ago. Let's see.... customer production lines shut down, nobody can figure out how to do barcode printing, and my latest project is to fix the feed coming out for forecassting - seems the numbers are just flat out wrong and nobody knows how to fix this inside of SAP.

Why me? Seems I had this flash of sanity... told them I could get accurate numbers out inside of a week because I'll just go against the damn base tables and not some 'infostructure' that once again nobody - go figure - knows how to change. Why do I know I can do this? Because I wrote a shopping cart site and rolled my own queries for order/catalog searching and price break info (seems SAP kinda lacks in this sort of stuff - again, go figure).

So let me understand this. 16 months, 15 programmers, millions on consulting. And not one programmer can write a simple program to pull out sales and invoice numbers. Net result? I'm stuck doing junior-level SAP coding.

Whew. Thanks for the platform to rant!

# July 21, 2003 4:16 AM

Duncan said:

You always get what you pay for - and Linux is free....so you don't get anything.

# July 21, 2003 6:43 AM

Charles said:

Spybot Search & Destroy ! ! !

# July 21, 2003 1:08 PM

SBC said:

A good one, thanks. I am also looking for one that measures the shutdown & restart process.

# July 22, 2003 12:31 AM

Tim Marman said:

That doesn't look very comfortable. What the hell is in there? Why is the backpack so big? :)

# July 22, 2003 5:14 AM

Tim Marman said:

Ahh. Bruce Lee and Mail Order Monsters, two of my favorite games of all time. Maybe I'll try to port the latter to .NET - would be a good exercise and I need a new game to play :)

C64 games were perfect with their simplicity - enough substance, decent graphics, but all about gameplay :)

# July 22, 2003 5:15 AM

spooky-the-cat said:

Cool sit you've got here :-)

# July 22, 2003 6:23 AM

Justin said:

There is a simple fix for IE 5 and up. In your Page Directive, include SmartNavigation="true". This will eliminate the postbacks from your browser history and also the Retry/Cancel dialog that a Refresh action triggers as Tim mentioned.

# July 22, 2003 8:25 AM

Isaac said:

Hi...I downloaded your codes but I can't get the questions and answers you said are stored in $$$. I can't click on it. Could I have it? Because I'm new to ASP.NET(VB) and am having trouble doing a quiz website.

If possible please email me the questions and answers at isaac_luo@yahoo.com.sg

# July 22, 2003 11:38 PM

Rand() said:

Yes, have seen it regularly, google shows some chatter on the newgroups about the same but no idea what the source is.

# July 23, 2003 11:19 AM

Paschal said:

The problem is this seems to be random.

And not really explicit error message !
I will probably try using my development server to see if this has something to do with my SQL installation.

# July 23, 2003 11:25 AM

asd said:

asd

# July 23, 2003 12:30 PM

Alex Hoffman said:

Amazing - where do you find the time?

# July 23, 2003 3:15 PM

Isaac said:

Hi,
if its possible could I have the source for the quiz? I'm doing a quiz website as a project for my school. Its suppose to be teaching material too. Please email me at isaac_luo@yahoo.com.sg

Thanks

# July 23, 2003 3:40 PM

TrackBack said:

heLP .Net Blog

# July 23, 2003 4:04 PM

Chris said:

Ever seen Expedia.com? They solved the popup problem. They use an IFRAME which *can* sit above combos (dropdownlist).

The dropdownlist and iframe are on the same level so they can sit on each other, no problem. So, if you can put your code in a seperate webpage and pull it into an iframe, you're golden ;)

# July 26, 2003 9:44 AM

Isaac said:

Hi again,
I was just wondering...I emailed you a few days ago but I don't know whether you got it. You were saying you are doing another quiz website with more features. I would really like to see it 'cos I need some help there. I would appreciate if you could reply to me asap as I have to hand in my project very very soon and I'm still stuck.

Thanks.

# July 27, 2003 6:03 AM

Paul Speranza said:

Paschal

I have been using a laptop as my primary machine for 4 years. The first was a 400 mhz Dell CPIR running NT4 Server for Interdev and VB.

My latest is a Dell C800 1GZ running Win 2K with .Net. I have had the video screen replaced twice and the hard drive crapped out and had to be replaced. Other than that I have been pretty pleased with it.

The only major difference is the drives in the laptops are slower than in desktops, but I love the convenience of working at my clients or at home.

Regards,
Paul Speranza

# July 27, 2003 3:23 PM

Isaac said:

Hi
I just saw your quiz website. Its very good. Simple and attractive. Is there any chance that I could get the code?

# July 27, 2003 4:32 PM

Dave said:

I agree with Paschel. I ditched my last desktop back in 1998 and never regretted it. I'm on my 3rd laptop since then - 2.5G RAM, full mutimedia, DVD and CD R/W, 16 inch screen, P4. The VERY first thing I did was upgrade it from XP Home to XP Pro with my MSDN Universal.

Currently running VB.NET 2003, IIS 5, SQL 2000 and Office 2000 along with a slew of other things... and never a problem. I've been considering purchasing VMware so I can set up a VM for both Office 2003 and Win2k3 and I'm very sure this box will handle it.

The benefits of my setup are too many to mention - wireless cable internet connection alone means I'll never go back. I participated in the blogathon yesterday and was grateful after reading many many complaining of sore butts by the 16th hour. You see, I just move around from the bed to floor to kitchen table to recliner! :P

Seriously.... my one strong OS recommendation is to use XP Pro. If you buy a laptop OR a desktop for VS.NET and SQL 2000, make sure you do it right. Hardware? You gotta pay bigger bucks for the laptop over a desktop, but by all means do NOT underpurchase on the horsepower no matter what. And then - to repeat - don't go with 2000 Pro (unless you care to install SP1, SP2, SP3 and probably SP4 chancing breaking something else) and don't go with XP Home (the lack of IIS and full networking will someday screw you) but instead IMMEDIATELY go to XP Pro.

Then, and only then, install all your MS apps like VS.NET and SQL 2000.

# July 27, 2003 5:12 PM

Data_Bus said:

Computers that start acting this need a spring cleaning.

Buy a new HD for your laptop, they aren't expensive. Install the new drive, do a clean install of XP. DON'T reinstall the OS or migrate existing setting from your old drive; do a FRESH ground up install.

Install the latest drivers, copy over your files, and just install the apps you need. I also picked up a cheap converter so that I can install the notebook HD in my desktop machine to help with the file copies.

I am in the habit of doing this process about every 18 months on any machine I care about or need to get real work done on. These machines never crash. If I wait to long to do this on my girlfriend's computer she starts to get real cranky...it makes THAT big a difference.

# July 27, 2003 5:49 PM

Steven Smith said:

Like the others have said, it sounds like it's just your situation. I've been using a laptop for all my dev work for a couple of years now. I HIGHLY recommend the Dell Inspirion line, since it has a tremendous amount of power. I've used their Inspiron 7500, 8000, and 8100 over the last 3-4 years and have been very happy with them. My next upgrade will probably come soon, most likely to an Inspiron 8500.

# July 27, 2003 7:29 PM

Julien C. said:

I have been working on a laptop for 3 years now... And I can't go back to a desktop computer now. I can work anywhere !

The most important thing is that I can work with a resolution of 1400*1050 (15" screen). It's a Sony VAIO PCG-GR215SP (1.2Ghz, 512M of RAM, ATI Radeon). I always plug my Microsoft Intellimouse on it. Can't work with that TouchPad... Sony makes very very good and fast laptops... My WinXP is loaded much more faster on my laptop than on my desktop (which has the same config...)

SONY IS THE BEST (and the most expansive :)

# July 27, 2003 11:44 PM

Paschal said:

Isaac

I replied to your email last week. And if you go to the link above, you can have the code for the client side.

The admin part will be release today or tomorrow, as soon as I can finish the tool.

# July 28, 2003 12:26 AM

SBC said:

How much RAM do you have in your laptops? In my machines, I feed it at least 512mb to garner an acceptable response.

# July 28, 2003 1:42 AM

Paschal said:

512 Mb !

# July 28, 2003 1:54 AM

Dave said:

I'll stick with my earlier comments. I have never had any problems - and every laptop I owned required an OS install after I purchased it. Lay down the OS, then deal with .NET, SQL 2000 and finally Office. The only thing my latest laptop required was some careful thought over .NET... I decided since my habits and requirements did't need Framework 1.0 nor VS 2002, I skipped this. You see, my 60G harddrive came already partitioned 30G each, and throwing everything on the C: drive (my personal preference - keep all MS products on the Windows drive) would have left about 300M free!

Good luck. If I can have no issues with this, I gotta believe any halfway decent geek should - I'm an MCSD but have never aspired to be MCSE! :P

# July 28, 2003 2:08 AM

Paschal said:

Dave

I don't say I am unhappy with my laptop ! I just say I open a debate on the fact that Windows is not really adapted for a laptop.

Take another example, the battery meter.

Do you find it's very accurate ? I don't think so.

IMHO MS had never proof the concept of windows and mobility.

Tablet PC OS goes in the right direction.

# July 28, 2003 2:32 AM

Damit said:

I think the accuracy of the battery meter depends to a large extent on how accurate the battery itself is and how accurate the measuring sensors are, not so much on Windows. My laptop's battery gets reported very accurately...

Just upgraded my laptop to 512MB too.

# July 28, 2003 4:31 AM

Robert McLaws said:

How is a laptop's hardware any different that a desktop's hardware?

# July 28, 2003 8:21 AM

Mladen Mihajlovic said:

I think what Microsoft's point with .NET is that languages aren't important anymore. It shouldn't matter what you program in as it all creates the same code at the end of the day. Maybe *that's* the revolution that's coming.

# July 28, 2003 9:08 AM

Isaac said:

Hi just to clarify...the link above you are refering to is the Quiz application link right? That links me to your first quiz website codes. Is that the one I'm suppose to get?

# July 28, 2003 4:02 PM

damit@mvps.org (Damit) said:

Robert,

Most new laptops use the Pentium-M (Centrino chipset) or the mobile version of the P4 (like mine does); thus they need different motherboards, power supplies, etc. from desktops. Also the hard drives, DVD-ROMs, CD-RWs, etc. are usually smaller to fit into the laptop chassis.

# July 28, 2003 5:02 PM

David Evans said:

Sometimes when the Index service is running it locks and messes around with assemblies and config files.

To Fix: Go to the 'System' node under 'Indexing Service' in computer management.
In the directories node create a new directory.
In the Path put 'C:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.0.3705\Temporary ASP.NET Files' (for 2002) and click no to include in the index.
Click OK and the indexing service will leave the directory alone.

This may not be the solution but its better than re-installing VS

# July 29, 2003 6:00 AM

Peter said:

Sounds like an error that I get frequently - if it's the one I'm thinking of that is... Have a look at this url: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;329065

# July 29, 2003 6:09 AM

Paschall said:

Thanks David and Peter ! I will try now. I couldn't imagine that Index Server could have something to do with my issue.

# July 29, 2003 6:12 AM

TrackBack said:

Jim Meeker

# July 29, 2003 7:28 AM

TrackBack said:

Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio WebDog, Shadow: Tuesday, July 29, 2003

# July 29, 2003 8:09 AM

Stephane Rodriguez said:

Everything lies in the xml namespaces. Each vendor is making sure it's all proprietary, read: undocumented and will be upgraded without notice.

xml namespaces are like binary file formats. So basically, there is no difference between proprietary stuff and xml protocols.

All the rest is marketing fluff waiting for their Scoble session.

# July 29, 2003 1:20 PM

James Snell said:

Actually, namespaces are the saving grace here because they work both ways... there's absolutely nothing stopping you or the companies on the receiving end of this stuff to come up with their own. The key issue here is FUD... everyone claiming their own fertilizer smells better than everyone else's when what really matters is that the crop needs food regardless of how bad it smells.

# July 30, 2003 12:17 AM

TrackBack said:

# July 30, 2003 4:58 AM

James Snell said:

Is it real gold? ;-)

# July 30, 2003 11:07 AM

TrackBack said:

heLP .Net Blog

# July 30, 2003 4:48 PM

Phil Scott said:

This came up in one of my classes, and this is what we came up with (all theoretical, but I think it would work).

The first option we thought of was to dynamically generate the JavaScript code for the drop down lists. Which, in theory, could work. The problem lied in the fact that in total there 10000+ items for the third drop down list that we were trying to narrow down.

Our other idea involved a hidden iframe that would do all the work for us, and then update the drop down lists via JavaScript. Once again, nasty.

The postback is going to be only as fast as their connections most of the time, so we were trying to do as much on the client side as possible (without sending down a ton of data).

If you run across a good solution, I'd love to see it.

# July 30, 2003 6:00 PM

Scott Galloway said:

Have a look at Andy Smiths site...he has a bunch of controls which do what you want...oh and are free...and work really well!

# July 30, 2003 7:41 PM

Scott Galloway said:

And it is at http://www.metabuilders.com :-)

# July 30, 2003 7:42 PM

paschall said:

thanks

# July 30, 2003 8:20 PM

TrackBack said:

# July 31, 2003 4:26 AM

Mads Nissen said:

Check out denis bauers control if your dynamically loaded controls are giving you a hassle:http://weblogs.asp.net/mnissen/posts/9978.aspx

# July 31, 2003 9:06 AM

Jesse Ezell said:

I agree. Edit and Continue is a good thing, there are lots of other things I would much rather have than Edit and Continue though... that is very low on the list of features I would like to see (in fact, low enough not to be on my wish list). Definately something I could live without (even though it would be nice). If I had to choose between generics and edit and continue or iterators and edit and continue, I would definately choose the alternatives.

# July 31, 2003 12:17 PM

Paschal said:

Jesse I agree too. I would like to see some improvments on the HTML editor too.

Some ideas about this part ?

What about also some XML/XSL editor ?

I also seen this morning that on the video, we are going to use more and more windows everywhere.

What's about giving people a 30" widescreen :-)

# July 31, 2003 12:41 PM

TLGNH said:

c64? I have the original Pet with a chicklet keyboard and 8K (yes thats, K) RAM. The went to the 4032 with a green screen. Thats where I learned BASIC. It was great!

# August 1, 2003 7:06 PM

Isaac said:

Hi
I am still waiting for the admin side of your quiz because I don't know how to add the question into the database using a webpage when the last question number is 9999. May I know when I could get the admin part? I have to hand in my quiz soon...

# August 4, 2003 11:05 PM

TrackBack said:

Jim Meeker

# August 5, 2003 12:01 PM

TrackBack said:

# August 5, 2003 1:24 PM

dsuspense said:

Actually, java.blogs was out before dotnet.blogs.
Both are great communities for java and .net knowledge.

# August 5, 2003 3:00 PM

Mads Nissen said:

Thanks! This aggregator seems very nice. Been looking for something like this for a while!

# August 6, 2003 8:31 AM

Damian said:

Not necessarily
It means SCO are trying to scare people into coughing up some money before any of this gets tested in court

# August 6, 2003 10:09 AM

Jesse Houwing said:

What is it? It looks cool!

# August 6, 2003 10:41 AM

Paschal said:

It seems to be an electric lightning produce in a lab. Well I guess so

# August 6, 2003 11:04 AM

Robert Scoble said:

How much can you afford? Did you realize that we're not making a profit on the show?

# August 6, 2003 1:38 PM

Paschal said:

Robert I think 500$ would be a reasonable price but 2000$, no thank you.

I like Microsoft, but in my real world, my rela company don't pay for some fantasy like this one.
It's truely sad but that's the truth !

# August 6, 2003 1:45 PM

Scott Watermasysk said:

Actually, lack of style can be great...nothing to get in the way.

.Text uses all repeaters...no datagrids/datalists were hurt in the making of this blog (...well, maybe in the admin :D)

-Scott

# August 6, 2003 1:48 PM

Paschal said:

Yes Scott but maybe for weblogs, not for websites, users still like colors and the headers and footers different styles.
BTW, I forget also the lack of pagination in a repeater.

# August 6, 2003 1:53 PM

Phil Scott said:

I wrote too much so I just posted it on my weblog: http://weblogs.asp.net/pscott/posts/22804.aspx

# August 6, 2003 2:01 PM

TrackBack said:

# August 6, 2003 2:23 PM

Robert Scoble said:

Paschal, unfortunately, it costs us a lot more than $500 per person to put an event of this size and quality on. Did you know that every Microsoft employee who attends has to pay too? And their group is being charged almost the entire full price.

Have you ever been to a serious developer conference before? (Ala VSLive, or PDC, or TechED?) It doesn't sound like it, since you're calling them fantasies. These are by far the best way to get technical details about bleeding edge technologies.

# August 6, 2003 2:24 PM

Paschal said:

Robert, yes I was at many many conferences... in Europe !

OK maybe the word fantasies is a bit too much. I love all the technical events, but why not doing something outside the US, when MS pretend to be a worldwide company ?

I missed TechEd this year for the first time, and yes it was expensive too, but the ratio price content was more realistic.

# August 6, 2003 2:30 PM

Robert Scoble said:

One problem: there can only be one PDC. Why? Because the PDC only happens when Microsoft is going to unveil a big new platform. Or, in the case of this year's PDC, three new platforms (new VS, new SQL, new Windows).

Also, what makes the PDC the PDC? Microsoft employee participation. Do you realize that every Microsoft employee has to justify attending to their boss (and their boss has to pick up the cost?)

Turns out we're not expecting to make a profit on the PDC, even with Microsoft paying for employees to attend.

For a Microsoft employee, it's already hard to justify going to a conference like this. If you add in a 19-hour flight somewhere, it'll be even more difficult. And, there can only be one PDC, not a series. So, no matter where we put it, people are gonna gripe about having to fly 19 hours to come to it (if it's in Europe, Asia, for instance, would have to fly, and most of America). If it's in Asia, then everyone else won't come. It's a real hard problem.

When I planned the VBITS conferences we held them all over the world, but the ones in San Francisco were always better than the rest (and demonstratably so). Why? Most of the world's Microsoft developers live within a five hour flight of San Francisco. Our European and Asian conferences were always about 1/5th the attendance, and not as good technical content.

# August 6, 2003 2:35 PM

Robert Scoble said:

Phil, believe it or not, this conference +is+ that expensive. Did you realize we're not expecting to make a profit on the conference? Even at a $1800 price tag. Translation: attendees will get a lot of value out of this event, even though the price is high.

# August 6, 2003 2:36 PM

Paschal said:

So Robert, if I understand what you say.
1 - PDC is only for the rich elite who can afford it.
2 - Microsoft is a company in trouble which can afford to promote their own strategy and line of products.
3 - Microsoft outside the US don't have good technical employees.

LOL

# August 6, 2003 2:42 PM

Paschal said:

And Robert when you say attendees will get a lot of value out of this event, you are seriously thinking that a couple of DVD, a T-shirt 'I was at the PDC' and a bunch of pencils worth the money :-(

# August 6, 2003 2:44 PM

TrackBack said:

# August 6, 2003 3:09 PM

Anon said:

No. End it now, this is silly. You know, I know it, we all know it.

# August 6, 2003 3:34 PM

Robert Scoble said:

Paschal: no. I'm saying that having a relationship with the teams that are building the technology that your livelihood depends on, is worth the investment.

Um, we have 55,000 employees. 25,000+ of whom are employed in the Seattle area. Most of the major decision makers live here. Most of the execs live here. Most of the key teams are located here. Yes, we have R&D labs all over the world (we have a great face detection team in China, for instance) but most of it is here in Seattle.

Hey, I want a Mercedes Benz, too, but...

Sorry you can't be there. I couldn't attend Gnomdex for the same reasons (I couldn't afford it). We all have to decide what's important to us and our careers going forward.

# August 6, 2003 3:35 PM

Duncan said:

It is a shame that conferences in general cost so much - not a reflection on MS, it's just a fact of life. Perhaps if there were small satelite conferences in Europe with live satelite links?

# August 6, 2003 3:46 PM

Ray Jezek said:

dont they just post a lot of the information from the conference on the site anyway after its over? Heck there were like 5 MSDN-TV segments from teched on architecture alone... i feel like i was there... so why pay all the $$? It's probably a nice place to be seen and what not but getting the scoop on a "futuristic" product isnt very useful.. unless your company adopts the technology in beta or the first week it comes out (which some people do.. especially those who build components as a business, etc...). I went to the PDC info site and was dissapointed to see the whole thing was on whidbey and yukon because that makes me thinks it's just a week long advertisement for these up-and-coming-cant-live-without products of the future. I would rather spend $$ on a conference that provided me with information that would be valuable using the tools i already made an investment in.

Thats the practical side... the other side of me thinks it would be really cool to be there and see all the new stuff...get a head start on the up-and-coming next wave, etc...

unfortunately the practical side usually pays the bills... ;)

# August 6, 2003 10:46 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

This was originally published at:
http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/012302-1.shtml

Personally, I find the DeveloperFusion layout hard to utilize for reading articles.

Also, if you are into learning more about XML Serialization, check out the presentation I gave on it for a class I taught on XML in .NET:
http://datawebcontrols.com/classes/xmlfornet/Session3.zip

# August 7, 2003 1:27 AM

Christophe Lauer said:

That's not exactly what I would call a bathroom :-)

# August 7, 2003 4:23 AM

Paschall said:

Point taken :-)

# August 7, 2003 4:34 AM

A.Parvaresh said:

I have never got that error connecting to weblogs.asp.net

Who says they get such thing?

# August 7, 2003 7:26 AM

Paschall said:

I don't think Hossei mentioned weblogs.asp.net ?!?

# August 7, 2003 7:44 AM

HumanCompiler said:

Censorship in that manner is very unfortunate...I believe I saw there are a bunch of news sites and what not being blocked in China. The internet's bringing some interesting new situations, with some unfortunate results.

# August 7, 2003 1:44 PM

Jeff Julian said:

Thanks for the entry. I like to see that people are actually reading them. My next article, in my opinion, will be a little more interesting because of the topic.

# August 9, 2003 7:42 PM

Exar said:

I will second the randomness of this error. I have a production server that kicks it to me every so often, and I know that one of our customers had a bad experience, and for no reason.

I always close my dbase connections, and it happens on various pages.

M$ should fix it.

# August 11, 2003 12:53 PM

Rachel Reese said:

Paschal, that is awesome!! Thanks for sharing.

# August 11, 2003 3:41 PM

Paschall said:

Thanks Rachel. Yes it's really good !

# August 11, 2003 3:47 PM

Addy Santo said:

Hey guess what - if you could see the source code it wouldn't help anyway because everyone knows that the world would be "sealed" :)

# August 11, 2003 3:49 PM

TrackBack said:

# August 11, 2003 4:15 PM

Douglas Reilly said:

Of course the Read logic is correct. The issue is that if you want to check the status in a non-destructive way (a way that does not eat up a record) there was not a way to do so. HasRows does allow that.

# August 11, 2003 4:43 PM

Paschall said:

OK Douglas, but what is the point to consume a data reading if it's just to see if you have rows ?
Maybe to retrieve a recordcount, but others methods exist for that.

# August 11, 2003 4:45 PM

HumanCompiler said:

Yup, was gonna say that, but Douglas beat me to it...I was actually pretty surprised to see HasRows...once you get used to the way the DataReader works, there really isn't a need for it.

Only time I ever needed it was determining whether or not to display a list control in ASP.NET if there are records or not. It was easy to work around though.

rpMain.DataSource = MyReader
rpMain.DataBinding()

If rpMain.Items.Count > 0 Then
'hide repeater and show label
Else
'show repeater and hide label
End If

I guess now instead, you could save the actual binding code like this...

If MyReader.HasRows Then
rpMain.DataSource = MyReader
rpMain.DataBind()
'show repeater and hide label
Else
'hide repeater and show label
End If

*shrug*

# August 11, 2003 4:49 PM

HumanCompiler said:

sorry about that first code example in the last comment...i'm dislexic ;)

# August 11, 2003 4:57 PM

Paschall said:

Erik that exactly what I was saying initially :-)
What is the point to add useless and confusing functions ??

And more annoying, especially for newbies, is that if you use an hasrows in if then else, not knowing that this is not a read method, the error message coming immediately after an attempt to read some data is not obviously linked to the HasRows.

# August 11, 2003 5:03 PM

Douglas Reilly said:

I think the advantage is that you can make a decision based upon whether records exist, and then, say, pass the DataReader on to another object to actually read the data. Other ways of getting the row count short of reading the DataReader are not that great (OUTPUT parameters from Stored Procs, etc.)

I personally have not found the lack of HasRows to be a problem (I use a pattern as above, checking Items.Count) but it is a little easier to have this available as an option.

# August 11, 2003 5:24 PM

HumanCompiler said:

Well hey, Doug and I gave you reasons why it's needed, it's just that those situations don't happen very often. ;) I personally haven't used HasRows yet in any of my projects.

# August 11, 2003 5:29 PM

TrackBack said:

Sean Gerety

# August 11, 2003 5:33 PM

Robert Scoble said:

What, you want a link too? Heh.

# August 11, 2003 5:42 PM

JosephCooney said:

So you read Chris Sells's blog too do you!

# August 11, 2003 8:03 PM

Nick said:

A citation to where you found the above piece would be nice, but it's nice you read my site.

# August 11, 2003 11:31 PM

Blair Stephenson said:

It could be quite useful when you have Set Nocount on in your stored proc's, but you still want to know if the datareader has rows.

Our SQL DBA's default to set nocount on, as according to them it saves some network packets.

# August 12, 2003 3:01 AM

Carl Prothman said:

The reason you need HasRows is in the case of where you need to check if the there are any records before you bind the SqlDataReader to a DataGrid WebControl. If you use the Read method, then bind, you will be missing the first record...

For example, say you get obtain a SqlDataReader as follows:

Dim connString As String = "Server=(local);Database=Northwind;UID=sa;PWD=myPassword"
Dim sqlConn As SqlClient.SqlConnection = New SqlClient.SqlConnection(connString)
Dim sqlSelectCmd As SqlClient.SqlCommand = New SqlClient.SqlCommand("Select * From Customers", sqlConn)

sqlConn.Open()
Dim sqlDataReader As SqlClient.SqlDataReader = sqlSelectCmd.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.CloseConnection)

Now if you use the read method, then bind, you will be missing the first record.

If sqlDataReader.Read Then
DataGrid1.DataSource = sqlDataReader
DataGrid1.DataBind()
Else
Label1.Text = "No records found"
End If

However, if you use the HasRows property, then you won't be missing the first record.

If sqlDataReader.HasRows Then
DataGrid1.DataSource = sqlDataReader
DataGrid1.DataBind()
Else
Label1.Text = "No records found"
End If

# August 13, 2003 2:14 AM

Paschall said:

Hmmm ! Not really what I use for a Datagrid bind. Instead I use a Dataadapter and Datatables, so Hasrows has no use for me there.

Datareader is more useful for a Repeater or to fill a form

# August 13, 2003 4:38 AM

Greg said:

Looks like V 3.0

# August 13, 2003 8:46 AM

Roy Osherove said:

If you want to do it using code, Look to WMI and ADSI for the answer. Using this technology you can pretty much control any aspect of your IIS from a remote machine (given the right permissions). this will egt you started:
http://www.15seconds.com/issue/010710.htm

I'm actually doing something on the subject myself, and hopefully will have an article on this in the coming week...

# August 13, 2003 6:00 PM

rick said:

That works in Mozilla and Opera too, not just IE. You can also add an accesskey attribute to set a keyboard shortcut for the form element.

# August 14, 2003 9:06 AM

Peter de Boer said:

Doesn't work in (my) IE6

# August 14, 2003 10:03 AM

Jason Perry said:

doesn't work in my IE6 either

# August 14, 2003 11:02 AM

Andy Smith said:

The asp:CheckBox already has label behavior built in, with the Text property.

# August 14, 2003 1:07 PM

rick said:

Actually, doesn't ASP.Net do this for you with the Text property of the CheckBox and RadioButton controls?

# August 14, 2003 2:24 PM

Zoepercavia said:

Did you have a any problems with the RPC service crashing yet? And do you automatically download the latest updates?

If so, then you probably have the patch for some time already, because it was issued July 16.

# August 14, 2003 5:50 PM

sirshannon said:

ah... I now have a potential scapegoat for the fact that several of my sites are MIA...

# August 14, 2003 6:06 PM

Paschall said:

As I said in my post I tried with a laptop I don't use often, without automatic updates, because it's not usually connected, and I surely didn't since June, and asked for Windows Update from the Start Menu.

I didn't see anything regarding a critical update, so of course because I know the situation I went to MSDN to download the patch.

So it's quite scary to see thhis behaviour when you address this issue with non techies users

# August 14, 2003 6:08 PM

Paul said:

See if you have any 'deferred updates' by going to the system control panel, click on automatic update and look if the button is highlighted.

Second, go back to windows update and View Installation History and see if you did already install it?

# August 14, 2003 6:17 PM

Bryan said:

Did you click the "View Installation History" link on the Windows Update page to make sure that it hadn't already been installed?

I didn't remember installing this particular patch on any of my machines, and no critical updates were showing, so I viewed the history and sure enough, there it was.

# August 14, 2003 6:31 PM

Paschall said:

Which one it's supposed to be on the History, or what date ?

On the Laptop I didn't updated since ages, so the last update is from March !

Of course I did it now.

# August 14, 2003 7:26 PM

Bryan said:

In the Description column of the Installation History, look for something containing "823980". For my machines running XP, the following shows up - "Security Update for Windows XP (823980)".

# August 14, 2003 9:10 PM

sirshannon said:

okay, it's not just an excuse... my server is hosted in NY. Unfortunately, it's my "work" email address (I am a contractor).

# August 15, 2003 2:45 AM

Harry said:

Too bad. It's actually in Traditional Chinese (Taiwan Culture).

# August 15, 2003 12:29 PM

Dumky said:

Could you give the url of the original news post that had this image?
Where is the lab located? What is the purpose of lightnings?
...

# August 15, 2003 6:45 PM

Jason Bunting said:

That would be a dream come true . . . The unfortunate reality is:

"Hey hon, check out this transformation of XML -"

"That's nice, we need to go shopping."

# August 15, 2003 6:58 PM

Scott Glasgow said:

Paschal,

You made me laugh, but I think you forget the real underlying issues that could happen. :)

We are talking about compounding every day normal arguments into a whole lot more!

Keep up the blogging!

# August 15, 2003 11:29 PM

a said:

Testing

# August 20, 2003 6:42 AM

steve said:

testing

# August 20, 2003 4:36 PM

qwerty said:

nope,
this is a cumualtive update for a number of old vulnerabilites and a new one. The MSBlast worm was a DCOM issue, and the match was released a month ago.

# August 20, 2003 10:07 PM

Scott Galloway said:

I see no download for this...do you have a download link - the article I see says click on the download link later in this article...but there isn't one???

# August 21, 2003 10:03 AM

Paschal said:

Scott you are right ! I still searching. Let you know if I find the bloody link ;-)

# August 21, 2003 10:28 AM

Phil Scott said:

I believe this is one of those "if it isn't effecting you, don't install it" hotfixes. If one of these issues are causing problems for your site, then you'll have to contact MS for the download.

Otherwise, they'll be included in a service pack.

# August 21, 2003 10:33 AM

Paschal said:

Looking at the list, MS should definitly release a Service pack !

# August 21, 2003 10:44 AM

Phil Scott said:

I think it comes down to them having to test everything out to make sure the patches don't hose existing, working ASP.NET 1.1 installs.

# August 21, 2003 10:56 AM

Joe Grossberg said:

Why don't you ask him why?

Seriously.

It might be that he's lazy and incompetent. Or, he might have a legitimate excuse.

Just be non-confrontational about it and be like, "Hey [name], do you have a minute? OK, I read about these two new worm -- MSBlast and Sobig -- and saw our system wasn't patched yet. So I went ahead and did it because I'm concerned about our vulnerability to attacks. Can you explain why weren't patched more quickly?"

If he brushes you off as paranoid, then maybe you should schedule a meeting with his supervisor.

Joe

P.S. I agree with you on the "mass effect" motivation, but it's impossible to prove. Whether or not a huge Linux user-base would be equally vulnerable is almost entirely speculation.

# August 21, 2003 12:02 PM

Paschal said:

To be honest, Joe he used more the F.. word in a minute that I do in my entire life ;-)
I show him the results produced by the test tool provided by MS to see which computers on a network are not patched, and his answer was: 'Oh this tool is not reliable, MS reckon that a PC can look unpatch when it's really done'. Moron ;-)
Anyway for the Linux idea, maybe I should add also the Internet success is also responsible.
Very tempting for some hackers to create some new exploits like a worm. But I definitely think that the success of an OS determine the will of some hackers to crack it. And of course Linux has also some good nasty virus, but nobody really make a publicity about this

# August 21, 2003 12:12 PM

Jerry Dennany said:

A very difficult position you find yourself in, I'm sure. I agree with Joe, that if his actions or inactions might directly impact the success of your projects, then you have cause for concern, and you should notify your boss that you see the potential for this placing your project at risk.

# August 21, 2003 3:02 PM

Jerry Dennany said:

Yup, like I've mentioned in other blogs that have referenced this, the article is mostly fluff. (IMHO).

# August 21, 2003 10:07 PM

Jacques pilote said:

je suis infecté par w32 blaster.worm comment je fais s.v.p

# August 22, 2003 1:55 PM

Alexandre Rocco said:

There is also the ASPNet Version Switcher from Denis Bauer, on a nice Winform that does the job for you. Very handy!

http://www.denisbauer.com/NETTools/ASPNETVersionSwitcher.aspx

--Alexandre Rocco

# August 22, 2003 3:59 PM

Robert A. Wlodarczyk said:

Wow, Thank you. I didn't find this until just now through a random search on Feedster.

I think some of the projects may be open sourced, while others won't be. For example, my project I plan on completing in the next few weeks (in my after-hours work at home) and will be hosting it for a small monthly fee per user.

# August 22, 2003 4:29 PM

TrackBack said:

# August 23, 2003 8:14 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 23, 2003 10:01 AM

TrackBack said:

Jim Meeker

# August 23, 2003 10:01 AM

Brian Desmond said:

Actually, PSS will not charge you for hotfixes.

The reason they make you call is because these things are also known as "QFE"s, or Quick Fix Engineering. These things are not as throughly tested as service packs or full releases, so keeping the distribution limited also limits the number of people that could encounter a bug int he fix.

--Brian

# August 23, 2003 12:09 PM

Paschall said:

Brian I disagree with this, accessibility must be standard not an option, and this particular fix should be downloadable.

# August 23, 2003 12:14 PM

Danilo said:

Looks good in theory, but you'd have to fix the font size for this to be useful, try using this at 400% font size, you'll see all of the images.

I suppose that this could be accomodated by making the image much taller, or perhaps placing an opaque div under the text positioned so that the area that the bottom two images take up in the "default" state won't be visible.

# August 23, 2003 2:44 PM

TrackBack said:

CSS-2 Image Rollovers, Blogarithm [dionidium.com: design 03]

# August 23, 2003 7:51 PM

Randy Holloway said:

Paschal, why couldn't you manage this with a server with a DMZ server with a hole opened up to the inside with IPSec to keep it secure? I agree that the box can't be hit directly, but surely there is a reasonable way to accomplish this objective.

# August 23, 2003 10:21 PM

Chris Martin said:

Here's up much cleaner, IMHO, method.
http://www.pixy.cz/blogg/clanky/cssnopreloadrollovers/

This can be applied to your images pretty easily.

Chris

# August 24, 2003 8:51 AM

Scott Galloway said:

This is a question which I've puzzled over as well, the general advice about static methods is 'don't use them to group a bunch on unrelated function together for convenience' umm...yes...well I've yet to come across a project which doesn't do just that. Most of my prjects has a 'Common' class somewhere about which has a whole bunch of 'Is' type functions and formatters etc..(IsGuid being a favourite in a current project). Other stuff is broken up into more appropriate classes like Security, encryption, compression etc...but I do think these types of classes are necessary.
One way to get around the problem of these messy source files is through the use of Partial classes like we'll have when Whidbey arrives, these will give a very useful method of breaking the sprwaling source files which can occur when you use this approach into better subdivisions (especially useful when using source control and multiple coders own parts of the same class...not ideal but it does happen!)

# August 24, 2003 8:58 AM

Paschal said:

Yes I know I published yours yesterday ;-)

But the one I publish today is an alternative, I have written some time ago, but still interesting method.

# August 24, 2003 8:59 AM

Paschal said:

Scott seems to be interesting the idea of a Common class. Can you develop more ?

# August 24, 2003 9:01 AM

Chris Martin said:

DOH!

Sorry 'bout that. I saw it on www.simplebits.com.

# August 24, 2003 9:10 AM

Scott Galloway said:

There realy is nothing to develop...it is literally a catch-all for methods which don't belong anywhere else. These are usually implemented as static methods...with compiled static regular expressions (very useful when validation farily compelx data) implemented within as well.
It really is better practice not to do this at all - it can lead to some very sloppy practices and you have to keep a tight rein on when something drifts into this class - a rule which I tend to use, is ' is it used by more than 3 unrelated classes' - if they're releated (i.e., can inherit from the same parent class) then the parent class should really implement the method and not the 'Common'.
If you've got a fair number of methods which are similar (like format validators such as IsGuid / IsLong...etc..) - then by all means set up other classes - oh, and don't be afraid to refactor as you go! Word has it that Whidbey has some pretty neat refactoring stuff!

# August 24, 2003 9:39 AM

Phil Scott said:

I don't think the box is going to have to be visible. I bet they'll release a service or something that will download the updates to a server that is visible, and the SQL Server will connect to that local server securely.

Of course, I could be very wrong.

# August 24, 2003 10:59 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 24, 2003 11:35 AM

Randy Holloway said:

I think that we can find one point of agreement. Finding a way to have the patches automatically downloaded or at least to notify the admin that they exist is a reasonable starting point, even if they aren't installed. Right now the SQL Server product can't even do that, and because it doesn't many less experienced administrators (or environments without a qualified administrator) go unpatched. Microsoft needs to take measures to try to fix that problem, and that's what they're trying to do.

# August 24, 2003 12:12 PM

Robert McLaws said:

Look, you have a web server that's visible, right? It has to have 2 way connections, so it has to be able to have outbound communication. So put SUS on that box, and open up the poert it runs on. At that point, you have a minimal attack surface. So what <i>exactly</i> are you worried about?

It brings up another point that goes along with human nature. You can't just close yourself off to the world cause you might get hurt. That's no way to live. If you follow the directions and do it properly, you can have the best of both worlds.

Somewhere, one of your boxes talks to the rest of the world. What is the harm in putting an update agent on that box? If you don't trust it, then try it in VMWare. If you don't like it, no harm no foul.

# August 24, 2003 3:29 PM

SBC said:

Thanks for the fine example.

# August 24, 2003 5:13 PM

JosephCooney said:

All my pages inherit from a <projectName>Page class, which in turn derives from System.Web.Ui.Page. Pages with more specialized function derive from a subclass of this main page (eg. all the edit pages might derive from <projectName>EditPage). All the convenience methods/objects I need which aren't in the framework are added to the base page(s). I've found creating a base page class to be very powerful (example: I changed all the validators on all of my pages to display a little exclamation mark image beside the control they were validating when there was an error, and show the validation message as a popup when you clicked on the image, all in 4 lines in the base class). I'm fairly happy with it, but would be interested in hearing how others do things.

# August 24, 2003 7:55 PM

hamish.ahern@REMOVETHIStrustpower.co.nz said:

I also am getting this erro, and it only does it on some particular queries, seems tied to the execution plan, because if you alter the query to return the same records but using different execution plan the error goes away. one suggestion that sometimes easily changes the execution plan is to use an ORDER By clause. please post the MS KB article if MS have decided to fix this bug that wont allow production environments to exist on their software.

# August 24, 2003 9:53 PM

hamish.ahern@REMOVETHIStrustpower.co.nz said:

I fixed my problem. I found by accident that by change my cmd.CommandTimeOut = 0 to anything but zero fixed stopped the error from occuring on adapter.fill(ds)

# August 24, 2003 11:30 PM

Dumky said:

Check out: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2003/07/01/bonusrecipe.html

Their version is a bit cleaner (imho) because the javascript event bindings are done at runtime, not using the onMouseX html tags.

Their version doesn't work in NS4 or IE4, though, but also looks better because it doesn't have to deal with too much browser specific code.

# August 25, 2003 2:24 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 25, 2003 6:21 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 25, 2003 7:22 AM

Scott Galloway said:

I also use a parent page class in my applications, and I agree it is a very useful approach. One comment I would have though is to try to resist the urge to make a catch-all Page class. The use of parent classes is also pretty handy for things like user and server controls, for instance it is a really useful way to hook up events to allow your user controls to 'communicate' with each other...
One problematic thign with the approach I mentioned is the loss of encapsulation between tiers of your application (so each tier accesses classes which belong to other tiers)- the use of a separate assembly can help aleviate this issue...

# August 25, 2003 8:14 AM

Confused said:

If you always have to use the "@" symbol then how is it any different from prepending any other character?

# August 25, 2003 8:17 AM

Robert Scoble said:

Nah, if anything you'll see MSDN change to become easier to publish to.

# August 25, 2003 9:53 AM

Paschal said:

Robert how you wxplain that some very deep stuff like Chris Brumme notes, are not part of MSDN ?
And I take only one case but you can find a lot of good stuff from MS bloggers which should be more officially place in MSDN, to give them a corporate identity

# August 25, 2003 9:57 AM

Duncan said:

Oh no - more code maintenance problems are born...

# August 25, 2003 10:24 AM

Darrell said:

Too funny, Duncan! I didn't necessarily think it is a *good* idea in all cases, but the option is there.

# August 25, 2003 5:22 PM

Dave said:

Well now.

Seems two weeks ago the big .NET weblog thing was personal responsibility for one's career. Oh, and inspired from PDC hype (or percieved hype if you will) coming from all corners of the .NET weblog universe.

Is this post foreshadowing of the next big revelation? That of either (a) consider the source or (b) corporate versus personal presense?

Next thing you know we'll all be marveling over the fact that multiple-chjoice certification exams are easier to braindump than adaptive ones.

Look... MSDN is a _corporate_ run and sponsered website. Chris Brumme's weblog is a _personal_ online jounal of whatever he wishes to write about. Period. One requires channels of approval ad as much forethought as possible. One requires no approval at all and therefore doesn't require any forethought. One is perceived as professional - and therefore speaks with more authoritative voice than anything the other one will ever do. One should be written professionally using proper tone, grammar and be devoid of slang or typos. One speaks personally and states opinion (likely even including the well-known disclaimer) and should therefore never be taken nearly as authoritatively.

We all know what a weblog is. We all should listen to sales pitches with a cautious ear. We all should watch the nightly news with the understanding that one of about three emedia conglomorates are telling us what they beieve is important. Just like we all should understand that however insightful and educational Chris' words are, when he posts them on his blog they are just that - HIS words, not MS' words.

MSDN _should_ be hard to publish to. It should have rigorous fact-checking, spell-checking, and yes, even code testing. It's the nature of the beast. Just because Chris works for MS I do not mistake his words for MS. And just because MSDN has an RSS feed doesn't make it a personal weblog.

# August 25, 2003 6:49 PM

julie said:

Paschal-
INETA does not CREATE user groups. You have to be a pre-existing, real live, public, monthly meeting user group with a .net focus in order to become an INETA member. You have been bitching and moaing about this for a long long time. YOu have so much enthusiasm for .net, so much information, for cryin' out loud - go start a user group. And then apply for membership in INETA and I'm sure THEN there will be a decent ineta group in ireland.

# August 25, 2003 11:54 PM

TrackBack said:

# August 26, 2003 3:56 AM

Christian Nagel said:

Paschal,
I can only follow on to Julie's comments.

There is an existing user group in Ireland: http://www.irishdev.com that is member of INETA. Christian Weyer (INETA Speaker) was just giving a presentation at this group: http://weblogs.asp.net/cnagel/posts/23173.aspx. He had very positive comments about the meeting.

I know that you are not happy with this group - so why don't you start a new one? At INETA we would be happy to support two user groups in Ireland.

Christian

# August 26, 2003 9:46 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 26, 2003 2:11 PM

Dave Rothgery said:

If you're using the 1.1 framework, the obvious solution is to use DataReader.HasRows for your test.

# August 27, 2003 2:49 PM

David Neal said:

If you are using stored procedures (which you should), then you could have the Question be an OUTPUT parameter. That way you don't have the question unnecessarily repeated in your resultset.

If you don't choose to go that path, then you could manually create the Items instead of setting the DataSource.

if (dtr.Read())
{
Poll_Question.Text = dtr["Question"].ToString();
MyPoll.Items.Add(...);
while (dtr.Read())
{
MyPoll.Items.Add(...);
}
}
dtr.Close();

# August 27, 2003 2:59 PM

Matt Berther said:

If you are using version 1.1 of the .NET framework, you can replace:

if (dtr.Read())

with

if (dtr.HasRows)

HTH.

# August 27, 2003 4:57 PM

Matt Berther said:

Ugh... just like Dave Rothgery said... I suppose I should read all the comments before posting my own. ;)

# August 27, 2003 4:57 PM

Scott Watermasysk said:

You have the ability to move forward and back...its called a DataTable :). Different tools have different options. You can also check DataTable.Rows.Count.

HTH,
-Scott

# August 27, 2003 6:29 PM

Phil Weber said:

Paschal: Does this work?

If dtr.HasRows then
dtr.Read
Poll_Question= dtr("Question")
'-- Now bind to the radiobutton list
MyPoll.Datasource =dtr
MyPoll.Databind
End If

# August 27, 2003 6:31 PM

Paschal said:

Thanks Scott but I know that ;-)

The question was more about Datareader. For a small data binding, a Datatable is bit too much.
My point is that it's bit silly to have to read the data twice to bind to the different controls ;-)
If I had Movefirst for example, I could avoid closing the reader.
Datareader suppose to be the modern version of the Recordset object isn't it ?

# August 27, 2003 6:35 PM

Paschal said:

Phil technicall yes, but you lost the first record after binding the Poll_Question control !
So the MyPoll radiobuttonlist control miss one record

# August 27, 2003 6:42 PM

Scott Watermasysk said:

No, the DataReader is not the modern version of the Recordset. Its single goal is to get you the data ask quick as possible. End of story. Remember, you are connected to the DB while the datareader is open. The goals should be get in, get out..move on.

Having said that, what about this:

string pollQuestion = null;
while(reader.Read())
{
if(pollQuestion == null)
{
pollQuestion = (string)reader["X"];
}
control.Items.Add(Something);
}

//also remember, if pollQuestion is still here null, then no data was found in the first place

or, return two results:
while(reader.Read())
{
//Get Question
break; //should only have 1 result anyway
}
reader.NextResult();
control.Datasource = reader;
control.DataBind();

# August 27, 2003 7:07 PM

JosephCooney said:

Of course the problem with data readers and output parameters is that you can't read the output parameters until you get to the end of the data stream (at least in 1.0, I haven't head anything about this changing in 1.1) http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;308051 . Of course in this case there is no reason why you couldn't read the question name after you've bound the radio buttons, but it can be annoying sometimes if you want to make a decision based on the result of an output parameter. I see no reason why you couldn't use the ADO from .NET via COM interop, if the movefirst, movelast functionality of the recordset is sorely missed.

# August 27, 2003 7:17 PM

russ said:

Here's a nice script I use to convert a datareader to a datatable in similar cases. Definitely some overhead, but nice at times...

Public Shared Function GetTable(ByVal reader As SqlDataReader) As DataTable

Dim table As DataTable = reader.GetSchemaTable()
Dim dt As DataTable = New System.Data.DataTable()
Dim dc As DataColumn
Dim row As DataRow
Dim al As System.Collections.ArrayList = New System.Collections.ArrayList()
Dim i As Integer

For i = 0 To table.Rows.Count - 1
dc = new DataColumn()

If Not(dt.Columns.Contains(String.Format(table.Rows(i)("ColumnName")))) Then
dc.ColumnName = table.Rows(i)("ColumnName").ToString()
dc.Unique = Convert.ToBoolean(table.Rows(i)("IsUnique"))
dc.AllowDBNull = Convert.ToBoolean(table.Rows(i)("AllowDBNull"))
dc.ReadOnly = Convert.ToBoolean(table.Rows(i)("IsReadOnly"))
al.Add(dc.ColumnName)
dt.Columns.Add(dc)
End If
Next

While (reader.Read())
row = dt.NewRow()

For i = 0 To al.Count - 1
row((String.Format(al(i)))) = reader(String.Format(al(i)))
Next

dt.Rows.Add(row)
End While

Return dt

End Function

# August 27, 2003 7:19 PM

Dave Rothgery said:

I didn't read what you were trying to do all that closely, or I wouldn't've suggested that HasRows would work. OTOH, I'd've put the questions and answers in different tables to start with.

# August 27, 2003 7:28 PM

David Neal said:

You wrote: "On the second part of your answer, you still miss the first record because of the dtr.Read."

Actually, you don't miss the first record. That's because the code manually adds each item to the list instead setting the DataSource and using DataBind(). The line of code just before the while loop adds the first row to the list.

# August 27, 2003 11:02 PM

Paschal said:

So many feedbacks ! Thanks to everybody.

I am going to do some testing now with all the ideas.
Russ, I use already this solution for some more complex things like the Quiz tool, but for this 'little' code it's bit too much ;-)
Scott I got the point but I will try the idea.
Joseph no I don't miss ADO, I just find stupid that we can't move forward and backward with a datareader easily (without a datatable), but just for the fun I will try to implement ADO via COM interop ;-)

# August 28, 2003 3:46 AM

Ray Jezek said:

I dont think determining whether rows exist or not helps the issue since the problem is that he is trying to get the question out of the datareader and then still trying to bind the data to radio list. You can't do both as discovered. David's suggestion about using an OUTPUT param is probably the best option for this situation.

# August 28, 2003 9:22 AM

Daniele Bochicchio said:

Take a look at http://www.extensible.it (sorry, only in Italian).

Ok, you have to say goodbye to webforms, postback and something similar, but you could always try to build the same functionality by hand.

Hopefully, v.2 may consider XHTML...

# August 28, 2003 10:01 AM

Ray Jezek said:

Why would you write custom code to put a datareader into a datatable when the DbDataAdapter already does this for you?

# August 28, 2003 12:52 PM

Chris Frazier said:

There's a post on the asp.net forums that outlines using a Response.Filter to make output xhtml-strict compliant.

# August 28, 2003 1:41 PM

Kurt said:

I do something similar. On string values that I know can be null, I'd do MyReader("Field").ToString().

# August 28, 2003 5:08 PM

Stebet said:

I've tried that responsefilter. A lot of things you have to watch out for, for example if you don't change the regular expression for the Form name attribute you get into trouble once the page receives QueryString parameters. I found it do have a pretty drastical impact on performance as well. Up to a 40% performance decrease for a pretty small page :(.

I like this Page and HtmlForm override method, i might take a look at that since i'm building my site. I'm all for web standards at the moment.

Since i'm here i might as well ask you to take a look at it and throw some comments at me (too bad m comments system ain't up yet) :)

# August 28, 2003 5:18 PM

Jesse Ezell said:

You have to be careful with ToString, if the value is null (really null, not DBNull), you can get a null reference exception. Yah, this shouldn't happen with a datareader pulling from SQL Server, but there are plenty of other places where it would.

in C#, you can use the "as" operator to do this type of thing (MyReader["field"] as string).

In all languages, you also have the option of: Convert.ToString(MyReader["field"]), which works pretty good too.

# August 28, 2003 5:40 PM

Scott Galloway said:

Oh, and for some reason I've been getting it free for the past year...not sure why (not complaining!)

# August 29, 2003 5:02 AM

Paschal said:

Be careful Scott I know well the editor ;-))

# August 29, 2003 5:29 AM

Don X said:

Actually I think it's pretty sad. I've noticed that most bloggers are as shallow as most of the 12 year olds who worship Britney Spears. Worse still they crave fame through their blogs instead of writing code.

# September 3, 2003 6:21 PM

Stefán Jökull said:

Hey.. if you want a remote island .NET User Group you should come over here to Iceland (yes, we have computers and no, we don't live in igloos). We're just about to start a .NET User group next week ;)

Free pizza and coke for me please (damn, no beer *sob*)!

Stefán.

# September 4, 2003 11:10 AM

Mehran Nikoo said:

I agree. I still prefer to use google and include site:msdn.microsoft.com for searching MSDN. You normally find what you are looking for in the first page. Try to search for the same criteria on MSDN, it normally doesn't find anything, but it recommends you to buy the related product from Microsoft!

It is a pity that the rich and fantastic MSDN resources are hidden behind an inaccurate search mechanism. MSDN guys... please do something about this!

# September 5, 2003 7:25 AM

Dave said:

Same here. I now prefer Google but didn't used to. The site itself was always slow, but the piss-poor "improvements" they made to the search page sealed it. Who requested getting back only the first 3 hits from a section? Why make me decide which search textbox I should key things into?

Nowadays, with the SLOW speed of the site, I have to (1) load the home page, (2) click on advanced search, (3) click on the search submit to return the top 3 THEY think are most important and then (4) click on "more" to get my first 10 hits. Yeah, I know I can navigate directly to the advanced search, but either way the improvements suck.

# September 5, 2003 7:40 AM

Paschal said:

It's a pity becuase I read somewhere that the Search was supposed to be an improvement.

In my mind, I call that more a step BACKWARD then forward ;-)

# September 5, 2003 8:13 AM

Ray Jezek said:

yeah i have some of the most obscene search results... for instance searching on the exact title of a page in the C# refrence section turned up with 0 results... then a search for "params" turns up empty etc... seems like when you get a 0 result search you get stuck there and no matter what your look for it always returns nothing...

it's very frustrating indeed...

# September 5, 2003 9:31 AM

kpako@yahoo.com (Dare Obasanjo) said:

If you want to search MSDN, use Google.

# September 5, 2003 9:42 AM

Kent Sharkey said:

Search has recently been replaced, we're sorry that it hasn't helped. We are listening, and trying to make your MSDN experience better. Please feel free to e-mail me (ksharkey@microsoft.com) with changes you'd like to see and I will try to make them a reality.

The Search problems were one of the main reasons we started the Developer Centers (such as http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/). These are focussed 'landing spots' for developers that try to make finding the information you need easier. If they are not working, please let me know.

Again, I'm sorry -- let us know how we can help.
TTFN - Kent
PS: Another Google user

# September 5, 2003 10:54 AM

Christophe Lauer said:

When I feel I cannot find what I'm looking for by using the navigtion system, I use Google by limiting the search to the MSDN site:

http://www.google.com/search?q=<keyword>+site%3Amsdn.microsoft.com

# September 5, 2003 11:54 AM

Damit said:

But what happens if the recipient can't read HTML-formatted e-mail? ;P

# September 6, 2003 9:26 PM

Remy said:

i need synonyms!

# September 7, 2003 7:40 PM

Blair Stephenson said:

You can also do it on the Application level.

Catch the Application_Error in the global.aspx.

# September 8, 2003 1:14 AM

TrackBack said:

# September 8, 2003 4:08 AM

TrackBack said:

# September 8, 2003 5:08 AM

TrackBack said:

# September 8, 2003 12:11 PM

Chris Martin said:

Hmmm. The documentation doesn't work in Mozilla 1.5. Back to the drawing board.

# September 8, 2003 3:54 PM

Brian Desmond said:

Yeah, I'm more into the less analytical end of things at the end of the day ... I was just amused by the results to be won.

# September 8, 2003 5:46 PM

TrackBack said:

# September 10, 2003 7:03 AM

SQL authentication said:

From docs: "The server should be able to accept SQL authentication credentials (integrated Windows authentication will not work)"

Ugh. Why does Microsoft keep telling us not to use SQL authentication mode and then giving us reasons to?

# September 10, 2003 11:01 AM

Stebet said:

You can't believe how much i've wanted a tool like this. Thanks a lot for pointing it out!

Why don't they distribute this along with MSDE since it has now management tool except for osql?

Up until now i had just downloaded the SQL Server 2000 trial and installed only the client tools. This should save me the effort. All that's missing from this tool (or i haven't found yet) is the user account settings (adding, removing users and/or setting the authentication mode).

Great stuff!

# September 10, 2003 6:15 PM

SBC said:

that'll be a great feat! that's about 2-3 websites per day... send accomplishment to the Guiness Book of World Records ;-)

# September 12, 2003 7:32 AM

Paschal said:

Sure I will. But it's a serious stuff you know, and I wonder how to achieve the hosting ;-)
For the code it should be ok if I build a sort of 'do your website by choosing a template' kind of tool.

# September 12, 2003 7:35 AM

Jeff Gonzalez said:

We are doing something very similar for the automotive industry. One suggestion I will give you, is don't use HostHeaders... =)

The management of them is insane.

If the sites are of a templated nature, maybe you can do what we are doing, and build the architecture to support any number of sites, from one application directory.

# September 12, 2003 10:09 AM

Paschal said:

Jeff how do you manage to solve the infrastructure nightmare ?
I am curious how I can manage so many IPs and how servers I need for something like that.

# September 12, 2003 10:25 AM

Jeff Gonzalez said:

That is the great thing about this setup. There really isnt an infrastructure nightmare. It is one web application running off several servers in a web farm. All of the "distinct" site information is data driven.

In fact the new application we are building is completely themable (different types of navigation) and completely skinnable (different color scheme's on existing themes)

There is obviously a backend administration tool that allows our customers to change their current theme, and or any information on their site.

We use F5 BigIp network load balancers and several windows 2003 servers. It is still under development so I cannot specify exactly how many servers will be used, but we plan to put 2,400 websites into production using only one code base and one application directory spread across multiple servers in a web farm.

Basically you can use DNS to just point hostnames to 1 single ip that is actually a virtual ip for all of the web farm.

We have used this same setup in an ASP legacy environment and it worked great. We hosted about 450 seperate sites on 2 web servers operating in a server farm.

# September 12, 2003 12:04 PM

Jerry Dennany said:

Check this out:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/default.mspx

Also, look for the windows update catalog. You'll still have to download the update, but you only have to do it once.

# September 12, 2003 2:39 PM

Bruce said:

Not to bring you down - but there are 16 types, so if your type is 10% of the population, then it has larger than average membership.

# September 12, 2003 9:40 PM

TrackBack said:

# September 13, 2003 6:51 PM

TrackBack said:

# September 13, 2003 6:58 PM

Tosh Meston said:

So, I am reading your blog, looking at this javascript and thinking something about this looks familiar... when I realize it's mine. Heh, I wrote that htc in that Web Team Talking article. You know, you somebody else posted a really simple html/css solution to this for IE in the comments of the article, which I think I like better than this one.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnwebteam/html/webteam11042002.asp?frame=true#Webteam11042002_topic2

# September 14, 2003 6:25 AM

Lance said:

Sounds like you are on the right track. My company has a similar implementation that uses F5 in a farm of less than 12 servers to host over 100k template-driven websites for our salesforce.

This is our 3rd or 4th complete rewrite and it gets better every time.

This is a great project, Have Fun!

# September 15, 2003 10:43 PM

Sucheta Damle said:

sucheta.damle@wipro.com.

I have tried something with Smart Navigation. In my case the smart navigation used to work properly in IE6. But as soon as you run the same .aspx page on the IE5, the page used to give stupid problems. For that matter I tried changing the SMARTNAVIE5.js file provided by .NET. It works fine. Now the page works fine in IE5 browser also.

Basically the problem is with the code segment in IE5 which is missing. Just add 3 lines in the SMARTNAVIE5.js and it works.

As there is no facility of attaching the .js file. If anyone wants the file please mail me. I can send it as an attachment.

# September 16, 2003 11:59 PM

Jason said:

Check this link:

http://cutesoft.net/example/General.aspx

We choose that because they provide both .Net and Asp solutions.

# September 18, 2003 2:52 PM

Duncan said:

Have a good day...

# September 25, 2003 6:40 AM

Roy Osherove said:

Wow! congratulations!

# September 25, 2003 6:44 AM

Jan said:

Congrats! I married a few months ago, and I have to say one thing: enjoy your day, it is sooo short!

Jan

# September 25, 2003 6:46 AM

Fabrice said:

Félicitations ! And I thought you were married with .NET... ;-)

# September 25, 2003 7:20 AM

OmegaSupreme said:

Congratulations, have a great day :D

# September 25, 2003 8:11 AM

Lorenzo Barbieri said:

Congratulations!!!
And remember to wear a pair of comfortable shoes!!! :-)

# September 25, 2003 8:14 AM

SBC said:

Congratulations!

# September 25, 2003 8:16 AM

Jeff Julian said:

Congratulations!

# September 25, 2003 8:18 AM

Dan Bright said:

Congratulations! Im finishing my 4th month as a married guy, and all I can tell you is enjoy the day.

For me the actual ceremony was the most stressful part. After that it's all cake (no pun intended).

# September 25, 2003 8:32 AM

Douglas Reilly said:

Congratulations!

# September 25, 2003 9:05 AM

Julien CHEYSSIAL said:

Félicitations !

# September 25, 2003 9:23 AM

Paschal said:

Thanks you all !

# September 25, 2003 9:35 AM

Damit said:

Congratulations! =)

# September 25, 2003 10:11 AM

Bruce said:

Congratulations! I hope you have many years of married bliss!

# September 25, 2003 10:14 AM

Vijay said:

What the hell are you doing here still ?!

Congrajulations man !

# September 25, 2003 11:30 AM

Chris Frazier said:

Congrats, Paschal! Wish you the best.

-Christopher

# September 25, 2003 11:49 AM

Dave said:

Congrats!!! We wish you the best
Dave

# September 25, 2003 1:48 PM

Tommi said:

Congratulations and best wishes to you both! :)

# September 26, 2003 3:51 AM

brad abrams said:

Congratulations.... Enjoy the time.

# September 27, 2003 11:25 AM

Richard Tallent said:

Congradulations! Hope you worked .NET and blogging time into that pre-nup ;)

# September 27, 2003 4:59 PM

ekrem said:

blaster.worm virus

# September 28, 2003 4:46 PM

bino Joseph said:

hiii am using SmartNavigation, but its interfering with validator.I had to retain the page view after the postback.If anyone got a solution please let me know
Thanks in advance,
Bino Joseph
bino291@yahoo.com

# September 30, 2003 7:55 AM

Mike Puddephat said:

Glad you like the forums!

# September 30, 2003 5:00 PM

Datagrid Girl said:

If you were a true diehard, you'd be blogging on your honeymoon--just kidding! I hope you've forgotten all about .NET and blogging by this point, and have focused on what's really important.

Best wishes for a long and happy future together,
Marcie

# September 30, 2003 11:41 PM

Rod said:

How to create a hierarchical DataGrid in ASP.NET?

# October 2, 2003 4:00 PM

karine roustant said:

en téléchargeant un kit de connnexion free, j'ai aatrapé le virus BB2 Blaster Worn. Je n'y connais rien. Quelqu'un peut il m'aider ?

# October 4, 2003 9:53 AM

mike w said:

setting the timeout to anything but zero totally fixes it. thanks a ton!!!!!!!

# October 8, 2003 3:36 PM

Ashraf Mohammad Eldirdiri said:

How to create mobile database

# October 12, 2003 6:32 AM

Rishu said:

Hi Dude !!!!!
Hope your wedding would be cool for u.. and u would be enjoying ur initial days....

tell me how it was going....

I wish u a lovefull enjoy full married life..
enjoyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

# October 14, 2003 12:27 AM

Frans Bouma said:

I didn't even congratulate you.. CONGRATULATIONS!! :)

# October 15, 2003 9:42 AM

Colt said:

Yeah... Congrat Paschal!
(BTW, Your mood ... is tired back from honeymoon? ;-)

# October 15, 2003 11:54 AM

Phil Scott said:

Scott Guthrie said that the demos and the such would be posted to the ASP.NET site. No official word on if non-attendies will be able to download Whibdey though. They are looking into different options

# October 16, 2003 12:45 PM

Paschal said:

Thanks Phil for the info. I hope Microsoft will consider MSDN subscribers as good evangelists of Bill's word and let us download some good stuff.

# October 16, 2003 12:52 PM

Jason said:

I'm trying to find it but someone said (I think either EricG or ScottGu) that they are still evaluating wiether or not they will post the bits to MSDN/Universal or not.

# October 16, 2003 12:53 PM

Paschal said:

Jason if what you say is true, that surely good news.

# October 16, 2003 12:54 PM

Phil Scott said:

Check here on ScottGu's comments: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/posts/31557.aspx#FeedBack

# October 16, 2003 3:09 PM

Brian Desmond said:

It's a testing thing - been around for a long time. I think the format is =rand(#sentences, #paragraphs)

# October 16, 2003 7:16 PM

Greg said:

Needs link checking... the Wrox links do not work....

# October 17, 2003 9:16 AM

Dave said:

The file appears to be the same as the old file, what has changed? Btw welcome back!!! Hope you 2 enjoyed your honeymoon!!
Dave

# October 17, 2003 10:33 PM

Luc said:

Hello, Ivisit your very nice site
It was for me great pleasure to visit and enjoy this site. Thanks
Greetings from Luc
Owner and webdesigner from
http://www.artpage.be

# October 20, 2003 8:00 AM

Sthefan Berwanger said:

I think ASP.NET 2.0 will be XHTML compliant.
And certainly the web.config will be the
the way that Microsoft will allow us to
choose the output as XHTML 1.0, 1.1 or HTML 4.0

# October 22, 2003 10:14 AM

Drew Marsh said:

What's wrong with Graphics::FillRegion??

You build a GraphicsPath, create a Region out of it and call FillRegion on it.

# October 22, 2003 1:49 PM

Jeffrey McManus said:

They've already said that you'll be able to deploy sites using FTP and direct file copy in Whidbey (you won't need to install FrontPage extensions). However there is a tool that lets you do all that today -- Macromedia Dreamweaver.

# October 22, 2003 1:55 PM

John Cavnar-Johnson said:

Are you trying to build this as an ASP.NET application or as a web-deployed WinForms app/control?

I'll assume you're using WinForms because I have no idea how to accomplish what you want with DHTML. Your problem is simply Code Access Security. I actually have a CAS demo that shows what permissions you need to have to fill an irregular region. Take a look at Chris Sells' Wahoo project to see one strategy for adjusting permissions for your app (he uses an .msi file). Then. if you are interested the minimal permissions you need to do the GDI+ stuff, contact me: CASDemo at orbistertius dot no-ip dot com

# October 22, 2003 2:11 PM

Michael Favro said:

Is this what you're looking for? :)

http://www.hammacher.com/publish/10244.asp?promo=el_computer

# October 22, 2003 4:12 PM

Ron LeClair said:

How are you coming along with the Javascript portion of this functionality? We use both netscape and IE here and it would be very helpful for us. Right now, our only solution for scrollable datagrids was to put them within a DIV.

Thanks,
Ron

# October 22, 2003 4:38 PM

Paschal said:

Ron the DIV idea is good but the problem is that you lost the titles of your grid with this system.
I will try to publish the Javascript code tomorrow (if I find some time ;-))

# October 22, 2003 4:41 PM

Ron LeClair said:

Thanks --> I know that is a problem with the DIV. We are currently reproducing the headers in a table above the datagrid... but sometimes they don't align, etc... This idea is a much better idea. I was able to get the .htc file to work, but it will not work in Netscape. Thanks for your prompt response Paschal - it is greatly appreciated!!!

# October 22, 2003 5:11 PM

julie lerman said:

I wonder how many different types of cancer THAT guy is getting?

# October 22, 2003 5:23 PM

scottgu@microsoft.com said:

Hi Paschal,

I just posted a blog on my site (with screenshot) showing what it looks like in Whidbey. I think it should address all of your questions/concerns above.

Hope this helps,

Scott

# October 22, 2003 5:23 PM

Shannon J Hager said:

in my opinion, if aspTODAY has nothing but articles about aspNEXTYEAR, it IS marketing.

# October 22, 2003 5:36 PM

Paschal said:

Jeffrey thanks for the advice but no Dreamwever is not a tool for me ;-)
I really appreciate VS !

# October 22, 2003 5:40 PM

Paschal said:

Scott thanks for this good news !

# October 22, 2003 5:40 PM

Paschal said:

Drew I think you're right but for a Win app not for a Web app.
I dream that someday we shoould be able to have a kind of win applet like a java applet, where you can program something nice like a Paint application for the web.

# October 22, 2003 6:04 PM

Wesner Moise said:

I would use something like this, but I am not sure what reg ex system you are using.

<([^bBiI]|.[^/>]+)/?>

Remove any tag with more than one character inside the tag. Handle all one character tags except for B and I.

Handle closing tags properly.

# October 22, 2003 7:53 PM

Wesner Moise said:

</?([^/bBiI]|.[^/>]+)/?>
Need to support HTML closing tags

# October 22, 2003 7:55 PM

Stefan Koell said:

This is what I wanna have...
http://www.go-l.com/monitors/index.htm

# October 23, 2003 4:03 AM

Frans Bouma said:

The Dynamic SQL article is misleading. No-one talks about sql concatenation inside SQL statements when talking about dynamic sql. Also the talk about execution plan caching is bogus, BOL will tell you otherwise, plus he totally misses the point about code bloat when it comes to stored procedures, because in an average system you require a lot of different stored procedures to hard-code all the different filters.

# October 23, 2003 4:50 AM

Paschal said:

Frans I take the point, but I think you can find some good stuff there.
Not perfect I reckon but interesting ;-)

# October 23, 2003 5:03 AM

Stefan Koell said:

Unfortunately I am already collecting funds for myself...

# October 23, 2003 5:14 AM

Duncan said:

Looks cool - you going to do any software dev for it? (I'll have to wait an extra three months before it comes out in Ireland but it looks like a potential target platform..)

# October 23, 2003 9:23 AM

matthew said:

Hoax. See: http://plex.us/outbursts/liebermann.html

# October 23, 2003 10:36 AM

SBC said:

Thanks for the update to XMLA v.1.1.

# October 24, 2003 7:49 AM

Kent Sharkey said:

In just a few sleeps, I hear you can get more info in LA, or at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/whidbey.

Short answer (after looking at a Toolbox):
WebPartManager
WebPartZone
ContentWebPart
CatalogZone
PageCatalogPart
EditorZone
TemplateCatalogPart
AppearanceEditorPart
LayoutEditorPart
BehaviorEditorPart
PropertyGridEditorPart

# October 24, 2003 11:54 AM

Scott Galloway said:

I usually solve this sort of issue with tabs...there the child can be editied on a separate tab from the parent - not ideal as tabs shouldn't really depend on each other's content...but using the MS Webcontrols, you can enable / disable a tab in source...
This is one of these things which is much easier in Winforms where you'd just spawn a separate child form. You can of course use this approach in web apps where you spawn a separate window - but I really dislike that approach (it's not a common practice).
Scott

# October 24, 2003 12:54 PM

Robert Hurlbut said:

Good question. Generics will also be part of VB.Net 2.0, as they are implemented in the CLR (low-level) and according to Don Box when he was here a couple of months ago. But, how the Generics implementation will work in VB.Net really hasn't been covered. Someone will probably talk about it at PDC, I imagine.

# October 24, 2003 12:56 PM

Frans Bouma said:

I'm not a VB.NET programmer but have to use it sometimes. What I want to know is how they're going to formulate the constructed types in VB.NET, because most characters are used for other constructs as well (like <>, (), []..). Perhaps they go for another ambiguous bracket pair, like () is both array indexer and method parameter call section enclosure bracket pair.

# October 24, 2003 1:17 PM

Jason said:

Generics in VB will not be much different then in C#, except for the keywording.

From what I read:

C#: class foobar<T>
VB: Class foobar(of T)

But it's early and stuff like that could change.

# October 24, 2003 1:18 PM

Jason said:

Put all those together and it sounds something like Sharepoint Team Services that we will be able to code against.

# October 24, 2003 1:26 PM

Dylan Greene said:

It's a very busy page. Does all of that content really need to be on the same page? It's very overwelming. I have to look left and right and up and down to find what I'm looking for. Where does one begin? What objects connect with what? Is nothing saved until I click the save button (hidden on the bottom left)?

How about splitting out functionality so that each page does one thing. It might mean more clicks, but at least the user won't be confused as they use your software.

Also, it looks like you are using images as functional links, such sissors and pencil. Often it's better to use text to avoid confusion as to what the icon does, and that the icon is even clickable. If you want to stick with icons, making the background transparent will show the gray background making it easier to see which icon goes with what row.

Sorry if this wasn't the advise you wanted.

# October 24, 2003 7:25 PM

Brian Desmond said:

I actually have ample supply of those at school to try such a thing. I think I have the addon cards to do it too:

1 128Mb AGP Dual head
1 OnBoard
1 PCI 32MB Card

Ultramon does four screens, I assume.

In all my spare time, I think i'll give this a whirl.

# October 24, 2003 10:51 PM

Saraswathi said:

Thanks for the code.
I used the function you have written in my store procedure.

# October 25, 2003 8:53 AM

Julien CHEYSSIAL said:

Hi Paschal,

I agree with you on the fact that the GUI should stay uniform and should not show and hide big parts of the screen just like that !

Here are my advices for you screen which is pretty heavy in terms of displayed informations :

- For the "Sections" fieldset, try to vertical-align the combobox and the button.

- I'd put the "Pages" and "Sections" fieldset on the same first row, and the "Versions" fieldset right under. And try to align the borders of the "Pages" and "Sections" fieldset.

- I would also put numbers right before each fieldset Titles. This would help the user to know where is the order of the steps.

- The "New" button (Versions Fieldset) and the "Submit" button (Elements Fieldset) should not be on the right... Above or below the datatable seems a good idea.

- For your fake disable thing, why don't you use the disabled="true" attribute on your fieldset ? It would render it with the disable look. You can also use a CSS attribute (IE Specific Filter attribute) like : style="filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(grayscale=1)". This will gray the object on which you apply this style. And when an element isn't selected in the parent datagrid, I'd display a simple sentence like "Please, select an element..." instead of the child datatable.

But I have to recognize I didn't really guess how your screen does work :)

And yes, I know, I'm very "maniac"... I don't know how to say it in English, but I know you know French.

Hope my advices will be usefull !

# October 25, 2003 2:21 PM

TrackBack said:

# October 26, 2003 4:23 AM

Stefan Koell said:

This is a baby!
http://www.9xmedia.com/pages-Build_a_system/X-Top---5over5.html

# October 26, 2003 9:14 AM

TrackBack said:

# October 28, 2003 3:45 AM

TrackBack said:

# October 28, 2003 3:46 AM

Dave said:

Exactly.

I commented a month ago someplace and made some predictions. After a week or two, I expect the inevitable backlash or letdown... Whidbey won't be released for months (thankfully the framework - ASP.NET 2.0 - may be separated from that) and the rest is now slated for 2005-2006. It'll be after the holidays that the true take on this PDC will evolve: some great previews of some great products, but products that are yet far away from being solutions to things we all use currently.

I thought about this last night. You don't - hell, you can't - pull off the immense logistical details of a PDC without tons of lead time. I suspect MS reserved the bulk of things in LA back in 2002 for this PDC. Remember where things were back then? Whidbey... VS.2004 being released in Q1. Yukon... at one point they thought they might release it with VS.2003! And Longhorn... targeted for late 2004.

My how things have slipped. I wouldn't be surprised if MS insiders had an entirely different picture of what they thought they would show at this PDC back when they initially scheduled it for this week.

What got me thinking about this is the rumor that MS is charging MSDN Universal subscribers for the PDC Longhorn bits. Not just others, but MSDN Universal. I realized they probably HAVE TO. How else can they justify charging the pants off of everyone attending the PDC otherwise? How would you feel spending thousands to preview things not ready for prime time and then just giving them away to those who were astute enough to stay home?

# October 28, 2003 6:21 AM

Jonne Kats said:

Good point, I'm also very interested in the future plans for GDI+

# October 28, 2003 6:24 AM

Thomas Tomiczek said:

Guess what - you are so totally right.

The stuff presented at the PDC is like star wars for most developers: a story a long time (ok, in the future) in a galaxy they are not part of.

Whidbey BETA is half a year away, a release more. Longhorn is even more in the future. Nothing against the great new technology, and some may be able to use some parts (we will switch some of our website stuff used on secondary sites to Whidbey next week, as it looks like). But you can not really use anything outside a controlled environment.

But then, people always like a great story, and this is what they get.

Practical conclusions: hard to zero for most developer's everyday work.

I htink Dave was right- planning got screwed up seriously here, timewise. Would Whidbey be at least near a beta, things would be more usable for the people.

# October 28, 2003 6:30 AM

Fabrice said:

Whidbey is one thing, and not the more distant in time. Longhorn will not be released before 2006, and so probably not generally deployed by clients before 2008-09! This is at least 5 (five) years from now!
Of course, developers already have access to some bits, and will probably develop for this new platform long before it is out. But as developers, we have to keep in mind that we are creating applications that have to be in production... and so can't be based on Longhorn before a loooong while.
It's nice to see everybody excited, but wait for the depression when they'll have to get out of the dream and face back their dull applications for Windows 2000, ASP and VB.

# October 28, 2003 6:31 AM

Thomas Tomiczek said:

::Heard of ClickOnce, the new client
::application deployment technology? That will
::be available in the Whidbey timeframe for
::Windows Forms applications.

Sure I heard of this. I already use it.

It is great to have something like this in Whidbey, but this is 100% available already today.

# October 28, 2003 7:12 AM

Thomas Tomiczek said:

I think he talks of the stuff being SOLD. This is realistic, though. And will be nice. Really nice.

# October 28, 2003 7:23 AM

Skin said:

...I'm not sure WLess is just a gizmo. Here in Italy the market is growing very fast (I'm currently browsing via WiFi), in number of operator and users, and in amount of money spent.
(But I admin that same nations still need to upgrade their legislations - in Italy the use of 5Ghz band is almost impossible, so bye bye to 802.11a)

# October 28, 2003 7:24 AM

Paschal said:

Thomas seriously only a geek (and I am one myself) would like to buy something with 1 TB ;-) And I believe the cost will be also astronomic !

# October 28, 2003 7:31 AM

Paschal said:

In Ireland wireless is more a fashion than really being availabale everywhere.
If I travel in the countryside, I surely going to see some old PC, maybe PIII with 20 Gb hard drives, a modem 56K and that's all.
So wireless is great thing but the common people (no negative thoughts here) are far away from the overhype we like to talk about.
It's sad but it's a real world, so let try to work for real uman beings ;-)

# October 28, 2003 7:34 AM

Thomas Tomiczek said:

::Thomas seriously only a geek (and I am one
::myself) would like to buy something with 1
::TB ;-) And I believe the cost will be also
::astronomic !

Get realistic. This is 3-4 years out.

The ost will NOT be realistic. "only a geek" bys today hard discs larger than 40gb. Ups, sorry - most computers are sold with hd's hlarger thn 4 gb.

VIDEO EDITING requires a ton of storage space. The hard discs just get bigger. My first one ha 120mb storage space, and I was considered a gook at this time. It was dfarn expensive (aroudn 500 USD, used).

2005-2006 1Tb may really be the norm in the computers you buy in the shops.

# October 28, 2003 7:35 AM

Paschal said:

I will write a new posts to group all your comments and some of my thoughts

# October 28, 2003 7:36 AM

Paschal said:

Yes Thomas sure you're right for video editing, but for Word users ?
What they can do with 1TB ?

# October 28, 2003 7:39 AM

Thomas Tomiczek said:

Well, at do they do TODAY with more than 10Gb?

It lays there, wasted. The price difference is not really there for a smaller hd.

So, you will see alot more empty space lying around.

# October 28, 2003 7:42 AM

Dave said:

Thomas, I really wasn't accusing MS for a planning screwup. MS is well- and long-known for delays in major releases. I'm sure they did their best to schedule this PDC to be at a time when they expected to have much more to show the attendees - much more truely spectacular stuff to show.

But realities can and usually do always intrude. You can't just call up and reserve convention center space 6 months ahead of time. Switching file storage systems and going to a vector-based graphical UI will have inevitable stubling blocks along the way. Unforseen ones too.

At the time they booked everything I believe they really did have a realistic forecast (at least to them) of where they would be in the development cycle this week. I'm sure they still have their problems... hell, they ran late making the PDC Longhorn build!

So, stuck with the realities - software releases way too far in the future, correctly refusing to give the UI bits out this week because of that... what is one to do to ensure value to the paying customers?

(1) Hype up the eventual value of everything because it is truely good stuff they are developing. But DO NOT give out a single firm release date - notice how they haven't even mentioned a firm date for ASP.NET 2.0?

(2) Give out non-strategic bits - read: no Longhorn UI - and drum up how important the feedback is from all attendees. This turns something more akin to vaporware into a "open community" project.

(3) Charge ALL outsiders a price or else be prepared to hear from the attendees how much money could have been saved by them if they only avoided the hype. Notice how this wasn't announced until AFTER the PDC sold out?

Nothing screwy here at all. Just good business.

# October 28, 2003 7:58 AM

Stefan Koell said:

woho. at least somebody found my tool. i was wondering how long it would take to get some attention.

# October 28, 2003 8:00 AM

Paschal said:

You're welcome. Seems to be a great tool so worth it to help !

# October 28, 2003 8:08 AM

Andrew said:

www.go-mono.org
.Net without MS...

# October 28, 2003 8:39 AM

Andrew said:

he he he

# October 28, 2003 8:51 AM

Christophe Lauer said:

Do you mean that you didn't get the big bag with the attendee's content inside and the t-shirt?

# October 28, 2003 10:05 AM

matthew said:

alternatively you could pull it off IRC or edonkey and avoid the delay......

It's not exactly piracy, as no-one is seriously using this for real work.

# October 28, 2003 10:15 AM

Duncan said:

You think MS in Ireland are going to do any developer showings of Whidbey etc. in the near future?

# October 28, 2003 10:32 AM

Paschal said:

Surely yes but I think we can't expect something before the betas or maybe the final release candidate !

# October 28, 2003 10:33 AM

Brad More said:

Just a thanks, mate! Just placed my order, but would not have known it was available w/out your note.

# October 28, 2003 10:42 AM

Paschal said:

You're welcome ;-)

# October 28, 2003 10:56 AM

James Avery said:

Everything will always change and invalidate what was made before it, this is IT. This is all still 2-3 years away though, so it does not change anything right now.

-James

# October 28, 2003 11:36 AM

Paschal said:

James ok for the basics, but cna't we have a better global view on the future technologies, something like a 10 years plan ?

Because if I follow this rule .NEt can be a thing of the past in 5-6 years.

I like progress, no doubt about this, but I like also smart moves, not only marketing stuff.

# October 28, 2003 11:40 AM

Paschal said:

Just to complete my last reply, I would say that I have the feeling that all the stuff shown actually at the PDC will certainly have the negative aspect to freeze the creativity on the current products(.Net, XP, etc...)
After all some companies will prefer to wait and see (as usual) what's going to happen next.
With a longer view, you can make better software, keep a high level standard in Research and Development, and eventually the hardware can still progress faster than the software.

# October 28, 2003 11:45 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Interesting... I have the feeling the IBM announcement the other day has had some influences on this statement ;)

Still, they don't go so far as saying it will host the CLR in the future (but of course that is a matter of time :))

# October 28, 2003 12:03 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

Ideally, a long-term view would be nice. But I think this might not be plausible for a couple of reasons:

1.) The view might change abruptly. In 1988 do you think MS could have said, "By 1998 we'll be totally Internet focused?" 99% of the shareholders at the time (and probably 75% of the devs using MS technology) would have asked, "What the heck is the 'Internet?'"

2.) Such revealings gives MS's competitors an advantage. Find out where MS plans to take the personal computer, and get there first, or find ways to make that path difficult...

# October 28, 2003 12:04 PM

Paschal said:

Scott you're right on the first point.

But if the strategy is to change every 2-3 years the big picture to confuse the competitors, what's about the developers and the companies who invest on some near-to-be obsolete technologies.

I don't understand the logic behind such idea.

IMHO, it's like preparing a nice wedding cake and at the very last minute destroy it in case some other couple will choose the same ;-)

# October 28, 2003 12:08 PM

Kartal Guner said:

.Net is here today. GDI+ is here today. I can be more productive today. Even if .NET is a thing of the past in 5 - 6 years, that 5 - 6 years of great productivity!!!

# October 28, 2003 12:09 PM

Paschal said:

Kartal I respect your opinion but I don't think that software companies will share the same when you talk about long term investment !

# October 28, 2003 12:10 PM

Pete said:

"means we should expect a new version of IE? Remember few months ago the discussion about IE development being dead"

I thought the statement from Microsoft was that no new version would be released until Longhorn shipped (probably with Longhorn IIRC).

# October 28, 2003 12:27 PM

mike lorengo said:

You can, simply download the Google Plugin. The new version includes this.

<a href="http://toolbar.google.com/"/>http://toolbar.google.com/</a>

# October 28, 2003 12:27 PM

Paschal said:

Thanks mike for the info, but I was talking about IE itself ;-)

# October 28, 2003 12:28 PM

Wesner Moise said:

GDI is obselete now; Longhorn uses the Media Integration Layer and DirectX, so you can do all sorts of things that weren't possible before.

# October 28, 2003 12:33 PM

James Avery said:

But the key is that you do not know! Microsoft is working on what they think is the best thing that they can come up with.... If Microsoft knew 10 years ago that they would eventually move to managed code they would not have messed around with all this other stuff for so long, they would have just jumped to .NET. If something better comes up in five years, I hope they drop .NET and move toward that. If you do not constantly evolve you become a dinosaur like Novell, or Sun. :)

The only thing about the future that we know for certain is change.

-James

# October 28, 2003 12:37 PM

James Avery said:

I doubt we will see another IE upgrade for Windows XP, even when Longhorn does ship. I don't agree with this decision, but it does have potential monetary rewards.

-James

# October 28, 2003 12:40 PM

Thomas Tomiczek said:

::o if I read this right, does it mean s that
::Whidbey will not support Longhorn ?

Exactly. Longhorn API comes comes at least a year after hidbey (possibly longer). So all the nice stuff is - just not relevant for 99.9% of the people out there.

# October 28, 2003 1:47 PM

Chris Frazier said:

I think it's safe to say that the code-beside feature will use the new partial classes to make things work. So you can have your void Page_Load inline, and Page_PreRender in a partial codebeside page, and compilation, intellisense, etc will work as if everything is in your codebehind now.

cheers!
-Christopher

# October 28, 2003 2:33 PM

Thomas Tomiczek said:

This looks more and moe like an intelligence test for users.

And frankly, users loose big time.

Reminds me of the Simpon's episode where Lisa (or was it Bart) compared the intelligence of her Hampster with the one of his father, and the father turned out to be just stupid (like the mapster ran away forom a piece of chiece under electricity, while Homer came back and back and back to get the next electroshock.

HJust how hard is it NOT to open emails that you dont expect and that have attachments?

# October 28, 2003 2:34 PM

Dave said:

Simply put: bullshit.

The web browser is dead - only as long as Longhorn is RELEASED AND RUNNING on the device.

Yes, things other than Longhorn will - and currently are - replacing the web browser. But in your context - Avalon replacing the browser - I repeat: bullshit.

Prove me wrong. Please. Prove me wrong in 2003, 2004 or 2005.

Prove me wrong. Please. Prove me wrong on a box with less than the minimum requirements Longhorn has - which well over 70% of the _business_ machines will still be when Longhorn is relased.

One last time: bullshit.

# October 28, 2003 4:46 PM

Dave said:

Here's the thing Thomas: What are minimal requirements for Longhorn? What are they for Longhorn to actually be usable?

Remember back in 1995 when Win95 came out? BIG difference in performance between minimum config and usable config.

By most accounts, the best machine you can buy TODAY is barely minimal for Longhorn. Meaning, business interests MUST plan for capital expenses to replace essentially ALL machines over the next 3 years.

Yes, web services and thunks can (once again) allow TODAY's PC to run Longhorn acceptably. But only if you have something that can run .NET today.... and most home users barely can. Meaning, you can code for Longhorn, but only if you consider gently degrading (once again).

Don't get me wrong: Longhorn is spectacular. But backward-compatible? Laughably, but I'll grudgingly agree. We're back to the 16 bit versus 32 bit argument. Except.... this time there are millions more current users - who simply cannot afford a FORCED hardware upgrade - using the legacy technology.

Keep this in mind as you evaluate what you see this week. Oh, and keep one more thing in mind too - more of us will make quite a bit more money the next 5 years developing things that work on today's machines than those who are getting this 'big neccessary jump' by attending the PDC and using what they are showing.

# October 28, 2003 5:25 PM

Douglas Reilly said:

Well, think of your own applications. While it is all well and good to say you should implement all changes immediately in the current version, at least at every company I have worked int, it does not happen. Some of the stuff (like not messing with your HTML formatting) is clearly a major difference, and probably required a big change. As VS.NET 2003, and so some things did not fit. And I guess that adding those wishes to a future version is lots easier than trying to retrofit these changes into a service pack.

# October 28, 2003 6:02 PM

Paul Wilson said:

They have to have something to sale. Just wait til you see the list of what's not in Whidbey that should be which will make it easy to sell Orcas. :)

# October 28, 2003 6:16 PM

Dave said:

Item #1 for Orcas might likely be Longhorn native support. Seems Whidbey will be touted as .NET - therefore able to work ON Longhorn - but only Orcas is touted as able to work WITH Longhorn.

# October 28, 2003 6:26 PM

Daniel O'Connell said:

There is one thing about software that I've noticed in my life: No matter how many features are there, there is always atleast one thing that is implemented in a manner you don't like or think should be there. When whidbey comes out, people will find things they don't like, and when orcas comes they will wish that the features were back ported into whidbey. Infact some people will wish that the features were back ported into vs.net 2002.

It is simply part of life with commercial software. With open source you can change alot, but most likely you won't have the time to fix everything you want to, I know I rarely do.

# October 28, 2003 8:24 PM

Shannon J Hager said:

actually, they put this up last week. Friday, at the latest.

# October 28, 2003 10:51 PM

Shannon J Hager said:

disabling the boxes when not is in use is the method Al Alberto used in his SWAT bug tracking system (still in-process on Code Project) and it seems to work pretty well. Users aren't surprised by things suddenly appearing and disappearing but the fact that some parts are disabled clues them in to what parts they should be using. Sometimes... I have also found that some people just don't take the time to read/look at EVERYTHING on the page so the less there is, the better the chance they'll make it to the important part.

# October 29, 2003 2:35 AM

Cadmium said:

Sounds like they are advertising bugfixes (like broken html formatting) as features. Sounds like a really expensive service pack more than an upgrade.

# October 29, 2003 11:34 AM

Dave Rothgery said:

I don't think many people realize how hard it is to get drag & drop HTML editting and round-trip source preservation at the same time. There's a reason why only Dreamweaver (and possibly FrontPage 2003) get this right.

# October 29, 2003 11:49 AM

Paschal said:

Dave MS suppose to have the best developers in the world isn't it ? ;-)
And seriously this has been done before 4 or 5 years ago.
GoLive is a good example too of a good HTML formatting, and it's there since quite long time !

# October 29, 2003 11:51 AM

G. Andrew Duthie said:

A couple of things that make a big difference here. The first, as you noted, is security. It was not so much the photo, as the combination of photo and description that apparently fell afoul of security. Given the reality of truck bombs or other threats, I can understand why the security folks would not want people publicly advertising which loading docks serve particular divisions. The second, which was noted in the Register story, is that it appears this guy was a temp. There's a big difference between employees and temps, and it's not surprising that a temp is cut less slack in terms of judgement calls on blogging and security. My guess would be that if this was an employee, he would've received a stern warning, and that would have been that.

Whether this was a good move from a PR perspective, of course, is another question entirely. But then, if I'm making decisions between the physical security of the campus, and a little PR kerfluffle, I'm not sure I'd decide any differently.

One last point...take the Macs out of the story, and no one notices at all. The reason bloggers and the Register are even talking about this is the spin that Microsoft is somehow trying to cover up their use of Macs, which even the temp admits is hardly the case.

# October 29, 2003 12:43 PM

Shannon J Hager said:

a) The reason bloggers are talking about this is because he was fired for what he wrote in a blog.
b) If security was the problem, they still would have (or at least should have) asked him to remove the entry.

# October 29, 2003 1:33 PM

Paschal said:

I am quite agree with Shannon. I am bit disturbed to know that temps people are named 'disposable' by some bloggers here. It sounds like cattle. Not sure it's good practice in 2003 to do such things.
I think a strong warning and a request to remove the pictures should be more appropriate

# October 29, 2003 2:23 PM

Dave said:

But the very definition of a 'temp' implied being disposable. And being so easily disposable means one should take even more care over what they post - or else TAKE THE RESPONSIBILITY for their actions and accept the consequences.

Just cause for dismissal. No more, no less. Could they have strongly warned him? Sure. But the guy has a screwy sense of proper etiquette already - think about the details he posted and the humorous reaction to his employer he was looking for. Reprimand him - the disposable temp who has much less reason to actually listen to the warning - and he might well post some real inflammatory things.

# October 29, 2003 4:55 PM

Paul Nicholls said:

Exactly, misunderstanding what being a temp means to an employer is the mistake the poor guy made.

Personally, I'm not really comfortable with publishing company details on the web anyway; it's not my information to give. It's like visiting a friend and blogging about their bathroom habits - you should probably ask before you post.

# October 30, 2003 4:58 AM

Salman said:

Its scary that Google has such a presence that they can enter many markets and take over the little guys...

# October 30, 2003 11:09 AM

Andrew said:

Entirely agree with you,
Microsoft as always tries to reinvent the
wheel,same story as with InfoPath=XHTML analog.XAML is simple extended (X)HTML
with ability to embed/markup any object
(graphical abstraction or webservice)+
managed code (compiled)scripting.
Why just don't use SVG marup for example...
I think it's all about money :-(

# October 30, 2003 1:27 PM

AsbjornM said:

I thought Videos was part of this PDC DVD's?, those you can order, and come after some weeks, that is..

# October 30, 2003 2:06 PM

Stephane Rodriguez said:

From what I have heard and seen, XAML is the next iteration of the old IE5 HTML+TIME multimedia authoring stuff. It's only more integrated to .NET and as such looks like something new.

# October 30, 2003 4:03 PM

Frans Bouma said:

afaik, the build system inside whidbey is far from finalized. Also, what I've read from the MS Build design docs is that it should be able to consume a solution file. That tells me projects and solutions are not gone. Just websites can now be developed using a directory structure instead of a project structure.

# October 30, 2003 4:07 PM

Paschal said:

Frans not sure it will be so easy. Remember the mess between 1.0 and 1.1
The problem here is that I read that you need to convert your VS2002-2003 projects to be compatible with the 1.2 or final 2 release.
Fine but it a one way ticket. No way to go back.
So that's mean (If I read right the different articles on the subject) that the project files will be gone. So my question is still valid, how Whidbey going to convert my web app(5 projects) without any project file ?!?

# October 30, 2003 4:11 PM

scottgu@microsoft.com said:

Hi Paschal,

Project to project references are actually managed using a solution file (not a project). We still have solution files in Whidbey for when you want to manage multiple projects together (for example: a .dll class library project that is used by a web project).

If you only have a single project, then no solution file is created (we have a "default solution" which contains just the active project).

Hope this helps,

Scott

# October 30, 2003 7:20 PM

TrackBack said:

# October 30, 2003 8:46 PM

SBC said:

Rob Chartier has another good one out - http://weblogs.asp.net/rchartier/posts/33793.aspx
Thanks for your post.

# October 30, 2003 9:11 PM

Paul Nicholls said:

So instead of calling Gator "spyware" (which of course it's not), we can just call Claria Gator-ware :)

# October 31, 2003 4:30 AM

Mel Grubb II said:

ACK! NOOOOOOOOO
The tag should be ''' as implemented by every independent developer who has patched this previously overlooked feature onto VB so far.

C#'s tag is \\\, VB's should be '''

Everyone in the world who has dealt with this problem is in aggreement on this one. Please Microsoft, don't make the tag different just for the wake of being different. Geez that would suck to type.

# October 31, 2003 9:15 AM

Paschal said:

Remember this is only on a preview version, maybe this will cahnge in the final release ;-)

# October 31, 2003 9:23 AM

Yahya said:

Hi...
I am have the same question as Mr.Pete. I want to know if he got the solution and would let me know what it is.
Thank You,
Yahya

# November 1, 2003 2:35 AM

SBC said:

yeah... but when are we getting the beta of this baby? :-)

# November 1, 2003 7:10 AM

Stefan Koell said:

If someone else but me is using this tool, you might visit my site. Released version 1.1 a few days ago. Nothing really new only some minor improvements...

# November 2, 2003 5:08 AM

Stefan Koell said:

You're right about selling the stuff. But I think it is a great idea to share tools and components for free even if the source code is not included. And I feel it's fair to ask for a donation. I am really happy that there are people who share great tools: Sharpreader, Reflector, Snippet Compiler, ...

# November 3, 2003 5:13 AM

Paschal said:

Stefan it's exactly what I said in my post ;-)
I post many times links to some great components, but I am not sure I will use this blog to sell my own stuff. I think it's a lazy and unclean way to do business

# November 3, 2003 5:18 AM

Paschal said:

As you can see Stefan I post a link to your tool ;-)
This is for me the way a community shuld work,linking each other on the other development.

# November 3, 2003 5:22 AM

Stefan Koell said:

:-)
There was one reason I wrote my tool:
I was frustrated with the tools from Microsoft and realised that the OCX can do much more than the snap-in. There were specific feature requests at my workplace.
There was one reason I published my tool:
I am satisfied with it's functionality, but other people have other ideas. So feedback helps me to improve the application and I learn while implementing some ideas.
There is one reason why I do not release the source code:
I think, some things are somehow hacky implemented and fear that if someone studies my code, he will not use my tool anymore ;-)

# November 3, 2003 5:32 AM

Paschal said:

Stefan yes I agree. Sharing doesn't mean necessarily to give your code, but it's a better practice to have somebody else 'pushing' your tool. Unless you want to open a website to sell it.

# November 3, 2003 5:38 AM

Stefan Koell said:

So we share the same opinion. Can you point me to some guys who commercialized their blog to sell their products? I am just curious.

Besides you really put much energy to your blog. Alone your archive statistics are impressive - average of 100 posts per month!!! Oh, in september you were probably on vacation ;-)

# November 3, 2003 5:46 AM

Paschal said:

Well no need to name the guys who practice this, just have a look on the main feed of weblogs.asp.net(last recent days) to find out by yourself ;-)
Yes I get married in September, so time off for honeymoon.

# November 3, 2003 5:50 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Well, dunno if you refer to me, but I used to blog once or twice about my tool. If someone gets annoyed by blogs about a given product, don't read the blog.

Personally I really get tired about reading the zillionth blog about how great the PDC is/was, how the installation of an alpha version of longhorn went and the gazillionth post about VB developers who feel offended because some MS employee declared them 'stupid'.

However, it's everyone's right to blog what he/she likes to blog about, so you won't see me blogging about the quality of blogs of others. Apparently every blogger and his brother felt the urge to blog about an OS that is 3 years away... so let them. When a person works very hard on a tool and wants to blog about that tool, let him/her.

# November 3, 2003 5:58 AM

Paschal said:

Frans this is not the point ! I agree you can talk about everything you want on a blog, but I think it's not fair to use a free space to make business ;-)

And no you were not targeted. Indeed my post has nothing personal. I just don't like posts like 'Buy my tool, this is the best of all the tools, come on I 'll give you a free box of soap if you buy it, I swear I will do , go on, go on...' ;-)

# November 3, 2003 6:04 AM

Scott Galloway said:

I agree with Paschal - this is one of the numerous reasons I host my own blog instead of putting it on Weblogs.asp.net. Is there a flag you can set when posting to your own blog to prevent it from showing on the main page - this would be very useful in keeping some swarf off the main page. Frans, saying don't read the blog is easy enough...but if it appears in the aggregated list I have no choice. This is a pretty old debate and goes back to the days of BBS where an entire board could get trashed by a few self-serving individuals (self promoting component vendors and recruitment people being the worst offenders).

# November 3, 2003 6:51 AM

Frans Bouma said:

There are some people who blog only about their tool, a given code generator creator for example ;). Nothing wrong with that, though. It's his choice. After all: who will contact him because of his insightful views on a lot of .NET related aspects? Not a lot. SImply because he hasn't expressed any :D

That it ends up in the main feed is the whole purpose of blogging about a given subject: to get as much attention as possible. :) I don't see anything wrong with that either though. When I open sharpreader in the morning there are about 35-40 new postings on weblogs.asp.net. I read 3 to 4 of them max. The rest is boring stuff about topics already mentioned on other blogs or totally irrelevant. (my opinion). Others will think differently, and that's perfectly ok, you can't please everybody :)

# November 3, 2003 7:31 AM

Andrew Stopford said:

Its called Royal TS ? :)

# November 3, 2003 8:20 AM

Paschal said:

OOps ! a typo corrected ;-)
Thanks Andrew

# November 3, 2003 8:26 AM

Jeffrey McManus said:

Internet Explorer only, huh? Hmm. I need something like this that will work with other browsers. Know of anything?

# November 3, 2003 1:47 PM

Paschal said:

I used to work on a project like that, but sadly it's only possible to have the Editor mode in IE4+.

Sorry Jeffrey.

# November 3, 2003 1:49 PM

Robert McLaws said:

For once, Frans and I see eye to eye.

Paschal, I know you're talking about me. I know you're pissed because occasionally I talk about a product I'm selling, because I'm the only one on the past few days that has talked about one of my products. Go look at the ratio of GenX.NET related posts to other posts on my blog, and you'll see that I have many other insightful things to say. If every once in a while, I decide to post some news about other things that I am doing, it's my perogative. I get upwards of 20,000 unique visitors a month. LonghornBlogs.com has 1.5 MILLION hits in it's first month. I think I have a right to try to make a little money off of my community efforts. Doug Seven and Donny Mack make enough money off of their efforts to drive Lexus' and never have to work.

And on the relevance note, I see you talk about Scoilnet all the time, but I don't recall a single instance where you posted source code on what you accomplished when you post all you screenshots. You comment all the time about how I "blog for ego", yet every one of those posts do nothing for the community but show off. If you want to post about open source stuff, maybe you should go work in java and post on Slashdot.

And try building others up instead of tearing them down for a change. You don't ALWAYS have to be so negative under the guise of a winking smile.

# November 3, 2003 1:54 PM

Paschal said:

Robert you see I am not a bad man, because I can do the same than you, deleting the comments I dislike but no !
(Unless you are writing with a rude language ;-))
And for the code, yes I write code, and yes I am not the best programmer of the world, but just a guy who like to blog about .Net and other technologies.
And open source is also possible with .Net, see GotDotNet for example.

# November 3, 2003 2:04 PM

Shane Bauer said:

That looks really good. Nice job.

# November 3, 2003 3:47 PM

julie lerman said:

Paschal-
So this project of yours, ScoilNet is just incredible looking. I've been looking around at the site. THe design is great. The scope is great. Is this entirely your baby? What's the scoop on this project and what is your involvement? I know we've seen bits and pieces for a while here and in aspadvice.
Tell me or tell us all. I am definitely interested.

# November 3, 2003 3:57 PM

Julien CHEYSSIAL said:

I'd be glad to test your dScribe project ! Release ! Release ! Release ! :)

# November 3, 2003 3:58 PM

Paschal said:

Hi Julie. Yes Scoilnet is my baby ;-)
I work in a agency working for the Department of Education in Ireland, and they had in the past another scoilnet version.
When I join the agency lat year I was quite happy to choose the technology I wanted. ASP was a first choice but because I was involved already in .Net, I choose VB.Net.
This project is on development since now 1 year, including really 5 months of hard-coding, the rest being meetings, discussions, etc... So I am the only programmer, so that's why I am REALLY busy, but I like it. Anyway you must be really a geek in a job position like mine ! So no time for PDC or TechEd, unfortunatly. I just miss a bit of training sometime, to be in touch with the real developer world.

# November 3, 2003 4:34 PM

Paschal said:

Julien thanks for your enthusiasm. Yes it's there now.
Feel free to comment. I hope to have more debugging session on the tool soon, and surely more code comments.

# November 3, 2003 4:36 PM

Stefan Koell said:

Congrats, Paschal! I see your baby is growing and growing and ...

Really great job!

# November 3, 2003 4:46 PM

SBC said:

This is certainly a very interesting website for educators. I know Dr Lillie (Prof of Accounting at a Calif college -
http://radio.weblogs.com/0117770/) may be interested in it. Dr Lillie works with Groove and several months ago hooked it with SharePoint. Both Groove & Sharepoint (WSS) have come along way since and your website may perk up more interest. Thanks.

# November 3, 2003 5:25 PM

Shannon J Hager said:

I do not blog here so my opinion may not matter, but here it is anyway: Scott W is the only person who can "decide" what goes here. Mr. A doesn't get to decide what is off-topic, Mr. B doesn't get to decide how many posts per day a person should do, Mr. C doesn't get to decide if someone is allowed to post images of butterflies they've photographed. Scott W can entertain your suggestions, as can other members, but only Scott has the right to lay rules.
If YOU are the person to decide the rules of the place, then you will need to be a little more clear. Can someone who works for MS on Windows mention Longhorn? If so, then you're going to need to make up some more rules and more well-defined rules. But, like I said, I do not think that is your decision to make.

# November 3, 2003 9:02 PM

Shannon J Hager said:

I found a crossbrowser tool a couple months ago, I don't use IE unless I have to (meaning rarely), so this was a great find for me. That "editor mode" comment of yours is off, too, Paschal, if memory serves me correctly. I believe that was added in IE 5.5, 5.0 at the earliest.
Anyway, here is the link to the cross-browser editor: http://dynarch.com/htmlarea/
it's not an ASP.Net component but I doubt it will be long before someone ports it.

# November 3, 2003 9:35 PM

Shannon J Hager said:

Thanks, I was looking forward to this. I enjoy being able to "hear" your thoughts about this project as it progresses. I haven't written a CMS system in a few years and it was much less involved than this one. Thanks for sharing.

# November 3, 2003 9:45 PM

Francois Verbeeck said:

Wow a microsoft photolog solution ? I never heard of it before ! Anyway, i would like to join the Wallop group too ! At least to check the design :] Who will be first to enter and post something about it ? :)

# November 4, 2003 8:07 AM

Paschal said:

Yes I know we have to wait and see if some folk can be nice enough to invite us to the party ;-)

# November 4, 2003 8:08 AM

denny said:

a) wrong symbols
b) no exit condition for the "you poor bastard" loop.

a can be overlooked....

but "b" is a fatal design flaw!!!

needs a block between "can you blame someone else?" and "You poor bastard" perhaps a procedure "Locate alternate scape-goat" that then connects to "No Problem"

review this mod ....

# November 4, 2003 8:30 AM

TrackBack said:

# November 4, 2003 8:37 AM

Tim Marman said:

Well, when one of you gets invited, I hope you'll invite me as well :)

# November 4, 2003 8:50 AM

SBC said:

LOL!... I think you can get into an infinite loop if can't blame someone else, so hire more consultants... ;-)

# November 4, 2003 9:07 AM

Dennis said:

I think Denny is incorrect, the infinite loop is valid until the "can you blame someone else" condition becomes true. Thus his "find alternate scapegoat" procedure is already implicit in the diagram.

It would be contradictory to go directly from "can you blame someone else - NO - find alternate scapegoat [ie., blame someone else]."

# November 4, 2003 9:32 AM

Jason Nadal said:

This was actually shown during the third keynote at the PDC. Pretty cool stuff... it showed relationship posting, say for a 2 people, you could pull up all of the pictures that contained both of them.

# November 4, 2003 9:39 AM

Paschal said:

Jason so yes great but the point is that you have to be invited to join ;-)
So if you or someone has an access let us know

# November 4, 2003 9:54 AM

Nathan said:

Please, has anyone found this super-secret ASP.NET Hotfix rollup download link?

PLEASE email me if you have it or know where to get it:

# November 4, 2003 11:15 AM

Nathan said:

I got the hotfix and it works like a champ. I had to call tech support to get it. MS keeps it secret and makes a big deal about not posting it publicly.

If you want it, email me. I'm hesitant to post the link here because the Microsoft S.S. would probably drag me out of my home in the middle of the night. They keep it really secret, but it works great.

# November 4, 2003 11:48 AM

Dylan Greene said:

I'd like to check this out and compare it to my own photo system on http://www.DylanGreene.com.

# November 4, 2003 1:22 PM

Lili said:

Hi there.. thought I'd chime in... we want to get feedback from a limited group of people (and instrument the usage so we know what works and what doesn't ;-) and of course write a research paper -- and likely make a bunch of changes.

I have to say I love these blogs. When you give a talk to a big audience like the PDC, its hard to tell what people think. When (assuming our initial set of users actually like it ;) we open the doors I'll invite you all myself--would love to hear what you think..

# November 4, 2003 2:21 PM

denny said:

Well if "a" were fixed..... :-)

"IF" should be a diamond not a box.

:-p

# November 4, 2003 2:23 PM

Paschal said:

Wow, are you really Lili Cheng ? If it's true, I'm so impressed. What a chance you have to do your life in Microsoft Research ;-)
Anyway, if you like to contact me by email...and eventually give me an access, promised I will not blog it ;-))

# November 4, 2003 2:25 PM

felttippin said:

Problems w/ dScribe.

I've downloaded the project from GotDotNet workspaces. And I've tried to install it. However, I have run accross several problems:

1) The FreeTextBox Project Cannot be found.

2) No default admin user. It would be quite helpful to include a default user and some default content.

3) I get the following errors when the SQL script is run:

Server: Msg 207, Level 16, State 3, Procedure Details_Page, Line 7
Invalid column name 'Template_Id'.
Server: Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Procedure Details_Page, Line 7
Invalid column name 'T_Id'.
Server: Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Procedure Details_Page, Line 7
Invalid column name 'Page_Id'.
Server: Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Procedure Details_Page, Line 7
Invalid column name 'Page_Name'.
Server: Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Procedure Details_Page, Line 7
Invalid column name 'T_Name'.
Server: Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Procedure Details_Page, Line 7
Invalid column name 'T_Nb_elts'.
Server: Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Procedure Details_Page, Line 7
Invalid column name 'Page_Name'.
Server: Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Procedure Details_Page, Line 7
Invalid column name 'T_Name'.
Server: Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Procedure Details_Page, Line 7
Invalid column name 'T_Nb_elts'.
Server: Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Procedure Details_Page, Line 7
Invalid column name 'Page_Active'.
Server: Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Procedure Details_Page, Line 7
Invalid column name 'Page_Active'.
Server: Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Procedure Details_Page, Line 7
Invalid column name 'Page_Name'.
Server: Msg 2714, Level 16, State 5, Procedure Element_Update, Line 28
There is already an object named 'Element_Update' in the database.
Server: Msg 207, Level 16, State 3, Procedure Image_Insert, Line 8
Invalid column name 'Page_Id'.
Server: Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Procedure Image_Insert, Line 8
Invalid column name 'Page_Name'.

# November 4, 2003 4:45 PM

OmegaSupreme said:

Netscape 3 , OMG what are these losers thinking LOL

# November 4, 2003 4:57 PM

Paschal said:

Apologies if you find some errors. I will have a look now and post something asap.
Thanks for your feedback ... and your support

# November 4, 2003 5:01 PM

Fabrice said:

A big part of IE's share can come from the ActiveX controls embedded in aggregators, this should be taken into account me thinks.

# November 4, 2003 5:31 PM

Stijn Gysemans said:

I've implemented some Gui like you before.
I've handled the selected row like this.
Everytime you call the details "edit":
-save the index of the datagrid in the viewstate
-you color "the indexed row"

If you want to retrieve the selected index on another page, you might use the session.

# November 4, 2003 5:40 PM

felttippin said:

Go Mozilla (I use firebird)!

# November 4, 2003 5:52 PM

Dennis said:

However it might be a good idea to put a "sleep" before the test...that way you're periodically polling for a new scapegoat, instead of consuming all processor with that loop...the length of the delay could depend on severity, going to zero if the lack of a scapegoat will cost you your job :)

# November 4, 2003 6:20 PM

Lili said:

ha ha... it's me. Lilich@microsoft.com
& remember you promised not to blog it. Send me your email and others here & i'll invite you if when we start opening.(OK now I'm going to freak out Sean Kelly, the guy who's really responsible for Wallop even more ;-)

# November 4, 2003 8:28 PM

denny said:

Yea.... I am *NOT* that serious about that chart.... but what the heck we are all living in a "Dilbert world" right??

# November 4, 2003 9:48 PM

felttippin said:

I've got some feed back for you.

1) SQL Script
Since you have to have the SQL Script to install the application, I would just include that with the application files and include a readme that tells a user how to run the Script.

2) Admin SQL Script
I would include the SQL Script for creating the default Admin that you mention in your installation instructions with the application files. This makes it much easier for users to install the application and saves time since 99% of the people installing the application will need an administrative account.

3) Free Text Box
Now, I don't know what the "legality" of it would be, but if you can include the version of the Free Text Box and it's project file with the solution files. This way if a newer version comes you, you know your application won't break. Also, you tell people it uses it, and where to get it, but there's no installation instructions for it.

4) Templates / Default Content
There should be some default content to the CMS so that people can see how it works without spending a lot of time setting it up to see if this is the solution they are looking for. Also, you can mention at the beginning page that the default admin account's password is 1234.

5) Coding Standards
In your database you have tables named AccountProperties, SesctionElements, TemplateElts, and Type_params. There should be a standard. If you use an underscore between words, use it in ever table. If you are going to capitalize every word, do so in every table. In the Table Account you have the Primary Key (PK) as AccountID. In Template_Elts you have no PK, and the field that should be a PK is name TemplateEltId (no underscores).

My standard for database is to have everything CAPS and use underscores between words and only use singluar names. If you use abbreviations, use it everywhere, but make sure they are easily understood. So Template_Elts would be TEMPLATE_ELEMENT with the TemplateEltId as the first field, and named TEMPLATE_ELEMENT_ID.

The above is my standard. I've found it works really nice. I understand that different people have different standards, and I respect that.. I just suggest picking a standard and sticking to it.

Now hopefully you will take this as constructive criticism (which is what it is intended to be) and make some improvements in your project to make it easy for you to build upon and for users to use.

# November 5, 2003 10:48 AM

felttippin said:

Always a good idea!

# November 5, 2003 3:14 PM

Adam Hill said:

I asked Robert Scoble to invite me, even *he* doesnt have access yet :-)

# November 5, 2003 4:51 PM

denny said:

another in a long line of "The Steve & Bill show".....

:-) two smart guys who have been out doing each other for years.....

and for contrast back when steve was doing NExT
he said in a Red Herring intervew that Netscape would lose the browser war and should focus on server software to make money, he also said it was better to write software for Windows than to fight windows.

BTW: this is true and was said at a time when netscape was selling browser packages to users and to ISP's.

# November 8, 2003 8:27 AM

Darrell said:

One other thing to bring up is the time between releases. It is ok to do frequent releases when your installed user base is the size of OS X's. But Microsoft understands with the size of their user base that people don't want to upgrade every year (like OS X).

Also, it speaks to the mission-critical nature of the apps running on the operating system. Regardless of how much better it is, businesses have fixed or work-around the current setup. Any mission-critical app will be tested for *long* periods of time before rolling out a new OS release. This is why so many people are still running Windows NT4.

# November 9, 2003 1:33 PM

Adam Field said:

Is this anything to do with the WWMX research project.

The WWMX app is very cool

# November 10, 2003 7:39 AM

SBC said:

what I'd like to see is an eBay add-in.. :-)

# November 10, 2003 2:34 PM

Jeffrey McManus said:

Yeah, me too! :)

# November 10, 2003 5:38 PM

Shannon J Hager said:

from the bottom of the page "Best of all, FormBuilder.NET is free for anyone to use! "

If I remember correctly, you have to register and log in, then you can use the app free. Downloading the source code what costs $349.

# November 10, 2003 8:46 PM

Stefan Koell said:

I can't wait to download it from MSDN. I am watching daily for new content at MSDN subscriber downloads...

# November 11, 2003 2:22 PM

G. Andrew Duthie said:

So who will be the first to claim that Microsoft is trying to put VMWare out of business by undercutting their price? I give it a day, maybe less, before The Register or /. make some claim like that. :-)

# November 11, 2003 5:10 PM

Paschal said:

Yes but it's definitly the right direction to take !

# November 11, 2003 5:33 PM

TrackBack said:

# November 11, 2003 6:08 PM

Paul Edwards said:

Anyone any idea when it will be available?

# November 11, 2003 6:25 PM

Paschal said:

I believe it's a matter of days maybe a week, not more because it was released officialy yesterday !
Surely with the next CDs release as a Christmas gift ;-)

# November 11, 2003 6:29 PM

Dan Bright said:

Ugh, I just sold my Wireless Optical Desktop for this VERY reason. As a lefty that mouses with my left hand, I use Shift+Insert to paste quite often. It saves me letting go of my mouse to paste via the keyboard.

I know I'm backwards, but my typing style has worked for me thus far and I see no reason to change it.

# November 11, 2003 7:02 PM

Dave said:

I'd be interested in seeing the justification for doubling the DEL key size. IMHO this may sound great, in practice you must be increasing the chance that you may hit the DEL key by mistake - meaning instead of accidentally toggling the INS mode and the inconvenience of some typos, you've accidentally deleted something and can never retrieve it, unless the app gently double-checks with you before deleting or the 'undo' is smartly written into the app.

# November 11, 2003 7:21 PM

Dave said:

Before MS can put VMWare out of business, they have to make something capable of doing it. As of today, Virtual PC not only is inferior, it has major hurdles in its rep to overcome too.

Oh, and MS would have to integrate it into the OS and put a nearly-impossible-to-remove icon on their OS desktop too.

I'd give it 2+ years before that happens. Or 3+ if Longhorn isn't released until 2006! :P

# November 11, 2003 7:29 PM

Andrew said:

What a trade off, one evil for annother ;)

One of the designers at work has a f*** lock, no f7 shift-f7 for him in VS.Net, no f1 either.

What really needs to be done is to move the 4 navigation (pg-up/dn , home/end) keys away from the delete and insert keys.

For several years, the first thing I have done to "my" keyboard is remove the insert key and put it in the top drawer.

The only exception seems to be my Logitech wireless ergonimic keyboard at home.
I write lots of code at home, I just don't seem to hit the insert on this keyboard...or I would have thworn the key in the trash :D

Doubling the DEL key's size is just extended support for the "Less is More" philosophy.
Or is it "More is Less" or "More less"?

# November 11, 2003 7:40 PM

fyi said:

fyi:microsoft have now moved to a monthly patch release schedule

# November 11, 2003 9:13 PM

Ali Parvaresh said:

Thanks for informing us.
Seems great.

# November 11, 2003 11:07 PM

TrackBack said:

# November 12, 2003 2:08 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Why didn't you go for XSL? The data it has to view can the be in XML, you simply convert the XML via the XSL to HTML and you view that. Works great and can be implemented easily, plus it's very flexible, you don't have to implement a custom parser.

# November 12, 2003 6:29 AM

Paschal said:

Frans It's in my plans for the version 2, but for the moment I have to make this thing working for Scoilnet, and I don't have too much time and resources.
It's not a problem with my knowledge on XML, but it's more the fact that dScribe is actually link to a hard coded HTML project.
Whatever people can say about XML, it's really time consuming to build some good XSL files.

# November 12, 2003 6:34 AM

oz said:

How can i use the above??

Do you guys have a exsample please !

Bes regards

Otto

# November 12, 2003 7:26 AM

TrackBack said:

# November 12, 2003 7:56 AM

Frans Bouma said:

You can add the XML at any time :) Build the XML for a page fragment when you want to view it, apply the XSL then and cache the result.

You can for example build page fragments using elements (nested for example) which are the building blocks for the editor too. Say, you build the template for a simple news item. You add 3 elements to that item: header (text string), summary textblock and extended text (textblock). In XML this looks simple, and in the database you just store it in tables. When you want to create an editor for this, you can create an editor XSL, which is applied to the XML which is created on the fly and you have your editor. When you want to view it on page X, you apply the XSL for that item on page X, and another XSL for example on anotehr page, for example the front page where you only view the header and the summary element :)

You can even do a lot of pre-calculation when you save the content of the item in teh editor: you can there apply all XSL's to the XML for all pages it is on and store that in the database too. Then, when viewing a page, you just have to retrieve the already generated HTML from the database and dump it in the page.

# November 12, 2003 9:52 AM

Cadmium said:

FreeTextBox would be *perfect* if only it supported firebird/midas :)

# November 12, 2003 11:01 AM

Paschal said:

Hmmm Frans I have too some knowledge on XML, and I agree with you on a page level. But there for the moment I am going to have on a same page different sections with unstructured and structured data. Not sure I can handle this so easily with XML.
A good example is this blog. If you look at the page, it's always the same structure. If you have a minute look at www.scoilnet.ie and you will surely understand what I mean. Some sections or blocks are also programming bricks, like the Resource Finder. They are built as user controls. The Interactive Poll is another one. I want tobe able for example to move all the sections around the place. How to achieve that easily and more important quickly (when you are alone to do everything)? I don't think it's realistic for the moment. But of course I have an open mind and if you have a bright idea let me know ;-)

# November 12, 2003 11:42 AM

Frans Bouma said:

In that case, programmed elements, than you have a point indeed. The XML / XSL stuff is how I build it in my ASP/COM based CMS CESys. I can imagine you'll keep xml out the door for now in favor of programmable objects. :)

# November 12, 2003 5:03 PM

Scott Philemon said:

I only saw the few posted screenshots on eWeek and the site and concept is wild. If it's Microsoft, you know it's going to be off the wall. I would be honored to be invited to see what offerings MS has for the Internet's future.

# November 12, 2003 6:23 PM

Paschal said:

It's quite difficult indeed to have portions of XML on the fly for any block in a page.
It's possible but take time.
Is CEsys is visble somwhere ?

# November 13, 2003 3:38 AM

Johnny Hall said:

I'm not entirely sure what you're doing by posting lots of alternatives to Robert's new product but regardless of your views of what should and shouldn't be posted on here, you're coming across as a little petulant.

My take (and I could be wrong):

Robert has posted a solution to a problem.

You don't like it because you disagree with "advertising" on here.

You post lots of alternatives, all of which have problems which Robert's code doesn't have, or are commercial (not your own products but still...)

The main feed is now clogged with a load of scrolling DataGrid blogs.

Why?

# November 13, 2003 6:14 AM

Paschal said:

First of all it's my freedom to post anything I want. Well I think so.
And I also send before Robert posts some ideas about this subject.
I also don't like that Robert modify my comment (or delete it like he did two minutes ago). It's also his freedom of thoughts on his blog. But a bit of honesty will be better.
And I said in acomment he delete LOL, on his demo you can see clearly that the header colums are not aligned properly with the columns below. Dino in his article had the same problem.It seems to be something with the width calculations.

# November 13, 2003 6:20 AM

JosephCooney said:

There are a couple of behaviors on the MSDN already that do some of these things.

Drag + Drop Columns
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dndude/html/dude07232001.asp

Scrollable Table Bodies
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwebteam/html/webteam11042002.asp

I tried to use the second one once, but it was causing some problems with the CSS I was using so I abandoned it. To me scrollable datagrids says you don't really know how much data is going to be returned, which makes me think maybe you should be paging it instead. Just my $0.02. Behaviors are cool tho, I wish Mozilla supported them. We can all dream, can't we?

# November 13, 2003 6:25 AM

Paschal said:

Thanks Joseph for the links

# November 13, 2003 6:26 AM

JosephCooney said:

Sorry for the double up on the link to the scrolling data grid. I didn't realize you'd blogged about it earlier. Gotta get back to the "Pascal hates Robert/no he doesn't/advertising sucks" soap-opera.

# November 13, 2003 6:30 AM

Johnny Hall said:

You are also saying and I paraphrase here "... is good, not the best...", and "worth it for $0" which is another way of saying it's not worth paying for.

How is it "anti-democratic" to reply to your posts?

If your point really was to "dig" alternative solutions then fine, but that *really* isn't how it has come across. If you hadn't been banging on about commercial "advertising" previously, then I might be more inclined to believe you.

# November 13, 2003 7:00 AM

Paschal said:

Sorry I was saying worth it 0$ because it's good and shoudl be there for free.
It's anti-democratic to change my words !
And for the commercial advertising, I don't have any shares in these companies. I just point out the free solutions and the commercial ones. Hey I like business, but everywhere nope.

# November 13, 2003 7:03 AM

Johnny Hall said:

"because it's good and shoudl be there for free"

Why should it be free? That's ridiculous. $10 is very little to pay. You show a lack of respect.

"And for the commercial advertising, I don't have any shares in these companies"

You miss my point. My point isn't about you posting commercial alternatives, my point is that I would be more inclined to believe you weren't baiting Robert if you hadn't already said you dislike people posting abot their own commercial products. But as we know, it's not up to you to decide what gets posted on the main feed.

# November 13, 2003 7:17 AM

Paschal said:

Come on dude.;-) Yes I dislike people commenting their own commercial products. I like objectivity so I believe that Robert should publish his tool writing just one short line on his blog about it, and let others test it and make all the publicity they want about it. And it makes common sense, becuase it will be more objective and practical. And yes you are right saying that 10$ it's cheap. But if you read the first post from Robert, you have a sensational annoucemnet he will release it for free, and in the next post, it's back with another story. As I sais the commercial tools I mentioned in a post are expensive, but they do much more than what I see with the control Robert code. It's surely a good code, I have no doubt about it, but on the demo I see on his website, it's not perfect. Be objective and constructive, that's why I said good, but not the best ;-)

# November 13, 2003 7:28 AM

Johnny Hall said:

I understand what you meant about his posts, he is a little sensational. Let's put it down to youthful exuberance, and his nationality ;)

My sense is that you disliked the way he went about things (long posts, deleting your comment) and retaliated a bit. I respect the work that both you and Robert are doing but this (series of posts) was started by you, and it seems a little unnecessary to me.

Anyway, I'll leave it there. I don't disagree with you, but neither do I think doing what you have done was particularly necessary either.

# November 13, 2003 7:35 AM

Lorenzo Barbieri said:

I want one...

# November 13, 2003 9:53 AM

Paschal said:

No problemo I ask Fred to start the production

# November 13, 2003 10:01 AM

Tim Marman said:

It's not really possible to adapt this code because behaviors are only supported by IE 5.0 or better.

# November 13, 2003 10:50 AM

Paschal said:

Yes but I was more thinking about the Javascript code inside the HTC file. This should be a starting point

# November 13, 2003 10:52 AM

Andrew said:

System.Globalization

CultureInfo?

# November 13, 2003 11:53 AM

Drew Marsh said:

Yeah, you essentially want to do:

myDateTime.ToString(new CultureInfo("en-US"));

# November 13, 2003 12:04 PM

Paschal said:

Thanks Drew I was just on the edge to have this but instead I am playing also with this

Dim MyCult as datetimeformatinfo = new CultureInfo("en-US", False).DateTimeFormat

Dim dtEndRange as new datetime(Now.ToString(MyCult.ShortDatePattern))

What do you think ?

# November 13, 2003 12:10 PM

Andrew said:

You should be able to
.ToString(CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("en-US"))

# November 13, 2003 12:26 PM

SBC said:

perhaps this one has more info -
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpguide/html/cpconformattingobjectsforspecificculture.asp

# November 13, 2003 12:46 PM

Paschal said:

Thanks ;-)

# November 13, 2003 12:48 PM

SBC said:

hey Fred - that can be an urban weapon too.. :) Barney

# November 13, 2003 12:50 PM

Paschal said:

Yeah sure ;-) and heavy one !

# November 13, 2003 12:51 PM

Joe said:

Your best bet is to use a SqlParameter with the date, then you don't need to worry about formatting it.

Alternatively a syntax that works with all versions of SQL server is 'yyyymmdd' (or if you want a date/time 'yyyymmdd hh:mm:ss'.

The culture of your ASP.NET application irrelevant. What's relevant is the language of your SQL Server connection. You can change the language using the T/SQL command "SET LANGUAGE", e.g.:

SET LANGUAGE US_ENGLISH
SELECT .. WHERE SOMEDATECOLUMN = 'M/d/yyyy'

Otherwise it will default to the default language of the SQL Server login that you're using. You can change the language for a SQL Server user in Enterprise Manager.

# November 13, 2003 1:07 PM

Paschal said:

Thanks Joe, but the solution I found is working now ;-)

# November 13, 2003 1:09 PM

Joe said:

Reminds me of a joke, something along the lines of:
- A British archeologist was digging and found bits of copper. He concluded that ancient Britons used to have a telephone network.
- Not to be outdone, a German archeologist found bits of glass - and concluded that the ancient Germans used to have a fibre-optic network.
- The Irish archeologist went digging and found - nothing. He concluded that the ancient Irish had a cell phone network.

# November 13, 2003 1:12 PM

Raman Kohli said:

Hi there ...

That is really the great stuff.Actually can you please tell me is it possible to freeze the column in the datagrid the way we can do the freezing in the Excel sheet.

Please give me the guidelines for this. Thanks in advance.

Regards
Raman Kohli
Raman.Kohli@lntinfotech.com

# November 13, 2003 2:52 PM

Stephane Rodriguez said:

Is this the 499$ media kit?

# November 13, 2003 2:54 PM

Joe said:

Maybe working now, but if you don't get it right it'll come back and bite you!
Try accessing the SQL Server on box A from an app on box B and vice versa.

# November 13, 2003 3:40 PM

Michal said:

Best is to use universal datetime format for SQL called "ODBC Datetime format" (see mk:@MSITStore:C:\Program%20Files\Microsoft%20SQL%20Server\80\Tools\Books\acdata.chm::/ac_8_con_03_04l0.htm) in SQL Server Books Online.
This format of date is suppport in all configuration of SQL 2000.

You can use this function for converting DateTime value to ODBC Datetime format:

Shared Function PrepareValueForSqlQuery(ByVal val As Date) As String
'{ ts '1998-05-02 01:23:56.123' }

Dim sDat As String

sDat = "{ ts '" & Year(val) & "-" & AddZero(Month(val)) & "-" & AddZero(Day(val)) & " " & AddZero(Hour(val)) & ":" & AddZero(Minute(val)) & ":" & AddZero(Second(val)) & "." & AddZero(val.Millisecond, 3) & "' }"

Return sDat
End Function

Private Shared Function AddZero(ByVal str As String, Optional ByVal DestLength As Integer = 2) As String
Return str.PadLeft(DestLength, "0")
End Function

# November 13, 2003 4:49 PM

Paschal said:

It's the MSDN package

# November 14, 2003 3:28 AM

Deepak Sharma said:

For intranet sites with IE5+ usage only, I've been using the following CSS solution:

http://slingfive.com/demos/scrollTable/

Simple yet effective...:)

# November 14, 2003 10:52 PM

rob said:

i am looking for synonyms

# November 16, 2003 6:08 PM

MrPayne said:

awesome, really awesome

# November 17, 2003 5:02 AM

Michael Schwarz said:

We should wait for Internet Explorer Update with Windows XP SP2, there is already a popup killer in the update, why install thousands of search engine toolbars?

# November 17, 2003 7:05 AM

Paschal said:

Yes you're right, but IE update is surely not until april or may 2004

# November 17, 2003 7:08 AM

Michael Schwarz said:

Ok,... that is the reason! ;)

# November 17, 2003 7:27 AM

Johan Danforth said:

I love the Google toolbar, and I've installed it on all machines in the house. It sure prevents a whole lot of garbage popups...

# November 17, 2003 8:16 AM

Jim said:

A not so related problem with the scroll bars, but a problem with a Microsoft patch none the less. I installed a fresh copy of Windows 2000 server (sp4 & latest hotfixes). Set it up to do NAT and route traffic for my private LAN. I then installed SQL Server 2000 & SP3a. When I brought the machine back to the network, my private LAN had weird surfing behavior. Problems accessing websites & parts of websites not downloading completely. Though, when I tried accessing the same sites from the server, all was fine. Because I had ghost images of the server at different stages, I was able to track this down to a SP3a problem. Hopefully Microsoft will spend a couple extra $$$ in the future on one or two more testers...

# November 17, 2003 11:21 AM

JosephCooney said:

XForms does look cool, altho I doubt that Microsoft will provide much support for it, since they threw it out (for whatever reasons) and rolled their own very similar thing in InfoPath. XAML does seem to have a passing similarity to XForms also, altho I don't have my PDC DVDs yet so I haven't really looked into it that much.

# November 17, 2003 12:49 PM

Stephane Rodriguez said:

Here is even more transparency and interoperability : Excel 2003 xml doesn't export charts, shapes, VBA macros and other rich objects. Why would anyone use xml then?

On the other hand, why would a vendor have to grant license to people only to use xml? If that's xml, then it's open by design. If it isn't, then it's binary file format. In fact, you've got to read between the lines to get the point. We are talking msxml here, not xml. Platform-specific implementations tie in developers and customers to a particular vendor, who can change the semantics anytime in the future.

# November 17, 2003 4:21 PM

TrackBack said:

# November 18, 2003 5:22 AM

TrackBack said:

# November 18, 2003 7:43 AM

Brian said:

Well my take on it is that if you combine the functionality of the other current xml standards you cover about half of what is really required to implement something like Avalon. Taken independently, SVG and Xforms etc. seem pretty good, but something more integrated is required.

That said you can apply XSLT to the Xaml if you want to, or extend SVG and friends...

# November 18, 2003 8:49 AM

Jim Martin said:

Damn! That is sweet! I thought my dual 19" CRTs at home were nice :P Wish I had enough dough for that set up :-)

# November 18, 2003 10:31 AM

Paschal said:

Well I have some luck to work with a seriously good IT budget.

And I have an Apple G5 and some wireless equipment coming soon ;-)

For the G5, it's because I have some Unix job to do, and I am still a old Mac fan.

# November 18, 2003 10:35 AM

Douglas Reilly said:

Sorry about that. Did not mean to inundate.

# November 18, 2003 10:55 AM

Scott Watermasysk said:

ehh...

What are you talking about? This is EXACTLY what should be happening on these blogs.

If anything your post about not wanting to hear anymore about the topic...and then commenting on it anyway is the only post I would object to.

-Scott

# November 18, 2003 10:59 AM

Lawrence Oluyede said:

Where did you catch the PIP-aware monitors? Who sell them?

# November 18, 2003 11:04 AM

Jim C said:

Thanks for sharing this!
Will change my whole asp.net life.

Jim

# November 18, 2003 11:06 AM

Paschal said:

Good Lord you are so hard with me ! Come on, we jnow already all the arguments abouts SP and Dynamic SQL.

And you know I removed some post from last wek end. So please calm down ;-)

# November 18, 2003 11:07 AM

Paschal said:

Dell 20" has a PIP feature, and multiple input like SVideo, DVI or Composite.

# November 18, 2003 11:08 AM

OmegaSupreme said:

ouchie dude you need a bigger desk !!

cancel that Mac though urrgggghhh.

# November 18, 2003 11:20 AM

James Avery said:

I love the stored procedure vs. Dynamic SQL **discussion**. The scrolling grid thing was a pointless argument (which you started I think), this is

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