April 2007 - Posts
Many discussions in connection with an article publish by Jeff Atwood, Coding Horror, comparing two books on WPF.
The first by Charles Petzold, the other by the least known Adam Nathan. I agree with Jeff Atwood for saying that a programming book must be readable and clear for all, but the debate can go further a simple choice between color or black and white.
I admit I read only Charles Petzold book and yes I find it quite hard to read.
Charles Petzold do not like the criticism of its book, and I understand his point of view as a professional and experimented author. (charles it's a pity you don't have comments on your book's blog).
However, the subject, WPF, go beyond the borders of the world of the pure and hard coders. WPF is also addressed to the designers, and as one is at the beginning of a new technology, it is necessary to be able to reach the maximum of audience.
The book of Adam Nathan brings by the color and the many photographs of screen, a good understanding and easy read on this subject.
I imagine authors are already preparing some new books on Silverlight too, and it's important It hink the writing stay 'light' (sorry for the pun!) and open to a large audience, including web designers and artists.
Otherwise WPF and WPF/E as good as they are will stay as a niche for some obscure applications.
When I started digging on Ajax, like many, I used the web but I am an old school person, so a book has more appeal for me than a blog.
But again with Ajax, the published ones are quite rubbish, except one I keep all the time in my laptop bag. And yes it has graphics, photos, and big captions, and no it's not a 'dummies' series. It's the great Head Rush Ajax from Head First Labs.
They really understood how to captivate their readers on a very dry subject!
As for WPF books, those books are the modern approach to complex matters.
Microsoft has released the first Beta of the 3.5 framework version.
Download here...
Cool, if you can't go to MIX, MIX will go to you.
VisitMIX is the official website to keep in mind if you want to share all the sessions, live keynotes and news from today.
Check here...
Well this is a funny post by Tim Sneath, and raise some question about who's in charge of naming products in Redmond :-)
So unless you're living on a desert island (and I doubt you can read this post anyway), you know about WPF/E being named SilverLight.
Thanks god, not the best name in the world, but it could have been worst :-)
Classic stuff, well my favourite in a typical Microsoft way (and I am surprised this didn't pick that one):
Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation Live Rich Client ActiveX Player R2 Ultimate Edition Service Pack 1 CTP (or WPFLRCAPR2UESP1CTP for short)
Read more...
Webtrends is one good package to analyze your web applications in all sorts of scenarios. However, recently I got in trouble with their licensing policy.
In different projects, I used to generate dynamically a lot of images coming from a database, using an aspx page, something like:
genimage.aspx?id=2000 (id is the image id).
But with WebTrends this has been a huge issue recently, because their licence works by page view, and of course my neat code was just doing that, creating too much hits on an expensive license.
Thanks to HTTPHandlers, I transformed the .aspx nightmare by clean .gif and .jpg files, intercepted by the handler to get the right image from the database.
I will publish soon my version of the image handler on Developers.ie if someone is interested.
Can someone tell me what .ashx generate exactly at the client side?
I want to start but saying I don't want to sound too negative about SQL 2005, because the core features of this version are performing very well compare to SQL 2000.
However, SQL Management Studio is the worst piece of management code I ever used in my developer's life. It's slow, the UI is over complicated (too many clicks in the tree view to do simple things). It's really annoying when you work in a small organisation and you need to maintain your databases as fast as possible.
I am repeating this, I am sure about it, but a new version of SQL Server is already in the pipe (for 2008?), and I beg Microsoft to get it right this time with the management tool.
I can write thousand of pages on all the troubles I have with SQL Studio but I like to give you this example. I have a query, not too complicated, just a full text search with a join to another table.
OK now in SQL 2000 enterprise manager, this executes perfectly well, but with SQL Studio, well I am told that SQL can't parse my text (see below) but weird enough the query execute perfectly well!
I have this kind of behavior dozen of time every day. One other thing, I would like that Microsoft get right also the way to edit an existing stored procedure. The Modify feature is not what I want, I just like the plain easy way that SQL 2000 has, open the SP, edit whatever you want and click OK to save it.
Here in SQL 2005 studio management, you call for Modify, then your procedure come in a new query window as ALTER PROCEDURE. Imagine when you need to change multiples procedures, all the tabs got meaningless names.
I also find very annoying that I can't open multiple time the same table, as in SQL 2000.
When I use * in a query, please let me doing my way and don't replace it by all the fields.
Select * from MyTable transforms as Select Myfield1, MyField2, etc... (imagine if you have 200 fields!).
Well the list is longer than that but hopefully Microsoft will release a better next version soon.
Tell me what other issues you have with SQL Studio Management?
Well very good advice from Roger Jennings, if like me you find yourself with this monstruous Orcas big file and don't know what to do to install it!
One issue really bother me with Ajax is the lack of real integrated browser support for Back and Forward button.
Different solutions exist, they are all based on Javascript. Andrew Mattie has written a complete solution, and not only it's a great one he also explain its journey through the other solutions.
Read more...
Great news!
This release of Enterprise Library includes: Caching Application Block, Cryptography Application Block, Data Access Application Block, Exception Handling Application Block, Logging Application Block, Policy Injection Application Block, Security Application Block and Validation Application Block.
Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes.
More Posts
Next page »